“Fine,” I reply curtly. “How are you?”
“Oh, you know.” She grins. “Same old. Still making a mess. Still chaos incarnate. Although we both seem to be all over the place, because your address seems to be constantly shifting too. I guess neither of us are exactly easy to live with. Where is it you’re based now?”
The absolute audacity of this woman.
“You know exactly where I live,” I huff. She has successfully goaded me into non-scripted speech. “And I am very easy to live with, thank you. Most people barely even notice I’m there at all.”
Her nostrils flare. That is not what I bloody meant.
“There was a little bit of drama last time we saw each other,” she tells Will faux confidentially. “It was definitely my fault, but Cass is proving extraordinarily difficult to apologize to. I’ve tried, like—what?” She glances at me. “Fifteen times, now? She’s having none of it. Let’s just say we don’t have very well matched cohabitation styles. I’m somewhat on the careless side, while Cassandra tends to like things neater and more organized than my personal preferences.”
“Somewhat on the careless side is like saying Alpha Centauri is a bit of a pain to get to.” I scratch at my arm with my fingernails; my leg is bouncing again. “You never once cleaned up after yourself. Not once. Literally. Not a single time.”
“We had cleaners.” She shrugs with laughing eyes.
“They weren’t cleaners,” I snap, then consciously lower my voice. (“Cassandra has a problem with volume control.”) “I once found seven empty cans of beans, stored under your bed. By what logic? You’d have to literally eat out of a can with a fork and then get down on the floor and place it there intentionally, seven times.”
“Not so.” She shakes her head. “Sometimes you put it on the floor so it doesn’t get on the bedding and eventually it just kind of rolls there and they collect.”
I make an exasperated mewl. “There was a cigarette butt in one of them.”
“There was not.”
“There was! I saw it!”
She grins. “They weren’t cigarettes, Sandy-pants.”
I glare at her and her eyes sparkle at me, and Will clears his throat next to us; we both look at him with a faint air of surprise, having forgotten he’s there. He’s watching me a lot more closely. Now the quiches are gone, he’s paying a bit more attention to his date.
“So...” He lifts his eyebrows. “A bit of a falling-out, I’m guessing?”
“You could say that,” I confirm sharply. “Yes.”
“I wish,” she says, grimacing and running a hand through her short brown fringe. “For a falling-out there needs to be a fight, an argument, some kind of reckoning, and there wasn’t one. Cass just legged it. Moved out the same day. The same hour. I’ve been trying to have it out with her ever since and she won’t let me.”
“Because I made it very clear I never want to see you again,” I agree at the top of my voice, violence in my fingertips. “Yet here you are.”
She visibly flinches, the exhibition goes quiet, and Will looks at me with that horrified Lamia expression again: the one I tried so hard to make go away. And I want to stop myself—I do. I just don’t know how to. I’m like a train hurtling off the right track into a wall while everyone inside jumps out of the window.
Will frowns. “Cassie, why don’t we—”
“Did you follow me?” I ignore the surprised tangerine color coming out of him and whip toward her again. “Is that what happened? I want the truth. Did you hunt me down and stalk me all the way here?”
When, though? Was she on the train behind me? In a different carriage? I was waiting outside for quite a while, but I did have my head buried in my phone. Maybe she somehow slipped in just ahead while I was googling Interesting and Relevant Things to Say at a Photography Exhibition.
“Yes,” she admits reluctantly. “But before you get too mad—”
“Way too late for mad,” I hiss. “Mad was three minutes ago. I’m moving rapidly through extremely irate and approaching incandescent.”
She smiles, then tries to bite the smile with her teeth.
“Shit.” An apologetic yet simultaneously flirty expression is aimed at Will. “This is so rude of us, fighting like this in front of you.”
“We’re not fighting,” I clarify heatedly. “You don’t get to fight with me.”
“Yes, I’ve gathered that.” She sighs and returns to Will. “I’m so sorry... What’s your name, anyway? Who exactly are you?”
Will blinks. “Oh. I’m Will. I’m Cassie’s...”
He never finishes the sentence, but I think his silence might be the loudest thing any of us has said so far.
I feel something inside me crumple into a sad, tired ball.
“Well.” She glances at me with massive eyes. Why are her eyes that big? Nobody needs eyes that big. We’re not owls. “Then I’m sure you know this already, Will, but Cass can be a little...black-and-white. It’s just the way she is. Right or wrong, good or bad. Love or hate. She has this remarkable ability to classify and separate the world and everything and everyone in it. She’s the Queen of Compartmentalization. Everything in tidy little Tupperware boxes, lined up straight, filed perfectly away in her brain with little laminated labels. That includes people.”
I open my mouth to debate this, then shut it again.
Of course I compartmentalize. Of course I file memories and people and emotions away as neatly as possible. Emotions are confusing, people even more so, and I remember everything that has ever happened to me, in elaborate detail. If I didn’t have an effective storage system, I’d go completely mad.
I also cannot believe she’s using Will as a shield to have this conversation with me, just because I wouldn’t have it with her by post.
“And if you screw up,” she continues, her cheeks getting even rosier, “just once—just a single time—you’re dead to her. It’s over. Forever. There is no room for basic human error in the world of Cassandra Penelope Dankworth.”
Why can’t you just be normal.
My stomach hurts. It’s one thing to follow me to a photography exhibition, and quite another to make wildly negative accusations about my character to the one man on earth who might be about to fall in love with me.
Even if they’re 100 percent accurate.
“Pomegranates,” I say suddenly, finally making the connection of why she’s picked that specific scent. “Fruit of the dead. Hilarious.”
“What can I say?” She grins. “I’m a creature of nuance and subtlety.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Am.”
“Subtle like a spear through the face.”
“If it’s sharp enough, I reckon you could barely see it from a distance.” She laughs. “It’s nice to meet you, Will. You seem lovely. Handsome, but not too handsome. Just the right amount of handsome. Enough to be secure but not enough to be a prick. And you’re nice and relaxed too, which is good to see. I’m very glad that Cass has found someone who can balance her out.”
She holds her hand out to Will; he takes it, and I stare at their hands.
Something bright pink flickers.
“Hi, Diana,” he says, looking like he wishes he was in another room, in another building, on another planet. “In Cassie’s defense, that doesn’t seem a fair character analysis. I’m not sure when you last saw her, but she’s been really cool and laid-back in the short time I’ve known her.”
“Really?” She looks at me. “I guess time really does change everything.”
That does it. Ugliness flares out of me with a whoosh.
“Her name isn’t even Diana,” I spit, losing all control now. “She’s a liar.”
I rotate back to her, lines of pure, hissing rage shooting out of my head like Medusa’s snakes. If I wanted Will to know that I try to control every single inch of my life and everything and everyone in it, I probably wouldn’t have spent quite so much effort and literal time ensuring he didn’t.
“And I might live in black and white,” I say in a choked voice, “but you live in the gray area. No right, no wrong. No fact, no fiction. No good, no bad. No lies, no truth, no consequences. It’s all just one big blurry mess to you, isn’t it, where nothing means anything and you can do and say whatever you want, regardless of what it does to the people around you.”
“Hey, I was just winding you up,” she says in a small voice, reaching a hand out toward mine. “I’m really sorry. Old habit.”
“Don’t touch me,” I say, whipping away.
“And I’m not lying,” she objects desperately. “I could have been called Diana, couldn’t I? It’s not that different. It would have taken just the tiniest tweak. Just a nudge, somewhere in the past, and boom—a different story. So I’m not a liar. Sometimes I just enjoy living in all the narratives that never got a chance to happen.”
“That’s the definition of pathological lying,” I hiss.
“Oh.” She frowns, thinks about it. “Then, yeah. I might have a problem.”
We stare at each other, breathing hard.