I didn’t knowhow long I stayed curled up on the floor. Crying because Bodhi knew. Because I’d made the wrong choice. Because I’d failed, just like I’d been afraid I would before I’d even left the Willow.
Bodhi’s face was burned into my memory. The disappointment there. The hurt. The fear he hadn’t even tried to hide, not just for me, but for himself. For his sobriety. His words looped endlessly in my head, cruel and relentless.
“I can’t be there for you right now.”
Reliving that moment again and again only made the sobs tear out of me harder. By the time I finally dragged myself into bed, my head felt stuffed with cotton wool. My eyes were swollen and aching, my nose crusted with snot. Every part of me hurt, my limbs heavy and sore, and the pain in my hip screamed loud enough to feel like an accusation. Like it was calling me stupid.
I tried to take a nap. Like Bodhi had told me to. When sleep refused to come, I took a single painkiller, hoping it might dull more than just the ache in my hip. Hoping it might quiet the hurt that had sunk somewhere deeper. I closed my eyes and tried toforget, just for a little while, that I was a mess. A disgrace. A failure. An addict.
It didn’t work.
I tossed and turned. Punched the pillow. Kicked off the covers. Pulled them back on. Took my clothes off. Put them back on again. The bed felt too big, too empty, too wrong.
I felt wrong.
The noise in my head kept building, every ugly thought I’d ever had about myself stacking on top of the next until it was deafening. Until all I could do was lie there and stare at the ceiling while tears streamed down my face, soaking into my hair, my neck, the pillow beneath me.
Eventually, I gave up on sleep altogether and reached for my phone.
Two and a half hours until I had to meet the others in the lobby. Two and a half hours until I had to face Bodhi and pretend, for everyone else’s sake, that this morning hadn’t shattered something between us. Until I had to pull the mask back on and perform my own version of being fine.
I opened Instagram and scrolled without really seeing anything. Liked a photo Sasha had posted of her growing baby bump. Left a comment on a blurry video Gloria had shared of her cat.
Then my breath hitched. I almost dropped my phone when I saw a post from my brother, Jethro.
He didn’t post very often. Just the occasional snapshot from a pub night with his rowing club, or a sunlit photo from a trip abroad with his girlfriend. We’d never been close as siblings, and over the years our contact had dwindled to the bare minimum. Obligatory messages on birthdays or a stiff “Merry Christmas.” Nothing more.
Still, every now and then, I checked his social media. Quietly,from a distance. I never liked his posts or left comments. Never gave him any indication that I was watching. I just looked, reassured by the fact that he seemed happy enough. That his life, at least, had turned out fine.
This photo made my hands tremble. Made bile claw its way up my throat.
Jethro stood in the centre of the frame, dressed in a long black robe and mortarboard. A Cambridge graduate. On either side of him were my parents, arms wrapped around his back like bookends. They looked proud as punch, their smiles perfectly practiced, even for Instagram.
My father wore a navy three-piece suit that probably cost more than my annual rent. My mother was dressed in a burgundy pantsuit over a crisp white blouse, her shoulder-length brown hair styled into place without a strand out of line.
The photo had been posted one day ago. The caption read:
“Officially Dr Preston. Grateful to have my family here.”
His family.
One that evidently didn’t include me, not anymore. Though maybe it never had.
While I’d chosen to push my parents away, Jethro had chosen to keep them close. God only knew why. Maybe because they’d always favoured him. He’d been the academic one. The safe investment.
I’d never had the brains for school. My parents had tolerated me while I excelled at ballet, played the part of proud benefactors when I landed a spot with the Royal. But even then, they’d warned me it wouldn’t last. That success in the arts came with a ticking clock and performers had an expiration date.
I just hadn’t realised mine would come so early.
Jethro, on the other hand, had always wanted to be a doctor. He’d chased the best schools, the highest grades, the mostprestigious outcomes. And because my parents liked certainty, they’d poured everything into him. Time, money, attention, support.
He was everything they’d wanted in a child. Driven. Self-sufficient. Successful despite their near-absent parenting. Straight as an arrow too. Despite only being a few years older, I’d been the prototype. The mistake. Whatever had gone wrong with me, they’d corrected the second time around.
Now he was a Cambridge graduate, grateful to be surrounded by his family, while I existed as a footnote. A taboo subject. Something only mentioned with thinly veiled disdain, if at all. One day, I’d be nothing more than a cautionary tale. An example dragged out to scare future children into making better choices.
My fingers shook as I typed out a comment. The first and only one I’d ever left on any of Jethro’s posts.
“Congratulations, little brother.”
