What if I'm not the only one with cracks starting to show?
CHAPTER 11- JADE
The hotel room feels smaller in the morning light.
I wake to the sound of traffic on the street below, the rumble of delivery trucks and the distant wail of sirens. For a moment, I don't remember where I am. The ceiling is wrong, the sheets are scratchy, and the air smells different.
Then it all comes rushing back. The fight. The things I said. The look on his face when I told him he was just like his father.
I roll over and reach for my phone in the nightstand drawer. When I turn it on, notifications flood the screen. Twelve missed calls from Phoenix. Eight text messages, each one more desperate than the last.
Please call me.
I'm sorry. You're right. I've been suffocating you.
Just tell me you're safe.
Jade, please.
I should respond. I know I should. But every time I start to type, the words dissolve before I can capture them. What is there to say? I love you but I can't breathe around you? I need you but I'm terrified of becoming a prisoner in your gilded cage?
The phone buzzes in my hand, and a new name flashes across the screen.
Mom.
I stare at it for a long moment, watching it ring. I haven't talked to my mother in over a week. Our last conversation ended badly, with her demanding to know when I was coming home and me insisting that my life was in California now. She doesn't know about Marcus. She doesn't know about the police. She doesn't know that her daughter has become an accessory to murder.
The phone stops ringing. Then immediately starts again.
I answer before I can talk myself out of it.
"Jade?" My mother's voice is sharp with worry, pitched higher than usual. "Jade, is that you?"
"Hi, Mom."
"Oh thank God." I hear her exhale, a rush of breath that carries weeks of tension. "Where are you? I've been worried sick. You haven't returned my calls, you've barely texted, I didn't know if you were alive or dead or what."
"I'm fine, Mom. I'm still here."
"With him?" The word drips with disdain. She's never met Phoenix, but she's already decided she hates him. Rich men are dangerous, she's told me a thousand times. They think they can buy whatever they want, including people. "Are you still with that man?"
I close my eyes and lean back against the headboard. The pillows are flat and lumpy, nothing like the cloud-soft pillows on Phoenix's bed. "We had a fight. I'm at a hotel."
A pause. I can practically hear my mother's mind working, calculating how to use this information to her advantage.
"Come home," she says finally. "Please, Jade. Just for a few days. We can talk, really talk, without him hovering over your shoulder."
"Mom."
"I'm not asking you to leave him forever. I'm asking for a few days. A week at most." Her voice softens, and I hear something underneath the usual sharpness. Fear, maybe. Or loneliness. "I miss you. I barely know what's happening in your life anymore. You used to tell me everything, and now I feel like I'm talking to a stranger."
The words hit harder than they should. She's right. I have been distant, keeping her at arm's length because I'm terrified of what she might see if she looks too closely: the guilt, the fear.
"I don't know," I start to say, but she cuts me off.
"Please. Whatever happened between you and this Phoenix person, you shouldn't be dealing with it alone in some hotel room. You should be home, with family, where people actually care about you."
"He cares about me."
