Ever the optimist, I checked. And it turned out there was only the undrinkable variety. Sigh.
Neither quenched nor on drugs, I slumped down next to Ellery. “Caspian and Nathaniel are engaged.”
There followed a very long silence. “I suppose you’re going to want a hug or some shit like that?”
“Yes please.”
A deep, pained sigh. Then, with great deliberation, she put down her brush and held out her arms. I bounced into them and cuddled for all I was worth. Which, on the cuddle front, amounted to a lot. Believe me.
She made a sound like a cat bringing up a furball. “Your hair’s in my mouth.”
I squeezed harder.
“Ow. Arden.”
Probably best to let go. I did and Ellery withdrew to a corner, all aggressive knees and elbows.
“Fuck,” she said, after a moment or two. “That shit’s fucked up.”
“Hugging?”
“Caspian.”
“I thought you didn’t care about him.”
Her head snapped up, eyes flashing—the blue fractals in their depths most reminiscent of her brother when she was annoyed. “I don’t. He can be miserable forever and I hope he is. But I hate the way he always drags other people down with him.”
Ouch. Caspian and Ellery’s relationship wasn’t so much a car crash as a pileup on the M1. I’d accidentally got caught up in it once before and the situation had become so unspeakably horrendous that it had left me questioning whether I could actually be with Caspian. It was the first time, outside of a sexual context, I’d seen him be cruel for the sake of it. And to Ellery, whom I loved. The worst of it was, I was sure he loved her too, and the way he treated her was his twisted idea of looking after her.
Talk about some Greek tragedy–level irony: Caspian had cast my heart away like a peach stone, and I’d never seen him so clearly or understood him so well. It left me full of hollow places—this useless knowledge, like my useless love. Probably that was why I said something, even though it wasn’t my business to.
“You do know that…that what happened with Lancaster Steyne wasn’t Caspian’s fault, right?”
Ellery curled her lip scornfully. “Yeah, I figured that out.”
“It’s just sometimes it almost seems as if you blame him? Maybe?”
“Well, I don’t. Adults shouldn’t fuck kids. And”—she hesitated, only for a second, which was extra startling because Ellery never hesitated—“I could have spoken up.”
More than once it had crossed my mind that if cats could talk, they’d talk like Ellery. She walked this impossible line between guarded and vulnerable, and woe betide anyone who couldn’t keep up. I kind ofmostlykept up, and, for whatever reason, she liked me enough that when I didn’t, she chose not to claw my face off. But I wasn’t ready for this.
“Oh my God,” I blurted out. “That’s so not on you.”
She just shrugged. And suddenly, I was breaking up with Caspian all over again—helpless against his suffering and his terrible certainties. Thinking about it usually made me want to cry, as if I could somehow fix the universe by feeding it all the tears he couldn’t shed for himself. Today, though, I was really fucking angry. This huge rusty spike of rage for Lancaster Steyne, the man who had gouged this wound so deeply and into so many people. I hadn’t been able to do anything for Caspian, but I would fight the same fight for Ellery. A thousand times if I had to.
I nudged her very lightly, just enough to earn a listless glance. “Listen to me. Please. You aren’t the person who fucked up here and neither is Caspian. The person who fucked up is Lancaster Steyne. Who”—my voice lost some of its steadiness—“seems to be the only damn person whoisn’ttaking responsibility for it.”
Honestly, it messed with my mind. I’d met the man very briefly at Ellery’s birthday. Thought he was attractive, almostbecausethere was something slightly intimidating about him. And yes, I did hate myself a little bit for that in retrospect. Occasionally, I’d remember his eyes on me like rust flecks on my soul. But what I just couldn’t…processwas how normal he seemed. How untouched by shame. When everyone and everything around him was fucking poisoned.
Ellery tucked her knees under her chin and wrapped her arms around them. “You don’t get it.”
“I get an eight-year-old shouldn’t—”
“For fuck’s sake,” she snapped. “I know that. It’s not theshould, it’s thecould. Like a fucking car alarm two streets over in my head all the time, knowing it could have easily gone differently.”
“But doesn’t that apply to everything? I mean, it probably wouldn’t have happened at all if your father hadn’t died.”
The warehouse was old and echoey, so the worddiedtook a really long time to go away. I listened to it bouncing off the crossbeams—di-di-di-died-died-died—with my hands over my mouth, horrified by what I’d said.
