Page 255 of Mad Girl

You traced my jaw with your thumb. “I nearly died once.”

“When?”

“Just before I came here. It was my birthday, and I’d just come from my dad’s. He said—” You stopped to swallow, then tried again. “He really upset me, so I took some drugs—took too many at once—and passed out at my sister’s.”

“Casey,” I whispered.

“I know. It’s awful. But Claire found me in time and I was rushed to hospital, where they pumped my stomach and saved me. When I woke up, Claire was”—you paused, too emotional to continue—“she was completely distraught. She cried and yelled. She made me feel awful for nearly leaving her, and when I told her I’d done it because I didn’t feel I could go on anymore—What was the point of me? What did I have to live for?—she said I’d better find a purpose, better find one quick, because she needed me to keep going.”

“And you did find something,” I said through the giant lump in my throat.

You nodded. “I took another hard look at Eleanor’s letter, did all that digging online, and put all my energy behind this. Finding my biological parents. Learning who I was and where I came from. I cleaned myself up, picked up more hours at the pub, and saved enough money to come here.”

“I’m so glad you kept going,” I whispered.

“So am I. And you’ll really think this is corny, but the night I met you, and we were standing outside, sharing that cigarette, it suddenly hit me, clear as day. I thought, So here it is. I’ve just found it. This is the point of me. This is what I was meant to live for. This mad girl. This shocking, extraordinary creature right here. Her.”

Tears ran down my cheeks. You tried catching them with your thumb.

What could I possibly say to an admission like that? Something too profound and beautiful for me? It felt like way more credit than I deserved. I couldn’t explain the jumble of emotions I felt without sobbing, so I said, “Did you just call me crazy?”

You chuckled. “By mad, I mean uninhibited. Reckless. And—well, yes, actually—a bit crazy.”

“I can’t believe you thought that about me.”

“Elliot,” you said gently, “we’d only just met, and you threatened to chop my balls off.”

“Well, yeah, but—” I stopped to consider this. “Okay, yeah.”

“Listen to me,” you said, holding my gaze. “When I say crazy, I mean it in the most endearing way possible.”

I started to press my lips to yours, then quickly drew back. “Wait. You thought we were siblings, though—when we met.”

Your eyes narrowed. “I thought we might have been.”

“Then you were probably thinking, Damn. I’ve got this stark raving mad sister who lives in a dungeon with some creepy guy hanging above the fireplace, and a dad who’s quite intimidating and a tiny bit scary as well. There’s loads of work to be done here.”

You laughed out loud. “Was that meant to be an impression of me?”

“You have to admit,” I said, eyebrows lifted, “the accent was spot on.”

“It was actually quite terrible,” you said, and I gave you a hard shove. You grabbed my hand, laughing against my palm before you kissed it. “I absolutely adore you.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly. “Sounds like something a guy would probably say to the girl he thought might have been his sister for six months.”

You rolled your eyes. “Will you stop? The truth is, the idea of us being siblings never felt quite right, and I struggled to even think of you like that. I kept having to remind myself we might be related. Mainly because I kept, you know, thinking of your mouth in hugely inappropriate ways.”

“But you were devastated when my dad told you he wasn’t your father—which means you wanted us to be siblings.”

You grabbed a lock of my hair, twirling it in the small space between us. “I did, and I didn’t. I wanted Nic to be my dad because of how good he was to me, but then I’d think, If he’s my dad, she’ll only ever be my sister. And every time that thought popped into my head, I’d feel overwhelmingly…disappointed by it. So I’d start to question the whole thing—if Nic being my dad is what I really wanted, why I kept looking at you the way I did, why I couldn’t shake that crazy gut feeling I’d had the night we met. So I was devastated over the dad bit, that’s true, but then I got your text: Please come back to me. And it was more than just a reminder that I had one other purpose here—it was hope. I was there at the airport, trying to run away because nothing had worked out like I wanted it to, and there you were, reminding me I’d already found the thing I was meant to be here for, and you were calling me back—calling me back home. So you might say it’s awfully presumptuous of me to assume we’re meant to be together, but I knew it from the moment we shared that cigarette. I wasn’t sure how we belonged together exactly, I just knew that we did. I knew that somehow—whether we were related or not—we needed each other. Sometimes, I don’t feel I was led here to find my biological family so much as I was led here to find you.”

Of course by then I was crying again, so you abandoned my hair to mop up the tears. “I wish that were true,” I said, clutching your wrist, “but it can’t be.”

“Why not?”

“You’re too good for me.”

“Stop it,” you said, passing your thumb over my lips. “I’m not too good for anyone.” The affectionate look you gave me made my heart skip. “I came home that night—to you and Nic waiting up for me in the kitchen—and when he left us alone, and you reached out to me, and I took your arm, it felt right. So hugely, glaringly, unbelievably right that I thought, Thank God. Thank God I was wrong. And then—when you burst into my room all those months later, and I told you I wasn’t your brother—you said it, too. Thank God.”