Page 121 of You’re So Vein

He made me feel safe.

We were going to do this together. We were leaving the election up to fate. We had a thing. And apparently, the thing was me being an idiot and him being a lying liar with excellent cheekbones.

How could I be so stupid?

I let myself be drawn into his fake story. Every sweet word he said to me curdles in my chest. It’s Sam all over again.

But I don’t get to fall apart. That’s not a luxury I’ve ever had. I have to be Madam MacGyver – the older sister, the auntie, the friend, the daughter, the perpetual human mop for everyone else’s spilled drama. I clean up the mess.

Only, this time, I’m the mess.

I’m the one who’s broken.

So I stand, mute, frozen, while the village detonates around me.

My beautiful friends, who I’d been yelling at minutes earlier, bounce into action. Alaric, Gideon, and Winnie direct the vampires outside at sword point. Maisie bangs her gavel and calls for order. Arabella glares at the people rushing the stage until they skitter away. Celeste and Beth flank me like bouncers and drag me offstage.

“I always said that guy was no good,” Beth says indignantly. “How could he do that to you, in front of everyone?”

“Beth, we’re not doing ‘I told you so’. We’re doing ‘let’s help Komal get away before she’s on the menu’.” Celeste shoves me through the kitchen and mayor’s office and out the fire exit. “We’re leaving, now.”

Celeste drags me across the square towards Nevermore Bookshop. She races around the back inserts her spare key into the lock. (We all have a key, and thankfully, Celeste isn’t as irresponsible with hers as the rest of us have been.) She rushes me through the empty shop into the deserted Events room. I glance down at the circle of empty chairs and beanbags where we hold our coven meetings, and the tears finally spill over.

“You’re safe.” Celeste closes her arms around me.

I’m not safe. I’m never safe.

I fall apart.

The tears come like floodwaters now, rising inside me and spilling down my face, messy and unstoppable. My breath hiccups, my throat burns.

More arms slip around me as the rest of the Nevermore Coven arrives.

Winnie appears last, out of breath and with the aura of a woman who has either just punched a vampire or desperately wants to.

“I went back to tell Augustin what an idiot he was,” she says. “But he’s disappeared. He isn’t at his cottage. No one knows where he is.”

46Komal

Beth: I’m coming over. I have some things you need to hear.

I’M TOO HEARTBROKEN TO GO to bed. My mother turns from the pot of chai on the stove and grabs my phone from my hands. “Don’t read that. It will only make you more depressed.”

“I’m not depressed.” I wait until she’s turned away and slide the phone back. The headline blares up at me from the Argleton app that I designed. MAYORAL CANDIDATE DISQUALIFIED OVER PRIVACY BREACH. Maisie may be my friend but she’s bound by her journalistic ethics to report the truth, and the truth is that I messed up.

I’m too devastated to care.

“You are miserable.” Mamma rolls her eyes as she whips around to see me reading the headline. “I’ve never seen you this mopey. And I lived through your teenage years. You were an ungrateful little shit, but I still loved you.”

I poke out my tongue at her. In response, she sets a mug down in front of me. The delicious scent of warm chai smooths the hard, scary edges of my broken heart.

“Your father and I have been thinking,” she says. “About you.”

“You shouldn’t be bothering Papa with anything right now. He has to focus on getting better.” As soon as we got home, Mamma put him to bed. I know he’s feeling weak, but I’m too horrified by disappointing him to go and see him.

Bad things keep happening, and my papa – the light of my life, the person I always wanted to be like – is getting weaker and sicker every day, and why can’t I fix him?

Mamma sighs. “He’s not getting better anytime soon, love. That’s why you should move out.”