I try to crack a smile. “Yeah.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve struggled to find the words to say to Daniel, but usually it’s because nothing ever seems good enough to say. Nothing ever seems to convey how deep my feelings are, how absolutely I had fallen for him in such a short amount of time. But now, the reasons are so vastly different, it’s hard to wrap my mind around. It’s hard to believe that this is actually happening. For a split second, my eyes glance over at my purse on the counter, at the bottle of Xanax I know is tucked inside. I think about the pill I took before chasing it with two glasses of wine, the way I had sunken into the couch as if I had been falling through clouds, the memory-like dream I was experiencing just before the alarm screeched to life. I think about college, the last time something like this happened. The last time I was mixing drugs with alcohol in such a reckless manner. I think about the way the police had stared at me then the same way Detective Thomas was staring at me in his office yesterday afternoon—the same way Cooper was staring—silently questioning the validity of my mind, my memories. Me.
I wonder, for a second, if maybe I imagined the necklace. If maybe it wasn’t there at all. If maybe I was just confused, conflating the past with the present, the way I have so many times before.
“You’re mad at me,” Daniel says, walking over to the table and taking a seat. He gestures to the chair across from him, and I follow, dropping my phone on the counter before sitting down and staring at the food below me. It looks good, but I’m not hungry. “And I don’t blame you. I’ve been gone … a lot. I’ve been leaving you here all by yourself in the middle of all of this.”
“In the middle of all what?” I ask, my eyes drilling into the chocolate chips poking out of the browned batter. I pick up my fork and stab one with a single prong, scraping it off with my teeth.
“The wedding,” he says. “Planning everything. And, you know, what’s been on the news.”
“It’s okay. I know you’ve been busy.”
“But not today,” he says, cutting into his breakfast and taking a bite. “Today, I’m not busy. Today, I’m yours. And we’ve got plans.”
“And what exactly are those plans?”
“It’s a surprise. Dress comfortably, we’re going to be outside. Can you be ready in twenty minutes?”
I hesitate for a second, wondering if it’s a good idea. I open my mouth, start to come up with an excuse, when I hear my phone vibrate on the kitchen counter.
“One second,” I say, pushing my chair back, grateful for the excuse to step away, to stop talking. I walk over to the counter and see Cooper’s name on the screen and suddenly our argument last night feels so trivial. Maybe Cooper was right. All this time, maybe he had seen something in Daniel that I couldn’t see. Maybe he’s been trying to warn me.
This relationship you’re in. It doesn’t seem healthy.
I swipe my finger across the screen, ducking into the living room.
“Hey, Coop,” I say, my voice low. “I’m glad you called.”
“Yeah, me, too. Look, Chloe. I’m sorry about last night—”
“It’s fine,” I say. “Really, I’m over it. I overreacted.”
The line is quiet and I can hear his breath. It sounds shaky, like he’s walking fast, his pounding feet on the pavement sending a vibration up his spine.
“Is everything okay?”
“No,” he says. “No, not really.”
“What is it?”
“It’s Mom,” he says at last. “Riverside called me this morning, they said it was urgent.”
“What was urgent?”
“Apparently she’s been refusing to eat,” he says. “Chloe, they think she’s dying.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I’m out the front door in less than five minutes; my shoes are barely on, the fabric on the back of my sneakers digging blisters into my heels as I run across the driveway.
“Chloe,” Daniel calls after me, his open hand slapping the door, pushing it back open. “Where are you going?”
“I have to go,” I yell back. “It’s my mom.”
“What about your mom?”
He’s rushing out of the house now, too, tugging a white T-shirt over his head. I’m fumbling through my purse, trying to find the keys to unlock my car.
“She isn’t eating,” I say. “She hasn’t eaten in days. I have to go, I have to—”
I stop, drop my head in my hands. All these years, I’ve been ignoring my mother. I’ve been treating her like an itch that I refused to scratch. I guess I thought that if I focused on it, on her, it would be overbearing, impossible to focus on anything else. But if I ignored it, eventually the pain would just subside on its own. It would never be gone—I knew it would still be there, it would always be there, ready to begin prickling across my skin as soon as I would let it—but it would be less noticeable, like background noise. Static. Just like my father, the reality of what she is—what she did to herself, to us—had been too much to handle. I had wanted her gone. But never, not once, did I stop to think about how I would feel if she actually were gone. If she passed away, by herself in that musty room in Riverside, unable to express her final words, her dying thoughts. The realization I have always known settles over me; it’s thick and suffocating, like trying to breathe through a damp towel.
I have abandoned her. I have left my mother to die alone.
“Chloe, hang on a second,” Daniel says. “Talk to me.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head, digging my hands back into my purse again. “Not now, Daniel. I don’t have time.”
“Chloe—”
I hear the jangling of metal behind me, and I freeze in place, turning around slowly. Daniel is behind me, holding my keys in the air. I grab for them, and he yanks them back, out of my reach.
“I’m coming with you,” he says. “You need me for this.”
“Daniel, no. Just give me my keys—”
“Yes,” he says. “Goddamn it, Chloe. It’s nonnegotiable. Now get in the car.”
I look at him, shocked at this sudden flare of anger. At his flushed-red skin and bulging eyes. Then, almost as suddenly, his expression shifts back.
“I’m sorry,” he says, exhaling and reaching out toward me. He puts his hands on mine, and I flinch. “Chloe, I’m sorry. But you have to stop pushing me away. Let me help you.”
I look at him again, at the way his face has completely changed in seconds. At the concern bunching his eyebrows now, the folds in his forehead, shiny and deep. I drop my hands in surrender; I don’t want Daniel there. I don’t want him in the same room as my mother—my dying, vulnerable mother—but I don’t have the energy to fight. I don’t have the time to fight.
“Fine,” I say. “Drive fast.”
I recognize Cooper’s car as soon as we pull into the lot; I jump out before Daniel can even put ours in Park, running through the automatic doors. I can hear Daniel behind me, his sneakers squeaking on the tile, trying to catch up, but I don’t wait. I take a right down my mother’s hallway, run past the collection of cracked doors, the quiet murmurs of televisions and radios and residents mumbling to themselves. When I turn in to her room, I see my brother first, sitting on her bedside.
“Coop.” I run toward him, collapsing onto my mother’s bed as I let Cooper pull me into a hug. “How is she?”
I look over at my mother, her eyes closed. Her already thin frame looks even thinner, as if she’s lost ten pounds in a week. Her wrists look as if they could snap, her cheeks two hollowed out caves draped in tissue paper skin.
“You must be Chloe.”
I jump at the voice coming from the corner of the room; I hadn’t noticed the doctor there, standing in a white coat with a clipboard pushed against his hip.
“My name is Doctor Glenn,” he says. “I’m one of the on-call doctors at Riverside. I spoke to Cooper this morning, over the phone, but I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“No, we haven’t,” I say, not bothering to stand. I look back down at my mother, at the gentle rise and fall of her chest. “When did this happen?”
“It’s been a little under a week.”