Page 2 of Mad Girl

But you know what they say about the best-laid plans—or maybe just the ones people make for me. They implode, don’t they, Casey?

I have a knack for ruining everything.

The morning I left for jail, you asked what I’d tried to tell you the night of that stupid party, and I told you it didn’t matter. Because I wanted to hold on to what little of you I had left, right before I lost everything, your voice cracking on the question and the weight of it hanging in the air between us. “What else were you trying to tell me, Elliot?”

You, guilty and unshaven as you searched my face.

Me, arms crossed over that cropped sweatshirt of my mom’s, barely able to meet your gaze.

You, so beautiful and distraught it pierced my heart to tell such a hideous lie. “It doesn’t matter.”

But it did matter, Casey. It does.

The truth—the confession I tried to make that night—was supposed to fix everything.

And now I know why you stopped me from saying it: you didn’t have the full story. You only had the pieces I’d been brave enough to give you.

The condensed version of our story goes something like this:

Crazy rich girl decided it wasn’t so bad being leashed to strange foreign guy. He brightened her dark corner of the world so much she finally stopped fighting him. And in quiet, ordinary moments, they fell.

Into a routine.

Into each other.

Into something they could never undo.

But there’s a bigger story, hidden within that one—like secret photos stashed between the pages of a book—and it’s bigger than you ever could’ve imagined.

This isn’t all about me, Casey. It’s your story, too.

For the last four weeks, I’ve tried blurting it out. Tried laying everything bare on that steel table between us. No preamble. No excuses. Just the full, ugly truth.

But is an hour enough? In sixty minutes, can I convince you to stay and listen? Make you understand?

I look at you, and you’re gazing back, that little groove of concern deepening between your eyebrows, and I’m transported to all the other times—the truths I gave you willingly, the few you demanded, that one you took. You saw some truths I never wanted you to see, but you didn’t judge. You only tried to understand, because that’s the kind of person you are.

But this truth is a bomb, held in the palm of my hand, too complex and powerful to drop. Too cataclysmic.

I don’t know how you’ll react to it. All I know for sure is I have to tell you everything. Despite what it might cost me.

And to do that, I have to go back to the very beginning.

I’m writing our story down so you’ll always have it. So there’s never any doubt.

This, Casey, is your proof.

That it was always you.

Something beautiful happened in that dark house, and it changed my life, and nothing in this world—not even a whirlwind like me—could make it any less true.

In the meantime, I hope you tire of wasting your Tuesdays here, begging me to talk. Because seeing you is like picking at an open wound, and while I deserve that pain, I still wish you’d relieve me of it. And while you’re out there, acting like the son Nic never had, I’ll be here, writing these letters. Filling however many pages it takes until there are no lies or secrets left.

So here it is.

All those missing pieces you wanted? The darkest ones? What’s broken and still true?

Here they are, Casey. They’re yours to keep.