The Beautiful Daughters

by Nicole Baart

  Harper flew out of the chair and grabbed Adri by the arms. Adri still had her backpack slung over her shoulder, her smile fixed all warped and crooked to her face, but she started to cry almost instantly. Big, anguished tears that spilled off her chin as she began to gasp for air.

  “We. Are. So. Fucked. Up.”

  Harper had to stifle a smile at that. Adri never swore, and the proclamation sounded downright comical from her lips. But in the next moment the story came tumbling out, and suddenly Harper wasn’t smiling anymore.

  David hit her.

  It was the only thing that Harper’s fury-clouded brain could think. David hit her.

  Something fierce and almost maternal reared up in Harper. She wanted to strangle David, to throttle him for what he had done. Hurt him. Make him regret he’d ever laid a finger on Adrienne.

  It was unforgivable.

  And yet, while Harper was angry, she wasn’t entirely surprised. She had experienced enough life to know that a woman like Victoria didn’t become so hollow-eyed and solitary without strong provocation. Though she was quiet and withdrawn, Mrs. Galloway had always been straight-backed and proud, the angle of her delicate chin a kind of regal. Even though her dark eyes told a story all their own, Harper couldn’t begin to imagine Victoria with a hair out of place or a note of impropriety in her tone. She exuded composure and good breeding. Perfection. A woman like that didn’t roll over and play dead. She was beaten down.

  Piperhall, as much as Harper adored it, was a burdened place that harbored many dark mysteries. Only they weren’t so mysterious to Harper. How could a child grow up in such an environment and not be affected? How could David endure the iron fist of his father and not boast threads of steel in his own bones? Everyone knew that Liam had abused Victoria, but had he bent his hand toward David, too? Or was David just a good pupil?

  Harper knew who David was. She always had. And she had believed that she could control him, that she could keep the monster inside at bay. Weren’t they the perfect pair? Beautiful. Dysfunctional. Fire and water and earth and air. Caught forever in a feverish dance, circling each other, near enough to touch but never close enough to wound. At least, not lethally.

  But David chose Adri and screwed everything up.

  Harper hated him for it. And she hated him for hurting Adri.

  It was after midnight when she slid out of the apartment like a shadow. Adri had been asleep for hours, traumatized and exhausted and anxious for the respite of a deep and dreamless sleep. Harper had given her sleeping pills and kissed her forehead as she closed her eyes. But Harper couldn’t sleep. Her blood seethed beneath her skin, licking at her heart like a tongue. A hot and living thing that surged through her and begged her to move.

  She didn’t know where she was going, but she could hardly wander around in the dark all night. The weather had turned and it was starting to sleet; already a fine sheet of ice crusted the sidewalk and splintered beneath the wedges of her boot heels. The sound was cathartic somehow, sharp but incomplete, for even as she walked away the ice continued to crack and moan along invisible seams. A path split before her, the glow of each perfectly spaced streetlamp highlighting a spiderweb map, a broken atlas of her uncharted life.

  It took her to David’s door.

  He was living alone in an off-campus apartment. Jackson and Will were roommates, and there would have been room for David, but he had elected to rent the second story of a converted farmhouse on the edge of ATU’s small campus. Slumming it like the other college students, instead of commuting from his mansion on the hill. The apartment was a place to gather, a place to drink. During the week it was both common room and community center for The Five, a sort of home base that was as much theirs as his. Harper had always wondered why Will and Jackson didn’t just join him in the apartment instead of living on campus, but Will had once let it slip that they hadn’t been invited. He didn’t seem put out. David was just David.

  The front door of the farmhouse opened on a short hallway, and it was never locked. To the right was the door to the ground-floor apartment. A simple #1 had been painted onto the faded wood, but David’s neighbors kept to themselves. Harper didn’t even know who they were. On the left was the narrow staircase to apartment 2, each step so shallow Harper had to tiptoe up the stairs. It had been murder moving David’s furniture in. Though Harper and Adri mostly watched from the front lawn, laughing at the guys and offering suggestions in the form of thinly veiled insults. “Lift with your backs, boys. Lift with your backs.”

  She took the steps now two at a time, propelling herself forward with one hand on the rail. David rarely locked his door, and he was a legendary night owl—Adri often mused that she worried he was a vampire, he slept so little—but, as incensed as Harper was, she couldn’t bring herself to just walk in. A wall had been erected between them, and it was more than she could surmount, even in the midst of her fury.

  Harper would have pounded on the door, but some small part of her registered the hour and the scene that she would make. Taking a moment to get hold of herself, Harper balled her fists and exhaled. Then she knocked quickly, softly, four times, and waited. Nothing. Four more. She could hear footsteps deep in the apartment, and something being shuffled around. Harper could picture David stumbling from the bedroom in the back, throwing a T-shirt on over his bare chest and cursing whoever had woken him up.

  But when David opened the door, it was obvious he hadn’t been sleeping.

  His hair was so fingered through that it stuck up straight from his forehead, and his eyes were bloodshot and wild. Harper wasn’t used to seeing him disheveled, for even when they partied he kept himself tightly reined. He was a slow burn, a quiet fury, and Harper hardly recognized him with his shirt half untucked from his designer jeans, his feet bare on the old hardwood floor of his tiny living room. David looked lost, empty, but his hands were full. In one hand he held a bottle of his father’s vintage Scotch, and in the other he balanced an empty glass between his fingers and the round door handle. He smelled of alcohol and cologne and sweat.

  “What have you done?” she said. Her anger flared and fizzled and flared again, and she couldn’t decide if she should hit him or hug him, he looked so wrecked. Instead, Harper elbowed her way into the apartment and closed the door with her hip. Taking the bottle from David, she glanced at the label and wondered just how much a 1985 Macallan would cost a mere mortal like herself. It was mostly empty, but she lifted the bottle to her lips and took a swig that burned all the way down. She put the Macallan on the nearest end table and stifled a cough.

  David didn’t seem to notice or care. His free hand was once again in his hair, yanking fistfuls of blond waves as if he intended to pluck himself bald.

  “I asked you a question.” Harper took the glass from him, too, and when she discovered it was empty, set it beside the bottle. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  David seemed not to hear her. He dropped his hands to his sides and stood there staring off into middle distance, his lips slightly parted. “I’m a bastard,” he said.

  “Yes, you are.”

  “No, really.” He looked at her suddenly, and his eyes seemed to carve right through her.

  Harper groaned. “I know you are, David. We all do. And we love you in spite of it. Don’t ask me why. But this . . .” She couldn’t finish.

  “What, Harper? What do you want to say to me?”

  “This is unforgivable.”

  His laugh was brittle and unexpected. “You really have no idea.”

  “Don’t play with me, David Galloway.” Harper couldn’t believe that she had thought to hug him only a moment ago. He was being impossible. She didn’t feel sorry for him, not one bit, and though she had come to talk some sense into him, or hit him or something, she found that the only thing she really wanted to do was leave. The room was filled with sparks of every unspoken word and inexpressibl
e hurt, each unthinkable wish and longing that she had felt about David since the moment she first saw him. The apartment was a tinderbox. A dangerous place to be.

  Harper tore her eyes from the intensity of David’s gaze and hurried toward the door. In a couple of seconds she would have wrenched it open and been gone, but David caught her from behind and yanked her close. She couldn’t tell if he was drunk or not, but it didn’t matter. His arms were locked around her, his body pressed along the length of her back. And though she didn’t want to feel what she was feeling, his breath on her neck made her weak.

  They stood like that for what felt like hours, and when Harper finally relaxed the tiniest bit in the coil of his embrace, David’s lips brushed against her ear. “It was supposed to be you,” he said.

  She had no idea what he meant. The relationship? The engagement? The fight? But in a way it didn’t matter. Harper would have taken it from him. All of it. They were one and the same. They were meant to be, and she knew it the moment he told her so.

  David’s fingers fumbled on the buttons of her coat and the zipper of her jeans, and she let him struggle. She was too busy damning herself, her fingers trembling so hard on the hindrances of his own clothes that she ripped a seam.

  Then lies and regrets and a love so skinny it hardly existed at all. Bones and lust. A wisp of nothingness.

  A sigh.

  The knowledge that everything she loved had shattered around her. And it was all her fault.

  He never even kissed her. Not really.

  Harper let go of the bar at the top of the slide. A matter of seconds. Her life upended. And then she shot out of the bottom and landed on her back in the gravel. But the drunken feeling didn’t stop, and when Adri knelt down and laid her hand on Harper’s arm, she still felt like she was whirling out of control.

  “You promised me the truth,” Adri said. “We’re not leaving until you tell me one true thing. Just one. That’s all I want.”

  When Harper opened her mouth, she had no idea what she was going to say. And when she heard her own words, it was as if someone else had spoken them.

  “I hate him.”

  It was the truest thing she could think to say.

  21

  Adri took a deep breath and heald it. Softly, she said, “Sometimes I hate him, too.”

  But Harper didn’t want to talk about David. Of course, she could have steered the conversation to different ground. She hated her father. And Sawyer, too. But she couldn’t say any of that. Sawyer’s name was an incantation, an illicit spell to conjure demons.

  “We shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” Harper said, pushing herself up from the ground.

  “You said it,” Adri’s voice sounded hollow, far away.

  “I shouldn’t have.”

  Harper started to walk back to the car, but it was a struggle to hold herself upright. It made her feel old.

  When Harper reached the car, she climbed into the passenger seat and pulled her knees up to her chest. Wrapped her arms tight around her shins. She was freezing, and grateful when Adri slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine. Turned the heat on high.

  Harper forced herself to say, “Sometimes I think that everything I’ve done, every moment of my life from the day that David died until now, has been determined by that one event.”

  “Me, too,” Adri admitted.

  “I’ve made a lot of bad choices.”

  Adri thought for a minute. “I’ve made a lot of careful choices. I live a very rigid life, Harper.”

  “I couldn’t tell.”

  “Tease away,” Adri said, and she didn’t sound at all upset. “It’s worked for me.”

  “Has it?” Harper turned and looked right at her friend, at the sharp angles of her lovely face and the deliberate way that she held her expression so tight and neutral. She didn’t look happy. But then again, she wasn’t scared either. She hadn’t messed up her life to the point of sheer lunacy. If Adri had taken careful, meticulous steps for the last five years, Harper had flung herself out of a plane. Without a parachute. Neither coping method seemed to be working very well.

  Adri was still waiting for an answer to all of her questions. Harper knew that she had strained her welcome. Her silence wasn’t arch anymore, it was reticent. She had to share something.

  “I was in a bad situation,” Harper said.

  “What do you mean, a bad situation?” The concern in Adri’s eyes was difficult to see; instead of watching her, Harper looked out the window at the pink glow of dawn. Traced her finger in the thin film of condensation and wrote her own name in block letters.

  “Seriously, Adri. Don’t make me say it.” Not that Harper would have said it anyway. She couldn’t.

  A pause. “Okay. So. You left.”

  As if it was that easy. “Yeah.”

  “And that woman in the SUV? The one who dropped you off?”

  “A friend.” Harper palmed away the letters, leaving a trail of droplets on the window. She couldn’t bring herself to tell Adri about The Bridge or her escape from Minneapolis. It was too sordid, too much like a bad soap opera. People didn’t live like that. Not really. And yet, Harper knew all too well that they did.

  “Okay.”

  “Look, Adri, I got your email and I came. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. But I didn’t mean to burden you with any of this. That was never my intention.”

  “You think you’re burdening me?” Adri sounded incredulous. “Harper, you’re my best friend. I wrote you because I wanted to see you, I wanted to talk about what happened in BC, what happened to David. But now that you’re here I feel like we’re playing some sort of game. Except I don’t know the rules.”

  It took Harper a minute to speak. “I didn’t mean for it to be this way.”

  “Me neither.”

  All at once, Harper felt a crashing wave of love for Adri. Years ago, Harper had kissed her. On the mouth like a lover instead of a friend. They were side by side on Harper’s bed in their dorm room, and Adri had said something that caused them both to dissolve into giggles. It was nothing, really, an unremarkable comment that held little meaning. But it made Harper feel as if her life could be beautiful after all. Normal. And she had forgotten for just a moment who she was and where she was and all the rules of the world she had known. Harper leaned over and kissed Adri as she laughed, felt the soft press of her lips and the smooth plane of her cheek, and knew that she had never in all her life loved anyone as much as she loved Adrienne Vogt.

  When Adri jerked away, there was a second of confusion, a moment when they looked at each other and everything, everything hung in the balance. Harper could have wept for agony at what she had done, but before she could even take a breath to apologize, to try to explain, Adri gave a little shake of her head. It cleared the air. Erased all but the faintest imprint of what had happened.

  “I love you,” Adri said, one corner of her mouth quirking. But her eyes said the rest: Not that way.

  And Harper didn’t either. It was just an overflow, an unguarded instant when she had tried to embrace the life before her with every ounce of her being. To let Adri know that she was accomplishing the impossible: singlehandedly convincing Harper that she deserved to be loved.

  Harper wanted to tell Adri that now. Maybe even tell her again that she adored her still. Loved her like a sister. She had tried to convince her, in the way that she braided her hair and made her pancakes on test mornings and listened to every late-night whispered wish as they fell asleep across the room. They had shared so much. A life. A dream. A lover. Harper stifled a shiver.

  “What in the world did you ever see in me?” Adri asked. It was an odd question, something that took Harper completely by surprise.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I said. Why did you chose me? Those first days at ATU, I felt like y
ou picked me out of a crowd.”

  “I did.”

  “Why?”

  Harper sat up straighter, let her feet slide to the floor of the car. “I liked you.”

  “That’s not enough.” Adri was gripping the steering wheel, her hands white-knuckled as if Harper’s answer mattered much. “I was a wallflower. A timid little farm girl. What in the world did you see in me?”

  “You were kind,” Harper began, searching for specifics, for the details that had inexorably drawn her to Adri. “You were smart and determined and serious. I think I was drawn to those things because I didn’t understand them. I liked them in you.”

  Adri gave a small nod, but she wouldn’t look at Harper.

  “And you weren’t a wallflower. You were an observer. Not the kind of girl who would run off at the mouth for no reason or make a spectacle of herself. Not like me. That’s a good thing, Adri. You weren’t flashy because you didn’t have to be. Your character spoke for itself.”

  “Those are all nice things to say,” Adri said.

  “But you don’t believe them?”

  Adri shrugged. “I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder how we ended up together at all.” She looked quickly at Harper, apparently gauging if her words had stung. But Harper had thought the same thing herself many, many times.

  And yet, her attraction to Adri was the most obvious thing in the world. Adri was quiet, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t confident. She was settled, perfectly comfortable in her own skin and the life that she had been given. Adri didn’t know it, but she wore serenity like an aura. Peace like that was something you couldn’t fake. Someone had to love it into you, and Adri had been loved well. Harper admired her.