The doorbell rang when I almost wrestled my suitcase closed. The unexpected sound startled me into loosening my hold on the shell, which popped open again with a smug thud.
“Fuck.”
I leave for New Zealand in four days. I’ve refused to check my luggage ever since an airline lost the suitcase containing my signed baseball trading cards when I was twelve, so I’d spent the past hour shoehorning a week’s worth of hiking gear into a tiny carry-on.
All that work, down the drain.
“This better be fucking good.” Irritation shot through my veins as I marched out of my room and to the front door.
I flung open the door, ready to rip whoever it was a new one, but my foul mood crumbled when I saw who stood on the front step.
“Hey.” Jules wrapped her arms around her waist, her skin pale and her eyes suspiciously bright. “I’m sorry for dropping by unannounced, but I…I didn’t know where…” Her wobbly smile crumpled. “I didn’t want to be alone.”
Her voice caught on the last word, and a blade of worry sliced through my insides.
“Fuck being sorry.” I opened the door wider and scanned her for injuries as she stepped inside. No bleeding, no bruises, just that lost look on her face. Worry stabbed deeper in my gut. “What happened?”
“It’s my mom.” Jules swallowed hard. “The hospital called and said she was in a car accident. She—she’s…” A small sob slipped out.
She didn’t need to finish the sentence for me to guess what happened. But while I’d expected sympathy or even commiserating pain, nothing could’ve prepared me for the explosion in my chest.
One tiny sob from her, and every hidden explosive detonated, one by one, until pain burned through my lungs and rushed through my blood. It echoed in my head and squeezed my heart so tight I had to force myself to breathe through the ache.
“Come here, Red.” The rough crack in my voice sounded foreign to my ears.
I opened my arms. Jules stepped into them, burying her face in my chest to muffle her cries, and it took all my willpower to hold back a visible reaction. I didn’t want to heighten the wild emotion rampaging through the air, but fuck, seeing her hurting, hurt. More than I thought possible.
“Shhh.” I rested my chin on top of her head and rubbed gentle circles on her back, wishing I weren’t so damn helpless. I would’ve done anything, bargained with anyone, to erase her pain, but of all the skills I’d mastered over the years, bringing back the dead wasn’t one of them. “It’s okay. It’ll be okay.”
“I’m sorry.” Jules hiccupped. “I know this—this i-isn’t part of our arrangement, b-but A-Ava’s a-at a photoshoot and S-Stella isn’t home y-yet and I…”
“Stop saying sorry.” I tightened my hold on her. “You have nothing to be sorry about. You can stay here as long as you’d like.”
“But w-what about our—”
“Jules.” My hand paused on her back for a second. ”Shut up and let me hold you.”
Her watery laugh lasted for a second before it dissolved into tears again. But fuck it, I’d take a second of her feeling better. I’d take half a second. Anything I could get.
Eventually, her sobs subsided into sniffles, and I guided her to the couch. “I’ll be right back.”
I didn’t have time to grocery shop this week, so I placed a quick delivery order on my phone and fixed a cup of tea in the kitchen. My mom had firmly believed a good cup of tea could solve any problem, and though I rarely drank it myself these days, I always kept some on hand.
Tea and a hot water dispenser—two essentials in a Chinese household.
A pang pierced my chest at the thought of my mom. She’d died when I was a kid, but no one truly gets over the death of a parent.
Jules never talked about her family, so I assumed she had a fraught relationship with her mother, but her mom was still her mom.
I returned to the living room and handed her the drink.
“You didn’t poison this, did you?” Her scratchy voice contained a hint of her usual sass.
Relief bloomed behind my ribs, and my lips curved at the callback to one of our earlier conversations.
“Just drink the damn tea, Red.”
A shadow of a smile crossed Jules’s mouth. She took a small sip while I sank next to her on the couch.
“They called when I was in the clinic,” she said, staring into her mug. “The other car ran a red light and crashed into hers. Everyone died on impact. The hospital went through her belongings and found my number…I was the only family she had left.”
She lifted her eyes to meet mine, her expression tortured. “I was the only family she had left,” she repeated. “And I haven’t talked to her in seven years. I had her number. I could’ve called her, but…” A visible swallow. “I kept telling myself, next year. Next year will be the year I call her and make amends. I never did. And now, I never will.”
Jules’s voice thickened with a fresh bout of unshed tears.
The ache in my chest hardened into stone.
“You couldn’t have known,” I said gently. “It was a freak accident.”
“But if I hadn’t put it off…” Jules shook her head. “The worst part is, I didn’t think I would feel like…this.” She gestured at herself. “My mom and I didn’t part on good terms, to say the least. For years, I was so angry at her for what she did. I thought I would be relieved when she died, but I…” She sucked in a sharp inhale. “I don’t know. I don’t know how I feel. Sad. Angry. Ashamed. Regretful. And yes, a little relieved.” Her knuckles whitened around her mug. “Is that terrible of me?”
“It sounds like you had a complicated relationship with your mother, and it’s normal to feel all those things. Even relief.”
I saw it all the time in the hospital. Some patients lingered on the verge of death without truly living or dying. When they finally passed, their families mourned, but they were also relieved that their loved one’s suffering had ended. They didn’t say it, but I saw it in their eyes.
Grief wasn’t one emotion; it was a hundred emotions wrapped in a dark shroud.
Jules’s situation wasn’t quite the same, but the principle remained.
“Trust me. I’m a doctor,” I added with a half smile. “I know everything.”
My chest glowed at her soft laugh. Two laughs in less than an hour. I viewed that as a win.
“Were you close to your mom?” she asked. “Before…”
My smile faded. “Yeah. She was the best until the divorce. It got so nasty, and she became erratic. Moody. And when she was framed for trying to kill Ava…well, you know what happened.” A lump of emotion lodged itself in my throat. “Like most people, I thought she tried to drown Ava. The doctors and police chalked it up to a mental break, but I still refused to talk to her for weeks after. We’d barely reconciled before she overdosed on antidepressants.”
Jules’s face softened with sympathy. “Sounds similar to my story. The beginning, at least.” She traced the rim of the mug with her finger. “My mom and I were close when I was a kid. My dad left before I was born, so it was only the two of us. She loved dressing me up and parading me around town like I was a doll or an exclusive accessory. I didn’t mind—I loved playing dress-up, and it made her happy. But when I got older, I started getting more attention than she did, especially from men, and she hated it. She never said it, but I could see it in her eyes every time someone complimented me. She stopped treating me like her daughter and started treating me like I was her competition.”
Jesus. “She was jealous of her own daughter?”
I tried to keep the condemnation out of my voice, considering the woman had just died, but my stomach churned at the idea that a mother would compete with her child.
Jules let out a humorless laugh. “That’s the thing about my mom. She was used to being the center of attention. Homecoming queen, prom queen, beauty queen. She won a bunch of pageants when she was younger and never got over her glory days. She was beautiful even when she was older, but she couldn’t stand not being the most beautiful person in the room.”
She took a deep breath. “My mom pursued modeling instead of attending college, but she never made it big. After she had me, the jobs dried up, and she became a cocktail waitress. Our town was cheap. We would’ve had an okay lifestyle, but she had a huge spending problem and racked up a bunch of credit card debt on clothes, makeup, beauty services…basically anything that helped her keep up appearances. Our bills fell by the wayside. There were some days when the only real food I ate was in the school cafeteria, and many days when I would come home, terrified that would be the day we got evicted.”
I rubbed Jules’s back with soothing strokes even as my jaw tensed at the description of her childhood.
Who the fuck would choose makeup and clothing over food for their kid?
But I’d witnessed enough ugliness in the world to know those people existed, and it made me sick that Jules had grown up with one of them.
“When I was thirteen, she got the attention of Alastair, the richest man in town, when he visited the bar where she worked,” Jules continued, “They got married a year later. We moved to a big house, I received a generous allowance, and it seemed like all our problems were solved. But Alastair always…” The short pause was long enough for dread to solidify my insides. “…watched me and said things that made me wildly uncomfortable, like how nice my legs were or how I should wear skirts more often. But he didn’t touch me, and I didn’t want people to think I was overreacting to a few compliments, so I didn’t say anything. Then one night, when I was seventeen and my mom was out with her friends, he came into my room and…”
I stilled. “And what?” The words vibrated with such eerie calm it was hard to believe they came out of my mouth.
“He said all this stuff about how I should be more grateful for everything he’s done for me and my mom, and then he said I could show him how grateful I was by…you know.”
Rage clouded my vision and painted the world in a film of bloody red. Darkness stirred in my chest, insidious in how slowly it uncoiled, like a monster lulling its prey into a false sense of security before it attacked.
“What happened after that?” Still calm, still flat, though razored tension ran sharp beneath my words.
“Of course, I said no. I yelled at him to get out and threatened to tell my mom what he said. He just laughed and said she’d never believe me. Then he tried to kiss me. I tried pushing him off, but he was too strong. Luckily…” Her mouth twisted at the word. “My mom came home early and caught us before he could…do anything else. He spun some story about how I’d tried to seduce him, and she believed him. She called me a whore for trying to seduce her husband and kicked me out that night.”
The rage pulsed harder in my gut, expanding and intensifying until it shattered any morals I might’ve had.
I became a doctor to save lives, but I wanted to slice Alastair’s skin off his body, strip by strip, and watch the life bleed from his eyes.
“I was able to withdraw enough money to scrape by for a few weeks before Alastair froze my accounts,” Jules said. “I, um, worked odd jobs around town until college. After graduation, I left and haven’t gone back since.”
“Where’s Alastair now?”
God help him if I ever found him, because I had zero compunction about turning my murderous fantasy into reality.
When it came to monsters who preyed on young girls or anyone I cared about, I didn’t give a shit about the law. The law wasn’t always justice.
“He died my junior year of college,” Jules said. “House fire. I was still tracking what was happening back home at the time—call it morbid curiosity—and the news made it into the local papers. There were rumors of arson, but the police couldn’t find any hard evidence, so the case went cold.”
Alastair’s death should’ve placated me, but it only pissed me off more. I didn’t care if he’d burned alive; the bastard got off too fucking easy.
“My mom was out with friends at the time, so she was fine, but it turned out Alastair left her a pittance,” Jules continued. “I’m not sure where the rest of his fortune went, but of course, my mom spent her inheritance within a year. She went from having everything to having nothing again.” A bitter smile touched her lips. “That was also in the local papers. When you’re as rich as Alastair was, in a town as small as Whittlesburg, everything that happens to you and your family is news.”
A muscle ticked in my jaw. “And no one questioned the fact that they threw a seventeen-year-old out to fend for herself?”
“No. The townspeople made up their own rumors about how I was stealing from Alastair to fund my drug habit,” she said flatly. “How they tried to get me help but it didn’t work, they were at their wits’ end, so on and so forth.”
Jesus fucking Christ.
“The crazy part is, I still wanted to reconcile with my mom, especially after Alastair’s death. She was my mom, you know? The only family I had. I called her, got her voicemail, and left my number. Asked her to call me back because I wanted to talk. She never did.” Jules wrapped her hands tighter around the mug. “My ego took a huge blow, and that was the last time I reached out to her. But if I hadn’t let my pride get in the way…”
“Communication is a two-way street.” Some of my anger faded, replaced by a deep ache for the little girl who’d only wanted her mother’s love. “She could’ve contacted you too. Don’t be too hard on yourself.”
Honestly, her mother sounded like a piece of fucking work, but I kept that to myself. Don’t speak ill of the dead and all that.
“I know.” Jules sighed. Distress carved tiny grooves in her forehead, but at least she’d stopped crying. “Anyway, enough about the past. It’s depressing.” She knocked her knee against mine. “You wouldn’t make a half-bad therapist.”
I almost laughed at the thought. “Trust me, Red. I’d make a terrible therapist.” I could barely get my life together, much less advise people on theirs. “I just have experience with dysfunctional families, that’s all.”
The doorbell rang.
I reluctantly unfolded myself from the couch to answer the door and returned with two large brown paper bags.
“Comfort food,” I explained, removing the takeout boxes from the bags.
Macaroni and cheese. Tomato soup. Salted caramel cheesecake. Her favorites.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Eat.” I pushed a container of soup toward her. “You’ll need the energy later. And drink more water or you’ll be dehydrated.”
Jules rewarded me with a tiny smile. “You’re such a doctor.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You take everything as a compliment.”
“Of course I do. I can’t fathom why anyone would want to insult me.” I removed the lid from the macaroni and cheese. “I’m extremely lovable.”
“People who are extremely lovable don’t have to keep saying it.” Jules took a tiny sip of soup before setting it down.
“Most people aren’t me.” I speared a piece of cheesecake with a fork and handed it to her. After a moment’s hesitation, she accepted.
We ate in companionable silence for a while until she said, “I have to fly to Ohio soon. For the funeral. But my graduation is on Saturday, and I have to make the arrangements, and I don’t even know how much flights are. They can’t be that expensive, right? But it’s so last minute. And I have to figure out where I’m going to stay, and I have—”
“Breathe, Red.” I placed my hands on her shoulders, steadying her. She was breathing faster again, her eyes taking on the wildness of overwhelm. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to finish eating, then you’re going to take a shower while I look up flights, hotels, and funeral homes. Once we nail those things down, we can focus on the details. And you are not flying to Ohio until after graduation. You went through three years of law school hell, so you’re walking across that damn stage. Got it?”
Jules nodded, looking too stunned to argue.
“Good.” I handed her the rest of the cheesecake. “Here. That shit’s too sweet for me.”
After we finished eating, she took a shower while I figured out the logistics of her trip. Luckily, flights to Ohio weren’t expensive, and Whittlesburg had a total of two hotels, five bed and breakfasts, and a handful of sketchy-looking motels on the outskirts of town, so it wasn’t hard to narrow the choices down. A quick Google search also turned up a funeral home with good reviews and reasonable prices.
By the time Jules stepped out of the bathroom, I had everything ready to go on my laptop. She gave them a cursory glance before booking.
“Thank you.” She sank onto my bed and ran a hand through her hair, still looking a little lost but more animated than before. “You didn’t have to do all this.” She gestured at my computer.
“I know, but it beats watching some crappy TV rerun for the tenth time.”
Jules snorted. Her eyes fell on my open suitcase and widened. “Wait, your New Zealand trip. I forgot that’s—”
“Not until next week. I leave Monday.” Unease tugged at my gut. I’d been so excited for New Zealand, but my enthusiasm had waned, for some reason.
“That’ll be fun.” Jules yawned. She wore an old Thayer tee of mine that skimmed her thighs, and her damp hair hung in dark red waves around her shoulders.
Of all my favorite sights in the world—the Washington Monument at sunrise, the autumnal blaze of leaves during a New England fall, the expanse of ocean and jungle laid out before me at the end of a long hike in Brazil—Jules wearing my shirt might just be my number one.
“Get some rest,” I said gruffly, discomfited by the strange warmth spiraling through my insides. “It’s late, and you’ve had a long day.”
“It’s nine, Grandpa.” She yawned again.
“Yeah? I’m not the one who looks like I’m trying to catch flies with my mouth.” I shut my laptop and turned off all the lights except for my bedside lamp. “Bed. Now.”
“You are so bossy. I swear…” Yawn. “I don’t know how…” Yawn. “People stand…” Jules’s drowsy grumble grew softer with each word until her eyes fluttered closed.
I tucked her beneath the comforter, keeping my touch gentle so I didn’t wake her. Her skin was paler than usual, and a touch of red still shaded the tip of her nose and the area around her eyes, but she fell asleep insulting me. If that wasn’t proof she was feeling better, I didn’t know what was.
I turned off the remaining light and climbed into bed next to her.
Our conversation from Bridget’s wedding lingered, unresolved, between us. Did our original arrangement still stand, or had we morphed into something else? I had no clue. I didn’t know what the fuck we were or what we were doing. I didn’t know what Jules was thinking.
But we could deal with all that another day.
I curled my arm around her waist, tucked her closer to my chest, and, for the first time since our arrangement started, we slept together.
