Madison studied her. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She shrugged off the sweatshirt and draped it over the armchair. After much argument, Eve had been the one to buy all of the furniture for their place, but only after she’d sat Madison down and showed her friend the statements from her trust fund. Furnishing a condo was nothing to Eve. It would be far more expensive for Madison, who was just starting her career, with little financial help from her family.
“Something’s wrong.”
Eve lifted her shoulder. “I lost my mother’s bracelet.” It wasn’t a lie. It wasn’t the only thing wrong, but she was upset about it.
Madison made a sympathetic face. If anyone knew what that bracelet meant to her, it was Madison. “Can I help you find it?”
“No, it’s... it’s gone.” Because life wasn’t a fairy tale, and sometimes you didn’t get everything you wanted. She walked over to the kitchen and opened the fridge, grabbing a can of sparkling water.
Madison raised her voice slightly. “Are you sure there’s nothing that can be done?”
There was, if she wasn’t so weird and inept at life. She popped the tab of her drink and made her way back to the living room. “No.”
“You seem really upset. Want to talk about it?”
Madison was a clinical psychologist by profession, and Eve tried not to let their friendship get so imbalanced that the other girl felt like she was Eve’s therapist. Eve had a therapist. She’d had a string of them since her mother had died and Nicholas had demanded she see someone.
She could have quit once she became an adult, but her visits had become a habit, like tennis lessons. Over the past year, she was glad she hadn’t quit. The woman she saw now was a little stodgy, but out of desperation, Eve had opened up more to her than anyone else. In return, the older woman had listened well and given her a number of helpful coping strategies to manage her emotions.
Like using her mother’s bracelet as an item to ground her. She took a sip of her drink, letting the cold bubbles tickle her throat. “Annoyed I lost this bracelet, is all.”
“Hmm.” Madison stuck her needle between her teeth and looked through her bag, pulling out blue floss.
She dropped into the armchair. “How’s Reese?” she asked brightly. “You still need me to pick him up from the airport tomorrow, right?” Madison’s boyfriend was a budding filmmaker and traveled often for work. Madison had to take her grandmother to an appointment tomorrow, so Eve had happily volunteered to fetch him.
“Nah. Like I said, he can order a Ryde, and I don’t want to make you late to leave for the wedding retreat or whatever Livvy’s calling it.”
“Livvy’s calling it a prewedding retreat and bad-omen cleanse. I’m going to go with ‘party.’”
Madison grinned. She’d fallen in love with Livvy at first meeting, which was pretty easy to do. Eve adored Livvy herself. Until the split had happened between the two families, Livvy had been the best surrogate sister a girl could hope for.
Eve wanted this wedding to be perfect for her brother, but she also couldn’t deny there was an element of selfishness in her encouraging this union. She wanted Livvy back as her sister. When she’d lost her mother, she’d lost everything except her brother. And even he had changed. He’d stopped putting her in headlocks and had started ensuring she was eating properly and going to bed on time—all the things her mother had done.
She’d felt very alone for a long time, until she’d learned how to make friends into family. Which was why she was careful to give Madison as much as Madison gave her. “I am a Ryde, and I can absolutely pick Reese up. I’ll be at the estate all week anyway, so whether I get there late or early doesn’t really matter. Besides, it’s just going to be Sadia and Kareem and Jackson for the first couple days. Livvy’s still sick.”
Her friend started stitching again. “And Gabe, right?”
Damn it. It wasn’t like she could keep her crush a secret from Madison, though. The woman had been there for her most mortifying seduction attempt. “Yeah.”
“You’re going to great lengths to see Gabe as much as you can lately, so you’re probably looking forward to seeing him for the whole week, huh?”
Eve pressed her lips tight, recognizing the gentle doggedness in her friend’s tone. Whether she wanted it or not, she was going to get some kind and probably on-the-nose advice. “Yes. Of course.”
Her friend put her stitching down in her lap and took a sip of water. “Eve, do you remember what we talked about a few months ago?”
“About how I needed to get a job?”
Madison snorted. “Before that.”
Eve tightened her arms around her middle. “About how I’m in an emotional straitjacket.”
“Your words, yes. But remember how we talked about some things that could help you break out of it? Because you wanted to break out of it?”
She looked down at the floor and dug her toes into the carpet. When Livvy had first come back to town months ago, Eve had... She didn’t like the wordsnapped, but it was like someone had snipped the cord that held her tight to her own self-control. She’d almost felt disassociated, like she was a bystander to her own actions. To her eternal shame, she’d cornered Livvy, demanded the other woman leave town, had even told her she would buy her off to get her away from Nicholas.
Afterward, when the full impact of what she’d done hit her, she’d been horrified and sobbed in her roommate’s arms.I don’t know how I could have done this.
