Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
Alive, then. Somewhere. Taking her pills at a counter he would never get to stand at, in a kitchen he would never get to hear her sing in.
He tried the shelters because she was broke and proud and had left with two small suitcases and no cushion under her at all. The casting offices too, the temp agencies, the diner with the dumplings, every callback room she'd ever laughed her way into. He tried her mother, who took his call and his money both and offered him, in exchange, the information that she and Jassy weren't close, and had he thought to try the girl's friends. As if a mother should ever have to ask a stranger that about her own child.
There were no friends. That was the part that took him apart on the floor. She had let him learn her entire noisy life by living inside it, and the terrible thing under all the noise was that before him she had been almost entirely alone, and now she'd gone back to it on purpose, and she'd done it for no reason but to stop taking up room in his.
For two years he had guarded a locked door so nothing could ever get in and cost him again. He understood now, far too late to spend the knowing on anything, that he had bricked up the wrong wall in the wrong place. The thing he couldn't survive the loss of had never once been behind that door. It had been out here the whole time, sitting on his kitchen floor laughing until it cried, filling every silent room he owned with a noise he hadn't known he was starving for. And he had put it out on the curb himself and called the putting-out honor. The man who could find anything sat in a home gone silent the old way, the dead way, and made himself say the true thing, since there was no one left to say it to. He had been handed a whole life. He hadn't lost it the way he lost Mary, to the dark, with no say in the matter. This one he had given away on purpose, and there was no container lost across any ocean that he wanted back a fraction as badly.
Chapter Thirty-One
NEW CITY, NEW ME, IS the plan.
I pick a place clear across the country from him, a city that's never heard me laugh, which turns out to be its own specific brand of lonely, and I get off the bus with my two suitcases and my orange pill bottle and my heart that isn't mine, and I start over the way I'm apparently very good at starting over.
I wait tables. I sleep on a cot in a share with four other girls chasing the same dream, and I audition for anything that'll hold still long enough to be auditioned for.
And I am, technically, fine.
That's the word I use in my head when the ache tries to start a conversation. Fine. I'm fine at the diner and fine on the cot and fine in the audition rooms. I'm fine right up until the smallest hours, when the four other girls are breathing slow and even and I catch myself doing the exact thing I swore on the bus I'd stop doing, which is lying still in the dark and listening for a man who used to move through his whole apartment without making a sound. Listening for footsteps on the far side of a wall that's three thousand miles away now and belongs to somebody else's life. And then I remember, fresh, every single time, like it's brand new every time, that this is the silence I picked. That nobody took him. That I set him down with my own two hands and walked, and a girl doesn't get to cry about a weight she chose to carry to the curb herself.
And the heart doesn't help. The one that was never even mine to give him picks those exact hours to go reaching after him, like it knows the way back even when I've made very sure the rest of me doesn't. It never once listened to me about him. I don't know why I thought leaving would teach it to start.
I cry about it anyway. Into a cot pillow, so the other girls don't hear. It's the one thing I let myself have, and I keep it small, and I'm done before morning, every time.
Because somewhere over a state I couldn't name, on that bus with my forehead against the cold window, I decided something. He was right.
Not about the cruel. He was wrong about the cruel, so wrong, and some furious little part of me is going to go on knowing that till I die. But underneath the cruel, down in the ugly true part, he was right. I owe her more than this. More than taking the second chance her heart bought me and spending it falling for the man she loved, in the home they must have shared, wearing the very thing she left behind. So I take my second chance, and I aim it at something that isn't him, and I try, every clumsy day, to be worth a heart I got handed by a stranger I never even got to thank to her face. The breakthrough, when it comes, comes the way these things come. A tiny indie nobody expects a thing from. A director who looks at my grounded, real, two-suitcases face and sees something he can use. A part that's small on paper and turns out to be the whole beating middle of the movie.