“Yes,” I say defiantly, and Bella sighs as she gets up.
“You’re lying to yourself, love,” she says and gets into her bedroom, leaving me sitting there feeling even worse than before.
Before she closes the door, she turns.
“You’ll always face pain and restless moments—that’s life. You chose a box to live in, with its own suffering. You decided to swallow it down and hide. But you can choose differently," she says, adding with a faint smile. “I've never seen you as alive as you have been in these past weeks. Be daring, Mia.”
Daring.
A word that triggers the memory of the book Victoria gave me.
Victoria.
“I can’t go back to her, Bells. She called me childish.”
“We all say things we don’t mean when we’re angry, especially when a person is important to us,” says Bella, leaning against the door frame.
Important to us.
“She’s sixty, Bells. Sixty. I am twenty-seven.”
“Who cares? I fucked with an eighty-two-year-old last night on viagra, was the best sex of my life.”
My face flushes immediately.
“Bella!” I shout.
“Just saying,” she says, laughing. “Who cares about the age if she makes you come?”
I shake my head, laughing.
“And what if I crawl back to her and she rejects me?”
“You see it as it is, Victoria Fitzroy made you come, something every woman on this planet will be envious of, and then you move on,” says Bella, shrugging.
Now, I have to laugh. Wholeheartedly.
“Envious, huh?” I ask.
“Of course! Why do you think the headlines are the way they are? Everyone wants to be you.”
I am utterly taken aback.
“What?”
“Mia, that’s how tabloids and media work. They prey on envy, desire and secrets. People are enraged because they wished to be you.”
I have no words and stare at her, dumbstruck.
“Sleep well,” she says a little too knowingly and closes the door to her room, leaving me sit there alone with all my thoughts and emotions.
Well, not entirely alone. I have Pebbles.
It isnight when I wake to a strange noise; my head throbs as I sit up.
It sounds like a rat is running in the walls, which is impossible because the house is made of bricks.
My heart pounds heavily.
