Finally back home from an exhausting black ops mission, I grabbed the mail and jogged up the stairs to my modest one-bedroom apartment, and headed inside. It was just off base, and of course I could afford something more luxurious, but when I’d enlisted, nobody knew who I was. It was a fresh start, and I wasn’t about to out myself by renting an extravagant apartment or driving a flashy car. I was hardly ever at homeanyway.
I quickly went through my mail, finding a thick black envelope in the stack. Thinking it was another society letter, I almost threw it away, but the return address in the corner caught my eye.
It was from the Devereuxs—a Christmas card, probably. I smiled and slid my finger through the seal, pulling the card out. My face dropped, realizing it was a funeral invitation.
The date had already passed—I folded over and puked right onto the kitchen floor, as a wave of guilt punched through me like a freight train. After everything she’d done for me, I’d missed the fucking funeral.
CHAPTER 14
Death Can Go Fuck Itself
SARAFINA
It was nearly a month before I even bothered to turn my cell phone back on. And when I finally did, text-after-text and voicemail-after-voicemail pushed through until the battery just gave up and died.
After I’d charged my phone, I’d deleted it all. Every. Single. Message. Didn’t bother reading a single one. There was nothing anybody could say. Nothing that would bring her back, nothing that would soothe the gaping hole I knew I’d never be able to fill.
I stood in front of the refrigerator, not caring that I was letting all the cold air out. It was basically empty anyway. Just like my heart.
Liam was back in the city working, and my father, who was hardly ever home anymore, had grown reliant on microwave dinners since he’d fired the housekeeping staff. So I was here, mostly alone, surviving off of cheese sticks and prepackaged cookies. It was the only thing I could get down since I’d completely lost my appetite, and I couldn’t find it in me to care that I was slowly wasting away. Nothing mattered anymore. Especially not me.
The house was deathly quiet, which was in stark contrast to how it looked. Festive, filled to the brim with echoes ofour ignorant happiness in every corner. Filled to the brim withChristmas decorations. In March.
Christmas was the one thing she had loved most, and none of us had been able to stomach putting all the decorations away. I knew it would never be the same.
Christmas. The holidays. My life.
I knew we could never recreate the fun, the gatherings,the comfortthat only she could create. The worst part was that it wasn’t just the holidays, either. It was quickly becoming evident that she was the glue that had heldeverythingtogether.Everyonetogether.
I’d lost my mother, but it felt like I’d lost my dad and brother, too. We were all scattered to the wind, processing our grief in different ways.
I’d never known I was taking it all for granted, because I’d actually been one of those lucky girls, one who’d genuinely gotten along with her mother. Of course, we’d had the occasional spat here and there, but she’d always supported me, given me the room I needed to figure out who I was, room to become my own person, without judgment or expectation.
In all these months that had passed, I just kept wondering why the people that seemed to burn the brightest were always the ones that were taken from us first.
Her death had been sudden.
A total shock.
Brain aneurism.
Shortly after New Years.
The doctor’s report had been both comforting and infuriating. The knowing there was nothing anyone could have done, so at least we didn’t have to live with the guilt that we could have changed the outcome.
On the other hand. Fuck death. She wasn’t supposed to go like that. We were supposed to have more time. She was supposed to be with me when I hadmybabies. Supposed to show me how to grow up, how tobea mother.
I needed her. Foreverything. I wasn’t ready to live in a world without a mother.
Now, I didn’t even know if I wanted tobea mother anymore. In an instant, everything in my life had changed. Everything felt so foreign and wrong and unfamiliar, and I wondered if I would ever stop feeling this terrible. If the ache would ever ease. It’d been three whole months, and it felt like three days. It’d been three whole months, and I still felt like I couldn’t breathe. I honestly didn’t know how anyone ever recovered from grief like this, because it wasall-consuming. People kept telling meit comes in waves,but it didn’t. Waves would have been a relief. No, it was a rip current, drowning me, every hour of every day. It was all-consuming, all the time, with no reprieve. Just grief and anger, and more of that layered right on top, and it was all just far, far too much to handle.
I’d taken some time off school because I literally couldn’t function, but staying home hadn’t really been all that comforting, because what had made home so comforting washer, but she wasn’t here. Not anymore. So now the house felt like a living graveyard, and there was nowhere I could go to escape the grief, nowhere to hide from it.
“Knock knock.” Sloane’s voice echoed in the distance, and I let go of the refrigerator door, realizing it’d been chiming at me for some time.
I forced myself to sit at the breakfast table in an attempt to look somewhat normal, rather than the hollow shell that had been reflected back to me in the refrigerator glass.
“We brought soup.” Jules announced, carrying several grocery bags into the kitchen. Someone turned the lights on, and I winced as my eyes protested to the adjustment.
