“Did you just use the word ‘unsavory’?”
I laughed. “I guess I did.”
“Wow.” She took a sip of her coffee.
“I guess I’ve been hanging around Remy too much,” I said. “He’s a big reader.”
“Really? I wouldn’t have expected that.”
“Why? Because he has tattoos and wears leather?”
She thought about it, which was something I appreciated about Bailey. She wasn’t afraid to question her own preconceived notions, wasn’t afraid to cop to it when she’d been wrong about something.
“I guess so,” she admitted. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I said. “I was as surprised as you when I first moved in here.”
She picked up one of the pastries and put it on a plate. “Thanks for this, seriously. But should you be baking and stuff? You look pretty beat up, Maeve.”
Her tone had turned serious, and I knew this was what she’d wanted to talk about all along.
“You should see the other guy,” I joked.
She didn’t crack a smile. “This isn’t funny.”
“I know.” I rubbed at a smudge on the island’s marble countertop. “I’m just coping however I can.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.
“Not really.”
“Can you… can you give me the short version of what happened?”
This was hard for her. There had never been a time in my life when she hadn’t known everything.
I took a deep breath. “Ethan Todd kidnapped me and took me to Romania. He kept me in an old dungeon under an abandoned castle, then hunted me until the Butchers found me.”
“Oh my god…”
She asked me some more questions, but there wasn’t a ton to say: it had been terrifying and lonely and I’d wondered if I was going to die there. I told her that Ethan Todd had gotten away, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I’d killed Anton or that Poe had killed Nick.
I wasn’t in denial. I knew it had happened. I just couldn’t afford to dwell on the details.
“Don’t you think you should see someone?” Bailey asked, her pastry forgotten.
“Are you suggesting therapy?” It seemed almost funny to think that a therapist could fix the mess of my life from the comfort of an office.
My life now was concrete and violence, savagery and death.
And love. There was that too.
But the other stuff couldn’t be fixed by someone who didn’t know what it was like to be in it.
“Maybe,” she said. “Or… a doctor at least?”
I could tell that she already thought it was insane that I hadn’t enlisted the help of at least one of those two professionals.
“I’m fine.” I didn’t know how true it was, if someday all the psychic damage I’d suffered would manifest as some kind of epic breakdown, but right now I needed to focus on getting justice for June. “Let’s talk about you. How’s work?”
