I’m the one who isn’t real. I’m exactly where I started. In the place I ran from. Except now there is a stigma attached to me that I will probably spend my whole life trying to overcome. And I won’t succeed. The conspiracy theories about my disappearance were mostly ludicrous, but some of them sounded credible. She was institutionalized. She had a nervous breakdown. She ran away with the gardener. I can see the women sizing me up in the mirror and I know their minds are already settled on whatever theory they chose on day one. This gathering is pointless. I wonder if my mother realizes that.
Even if she does, she’s made it clear she plans to trot me out like a show pony, regardless. Through my door for the last several days—in between lectures—there has been optimism on her part. If I just meet with Elijah, he’ll remember why good blood marries with good blood. He’ll stop his ridiculous gallivanting with Addison Potts and see sense. It’s what his parents want. It’s what’s expected.
Crazy enough, I feel more of a kinship for Elijah than I did when we were dating and engaged. I want to call him on the phone and command him to keep gallivanting, to hell with what our parents think. Yes, Elijah is the last stop on my apology tour, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to make it. Going to see him seems unfaithful to Jason.
Jason.
Another pin jabs me in the hip and I wince, jarred back into the moment. What did that woman with the ugly brooch ask me? How did I occupy myself in Florida?
A glance in the mirror tells me they’re all watching me expectantly. “Well…I took some educational classes.” On beer brewing. “I went scuba diving.” After which I had the most mind-melting sex of my life on a boat. “And I did some consulting for a beauty pageant contestant…”
“Were you paid for it?” Doris sits forward. “Did you work in Florida?”
She says work like some people say pus.
“Not work,” I say with a smile, even though I feel like I’m choking on every word. “More of a favor for someone who needed some guidance.”
“Tina,” my mother cuts in smoothly, addressing the seamstress. “Can you please add another half inch to the straps? We don’t need to remind everyone why she has tan lines.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I straighten my shoulders and hold still, giving Tina a reassuring smile as she works to widen the material and keep it in place. She’s not jabbing me on purpose. It’s clear that she’s new to the job and I don’t want to think that’s why my mother hired her, because that would just be too much. More than anything right now, I want to rip this green silk off my body and wear the loose, casual clothing I grew accustomed to in Florida. They’re still under my bed, locked in the suitcase I can’t allow myself to open.
“Did you…meet anyone interesting in Florida, Naomi?”
That not so subtle question comes from Ugly Brooch and I ache—ache—to tell her I met the most incredible person on this planet. An honorable man who can also be a grouch but would die to protect the ones he loves. My throat aches with the effort to keep the truth trapped. Oh God, I can’t stand here much longer. I want to scream.
No, I’m going to scream. It builds in my chest—
Elijah’s mother walks into the room, escorted by a maid. I deflate.
“Mrs. DuPont has arrived, Mrs. Clemons.”
“Thank you,” sings my mother, standing to greet her.
I’m frozen on the pedestal, my gaze locked with Elijah’s mother’s in the mirror. She’s another person I should have apologized to by now. For ruining her son’s wedding day. I just needed more time to stop being in actual, physical agony. More time to stop missing Jason so bad my legs refused to move.
Elijah’s mother doesn’t look angry with me, though. Or even disappointed. If anything, she looks kind of…conflicted. “Welcome home, Naomi,” she says. “You look well.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Du Pont.”
Between us, heads are moving like the crowd at Wimbledon.
“Mrs. Clemons,” the maid prompts, handing my mother an envelope. “This came in the mail. It’s addressed to Miss Clemons, but I thought you’d be interested since—”
“No need to go into detail,” my mother clips out, taking out her glasses and perching them on her nose to study the envelope. Whatever she sees visibly flusters her. “It’s from Elijah. For you, Naomi.”
The gentle version of an explosion goes off in the room. Murmuring and hand fanning ensues. My stomach drops to the floor. No. No, I’m not ready to deal with this. Not ready to deal with anything. I turn on autopilot to accept the note from my mother, noticing Mrs. DuPont’s confused expression and wondering what it means.
“Well, open it, Naomi,” my mother snaps, laughing somewhat hysterically. With all eyes on me, I slide the note out of the envelope, my heartbeat deafening in my ears.
Dear Naomi,
I still love you. I know we can get past what happened. Please come see me.
Elijah
I almost fall off the pedestal, but Tina steadies me.
“Well,” prompts Doris. “What does it say, dear?”
“Yes,” drawls Elijah’s mother. “I’m quite curious myself.”
I’m unable to form words when shackles are tightening around my wrists and ankles. Deep down, I’m not sure I ever believed my eventual marriage to Elijah was salvageable. I didn’t want it to be, I finally, finally confess to myself. Of course I didn’t. I’m in love with someone else. Someone who knows me, through and through. I don’t want to marry a stranger and live as a dutiful ornament the rest of my life. Elijah moving on was my only hope for having more. If I can’t have Jason, can’t I at least keep my renewed sense of self? I could build on that. With the reading of this note, however, all of those hopes are dashed. My choices are gone.
If Elijah wants a second chance and I don’t give it to him, I’m as good as disowned, my financial security stripped away. There’s nowhere to go but back to the start.
“It says…to come see him,” I manage. “If you’ll excuse me.”
I leave the room full of pins.
*
I walk up the steps of the home Elijah and I were supposed to inhabit after our honeymoon. Lord, it’s more intimidating than I remember. Needing to stall, I look up at the second floor at what I’d planned to make my meditation room. Why? I don’t even meditate. My friends insisted mediation rooms were as essential as kitchens, that’s why. Did I ever have a mind of my own?
Memories drift back to me. Renting my motel room in St. Augustine, food shopping in a strange place for the first time, the sensation of a paintbrush stroking down my ribcage. Telling Jason I wanted to be used hard. The carbonation of a beer tickling my throat.
Jason dancing with Birdie under a spotlight.
Those reminders that…yes, I do have the ability to make decisions and think for myself, to make a difference, send me up the steps to knock on the door. I’m braced to see the man I left at the altar. My apology is rehearsed and ready on my tongue. No one answers on the first knock, but when I lift my hand to knock again, the door flies open.
Whoa. This tall, suited gentleman is my ex-fiancé, but he’s not the poised and polished Elijah of my recollection. His dark hair is in disarray, his tie knot pulled to one side. He’s a man who never misses a step or looks anything but confident. Not right now, though. He’s very clearly upset. Almost…haunted. What is going on?
“Elijah. Hello.” I cling to my purse strap for comfort, waiting for the customary gentleman’s greeting. A kiss on the cheek, a smile, a compliment. He says nothing back, though, simply staring at me like…he doesn’t even know me. As if we’ve never met at all. I say his name again and he visibly shakes himself, fear moving into his expression. “Are you all right?”
“No.” His hand slaps down on the doorframe, his knuckles turning white from gripping it so hard. “Naomi, I don’t want to be rude, but this isn’t the best time.”
“Oh, of course, I—” Wait, what? He’s the one who invited me here, is
n’t he? I search through my purse for the envelope. “I wouldn’t have come, only you sent me the note.”
He stares at me like I’m speaking in pig Latin. “Note?”
“It was in my mailbox this afternoon.” The murk clears and reveals what should have been obvious the moment he opened the door, regarding me as one does a stranger. My chest expands with my first full breath of the day. With creeping, cautious relief. “I’m guessing you didn’t write it,” I breathe, handing him the unfolded piece of paper.
His eyes move one side to the other, reading—and the contents bring a sound out of his mouth. It’s a tortured denial. If he didn’t write the note, who did? Right now, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that he very obviously does not love me or want me back.
Thank God.
“Naomi…”
I hold up a hand with a boldness I didn’t always have. But I do now. “You don’t have to explain.” A bittersweet laugh puffs past my lips. “Engaged to be married and I didn’t even know your handwriting. If that’s not a sign, I don’t know what is,” I say, desperately trying to remember the words to my apology as more and more relief floods in. “Even so, I’m sorry about what happened, Elijah. How I handled it, especially. Driving like a bat out of hell to Florida until I couldn’t go any farther. Honestly, I barely recognized myself—”
The memory of Jason opening the door to his house for the first time, his big shoulders spanning the frame, almost strangles me, so I rush to distract myself, rambling, needing to go. Away from this house that represents the past. Past Naomi. Get the rest out. “Gosh, I’ve been going around apologizing to just about everyone. My mother, the wedding planner. Something about us just never felt right.” I shake my head. “Maybe I don’t know what right is even supposed to feel like with another person. Maybe…that’s what I learned in Florida. I’m not sure. I’m just sorry about the trouble I caused you.”
“I’m sorry, too,” he says, sincerity in his tone. “Someday, when all of this is long behind us, Addison and I would love to have you over for dinner. We’ll laugh about it.”
Happiness positively floods me at that confirmation that something good for Elijah and Addison came out of me fleeing the church. “I wondered if it was true. You and my cousin.” I heave a final sigh for the past. The one Elijah and I built with the best intentions, trying to please everyone but ourselves. “Everyone thinks I’m crazy, and seeing you in this house where we were meant to live…I think they must be right,” I say, trying to ease the distress radiating from him. “Hopefully Addison is smarter than me.”
“I’m hoping for the opposite. The smarter she is, the harder it’s going to be to convince her to forgive me.” I laugh, but he doesn’t join me, his gaze distant. “Naomi, I really have to go.”
“I understand. But there’s just one more quick thing.” My revelation is unplanned, but it needs to be said. This secret has been kept far too long and as of this moment, I’m done letting my parents deal the cards of their choosing and still having the gall to dictate how they’re played. “I overheard my parents arguing. A very long time ago.” All of those tense meals trying to mediate arguments about my father’s affair rush back to me, but one in particular stands out. One I wasn’t meant to witness. “Addison…she’s not just my cousin, she’s my half-sister. She deserves to know that. Will you tell her, please?”
Elijah’s chin snaps up, then all at once he looks weary. “Yes, I’ll tell her,” he says, attempting a smile, which I return. “Goodbye, Naomi.”
“Goodbye, Elijah.”
The door closes and I turn, floating down the steps. That’s how it seems. As if there are clouds under my feet, carrying me forward. Forward is where I need to go. Not back. I came here believing marriage to Elijah and a lifetime of posturing was my only option, but it’s not. It’s very clear he loves someone else, and thus, I am free. I’m free. Even my parents can’t maneuver past the love for another woman I just witnessed on Elijah’s face.
A bolt of lightning streaks across the sky and I look up, allowing rain to land on my cheeks and forehead. I laugh up into the storm, absorbing the power of it. My own power.
Jason will always hold my heart. I love him and I miss him, but we were driven apart by the choices we made. He didn’t ask me to stay in Florida. Wouldn’t. Not when his military career is the most important part of his life. I chose a different kind of duty. Duty that I’m relinquishing as of now, so I can prove my own capabilities, with no fallback money this time. No home to run back to if the going gets tough. Yes, Jason will always, always have my heart. But I have courage. I have me. And I’m ashamed of myself for forgetting that when I set my mind to it, I can stand on my own two feet. That’s exactly what I plan to do.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
ColdCaseCrushers.com
Username: StopJustStop
Well, it’s nice to see that sanity has returned to the Internet, but…
…an update on our Runaway Girl now that she’s home wouldn’t be too terrible.
ConspiracyCrowd.org
Username: IWant2Believe2000
Do not be fooled by New Naomi. She’s a plant.
That said, I wouldn’t mind an update, either.
Does she seem sad to anyone else?
Jason
It’s not until Birdie comes home from school with her graduation robe and cap that I check the calendar and realize I’ve been numb for a full month. Completely, sickeningly numb. If it wasn’t for Birdie, I’m not sure I would have had the wherewithal to get out of bed in the morning. Something went dark inside me when I walked off stage and Naomi wasn’t there. Like a candle being blown out in a dark room, leaving nothing behind but the baseline of silence.
My sister does need me, though. I don’t think I really believed I could be needed for anything other than protection, providing, until she smiled up at me on that stage. I’m more to her than I knew. She’s more to me, too. I never let that in, because it would mean staying. Operating outside my capabilities. When I came home, I treated my care of Birdie like just another mission. Maybe I still look at it that way, in a sense, because you can’t take the Army out of the man. But I do know my sister will always have been my most important mission.
And I wouldn’t have figured that out without Naomi. Wouldn’t have thought myself capable of living up to another person’s expectations, should they go beyond providing. Protecting. Who knew letting my guard down or being there for Birdie when she does the same…could be its own form of providence?
Maybe I’ve never really felt like a hero until now and I was searching for this feeling over and over on the battlefield, underwater, all over the goddamn place but at home.
It’s awful to have a sense of peace so deep, I couldn’t dive far enough to find it…while also being sublimely miserable. I don’t know which end is up anymore. Naomi came here and made everything so fucking right. But it was only right with her. Not without. Never without.
“Hey, bro.” Birdie tosses her graduation cap on the mantle, alongside her third-place trophy, which sits in a place of honor beside a picture of Natalie. “How long have you been sitting here?”
I look down at my hands. They hold a letter from my commander formally welcoming me back to active duty, beginning in June. “I have no idea,” I say in a voice rough from disuse. “A while.”
Over the last month, we’ve started making arrangements for my upcoming deployment. After graduation, Birdie is going to Dallas to stay with our parents until she starts college in the fall. I can tell she doesn’t want to go, but she isn’t letting on. She probably thinks I’m too fucked up over Naomi to handle her fears and I hate that she’s right. I barely got through this letter in my hands without dropping into mental blackness, replaying every single moment from the time Naomi knocked on the door to when she vanished into thin air. Jesus, I miss her. Half of me has been torn away, leaving the rest of me to rot.
More than anything, I want to put on a positive face for Birdie. I
want to tell her my parents aren’t going to treat her like a walking ghost of our sister, but it might be a lie. If they would abandon her when she needed them most, they’re not strong or smart enough to see Birdie is her very own unique person and treat her that way. My sister deserves better and I don’t know how to give it to her. I don’t know how to do anything when it hurts to function.
Pull it together. I set down the letter and stand, wincing as blood rushes to my feet. Hours. I must have been staring into nothing for hours. “How about some of those bowls for dinner? What do you call them?”
“Poke bowls. And you hated them last time.”
I have no memory of how they tasted or how long ago we ate them. “They were fine.”
“Jason.”
“I’ll make the call if you want to test your blood sugar.”
“Jason.”
Her serious tone alerts me that I need to focus. I don’t want to. I just want to make it through the next hour, guilty as it makes me for being less than Birdie needs. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she drones, mimicking me. “I’ve been letting you mope because I could tell nothing I said was going to penetrate your big head. But I, uh…” Her eyes flick to the letter resting on the table, complete with Army insignia at the top. “I’m starting to get worried, okay? If you leave without settling this thing with Naomi, you won’t think clearly over there. And I really need you to be thinking clearly so you don’t end up dead. Okay?”
I’m still trying to recover from hearing Naomi’s name out loud. It has been weeks of hearing it on a loop in my head, but having the vowels and consonants linger in the air has taken a blowtorch to my house of cards. “It’s settled. It couldn’t be more settled.”
“Said the dying man.”
I brace myself on the counter. “Birdie, please.”
“Naomi’s parents were going to disinherit her if she didn’t come home. And like, kick her out of the family, which if you ask me, would be a blessing.” She takes a breath and whistles it out. “I hate betraying a confidence.”
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