But while she was still so young, even in ballet years, I couldn’t help but notice the way she sometimes limped on her ankle, rubbing it whenever she thought no one was looking. Maybe her injury pained her more than she wanted to admit. Maybe Elsie needed to find something that didn’t make her suffer.
“What are you going to do?” I asked, and for the first time since our conversation had started, Elsie smiled. It was a soft look, a sweet one.
Elsie Farrow was the perfect girl next door. No wonder my brother loved her—though, as far as I knew, he still had yet to admit it. But anyone with eyes could see that those two were soulmates. Elsie was the only person capable of turning my brother into a tender man. Even I wasn’t enough to soften some of his stubbornness.
“I wish I could move out of the city. I’m not sure yet, though,” Elsie said, pulling the plug on the bath and grabbing my towel.
I might have been embarrassed at having Elsie see me so naked and vulnerable, but she’d been the closest thing I’d ever had to a sister since she came into my life when I was six, a thirteen-year-old girl who scowled at my brother for his inability to work on their group project together. In a few weeks, something had changed between them, and they became friends as they got older, which meant Elsie kept coming over, and Jules kept hoping she would come back.
“Where?”
“I think if I had the courage, I’d give small-town life a try.” She shrugged. “Get away from everything here. Maybe open a bakery.”
My eyebrows raised, though I said nothing. Elsie was a terrible cook—and I knew that because for the past couple of weeks, she’d been making things to try and cheer me up. I shuddered at the memory of the crumbling cookie she’d fed me. They were probably one of the worst things I’d ever eaten.
“Do me a favor?” Elsie asked, and I nodded. “Please don’t tell your brother. I’m waiting for the right moment, and right now, he’s under so much stress because…”
She trailed off, but I knew what she was going to say.
Because of you. He’s under so much stress because of you.
My shoulders slouched, and my throat dried up. There was nothing more I wanted to say, so I nodded again at Elsie and let her help me dry off with the fluffy pink towel Jules had bought me. It was as if he thought that flooding the house with pink would somehow make me change my mind about wanting to escape. There were random pillows on the leather couches, blankets everywhere, pictures of him and me strewn across the mantel.
But while a part of me appreciated the effort he was going to in order to make the home more comfortable for me, a larger part of me thought that he couldn’t just slap a pink Band-Aid on a broken heart to fix it.
Because my heartwasbroken. Without Alek there to fix it, I worried it always would be.
Elsie helped me get dressed in a pair of soft, pink pajamas, brushing my hair for me before kissing me on the side of the head and tucking me into bed like an overcautious older sister. She was just like Jules in that way, treating me like a porcelain doll they were convinced would break at every misplaced breath. Too fragile to even move.
I sat on the edge of the guest bed—my bed, technically, though it didn’t quite feel like mine—and folded my socks into a perfect rectangle for the third time that morning. They were already folded, but my hands kept moving anyway, smoothing edges, aligning seams, trying to make something in my life behave.
“Not perfect,” the voice in the back of my head hissed. I wasn’t sure if it was talking about my clothes or me.
The silence pressed in around me, broken only by the tick of a grandfather clock down the hall. I had nothing to keep me entertained, nothing but redoing my laundry over and over again, hoping it would make the voice go away. Jules gave me a television remote, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn it on.And any books I read just spun around in my head, the words jumbling together until they formed only one word:
Alek.
He was there in everything, everything. Every thought, every moment, every quiet moment.
All of it.
Alek.
I wished I could have called him. I wished I could hear his smooth voice crawling down my spine, reassuring me that everything would be all right. But Jules had yet to give me my phone back, so all I had was this unbearable quiet and an emptiness where my love had once gone.
It can’t be all bad,I tried to tell myself.Think of the positives.
But the only positive I could come up with was that I waspositivelysure Alek was gone, and that he wasn’t coming back. That he probably thought I wasn’t worth all of this trouble, not when I’d done nothing to fight for him like he had for me. He might have promised to find me, but promises were easily broken under the wrong circumstances, and everything about this was wrong indeed.
I needed to accept it. Maybe we weren’t meant to be. Love was fragile, and fragile things always broke.
A soft knock rapped gently at the door. “Eva? Can I come in?”
I don’t know why you ask. You’ll do whatever you want anyway,I thought, though I said nothing.
Jules stepped inside, tall and broad, dressed casually but still somehow intimidating. My brother didn’t know how to take up less space. It was something he and Alek had in common.
I curled up on the bed, turning away as soon as he took a step toward me. And maybe I was being unjust toward him. After all, he was my older brother, in charge of protecting me ever since we were kids. But Jules was convinced the world was toodangerous a place for me for whatever reason, and he was also convinced the only way to fix that was to hide me away from it.
