I closed out of the app and opened my contacts, scrolling until my thumb hovered over a number I hadn’t called in months. Not since I was in hospital. When I’d made the mistake of listing it as my emergency contact.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I tapped the number and lifted the phone to my ear. It rang once, twice, three times.
“Ms Preston’s phone.”
It was a man’s voice. One I recognised immediately.
“Marc,” I whispered.
“Ignatius,” my mother’s assistant replied, clipped and formal. “It’s been a while.”
“I need to speak to her.”
Marc sighed, long and heavy. The kind of sigh reserved for inconveniences. I’d heard it often enough in the Preston household growing up.
“She’s busy. Can I take a message?”
“Too busy to speak to her own son?” I muttered, the petulance slipping out before I could stop it.
“No,” he snapped. “Too busy to waste time putting out more of your fires.”
There was a shuffle on the line. A door closing. He must’ve moved somewhere private, just so he could say the next part without witnesses.
“What is it this time?” he continued. “You need money? Another hospital visit? A return trip to rehab?” He scoffed. “Your brother has just graduated from Cambridge. Your father is preparing for the next local election. Your mother is finalising a multi-billion-pound acquisition for the European division of her bank.” His voice sharpened. “What exactly are you doing, other than being a black mark on the Preston name?”
Each word drove into my gut like a blade. I was grateful it wasn’t a video call so he couldn’t see the way I flinched.
“When are you going to grow up, Ignatius?” he pressed. “It’s about time you do everyone a favour and either stop acting so selfishly or find a crack den and finally finish yourself off.”
“I—I just?—”
“If you want to speak to your mother,” he cut in. “You’ll need to make an appointment. Your parents are busy celebrating with your brother. Since he’s actually made something of himself.”
“Marc—”
“Goodbye, Ignatius.”
The line went dead.
The phone slipped from my hand and hit the mattress with a dull thud. I stayed frozen, my hand still hovering by my ear, trembling as if I was holding on to something that had already disappeared.
I didn’t move. Afraid that if I did, I’d collapse completely. Like a stack of LEGO kicked apart in one careless motion.
My breaths came shallow and uneven, and the room blurred as tears filled my eyes. More tears. Because that was all I ever seemed to do. Cry when things went wrong. Fall apart when I wasn’t wanted.
Because maybe Marc was right.
Maybe I was just a selfish child in an adult body. A waste of space who took and took and never gave anything worth keeping. I’d never gone without while growing up. Never lacked money, opportunity, education. And still, it hadn’t been enough. Because my parents hadn’t loved me the way parents were supposed to.
And when someone finally loved me—reallyloved me—when Bodhi had handed me his heart without hesitation, I’d trampled all over it.
I’d only called my mother because I wanted to know. Wanted to understand what about me was so unlovable. Why they’d bothered to have children at all if they couldn’t be bothered to actually raise us.
Instead, I’d been served a platter of truths by my mother’s assistant. Because in the end, she was too busy even to tell me herself what a fuckup I was.
“Find a crack den and finally finish yourself off.”
I didn’t have a crack den, and I didn’t want to die. But there was a way to forget this conversation had ever happened. A way to quiet the noise and stop feeling. To make everything go blissfully, mercifully blank for a while.
