Chapter 14
The sad, embarrassing truth was that I had let my world get very small.
Jackson disliked my friends. Not openly at first. He simply found faults in them. Leah was too loud. Monica was jealous. Priya filled my head with negative ideas. My colleagues were pretentious. My neighbors were nosy.
Little by little, loving him became easier when fewer people were around to witness what it cost.
But there was one person he had never managed to remove entirely.
My sister.
I called Claire from the hospital hallway after the stitches were done.
She answered with the panicked breath of someone who had been sleeping beside her phone.
“Elaine?”
At the sound of her voice, I began crying.
Not gracefully. Not quietly. The tears came from somewhere old and exhausted, and I pressed one hand against the wall to keep myself upright.
Claire did not ask me to calm down.
She waited.
When I could speak, I told her where I was.
“I’m coming,” she said.
“It’s late.”
“I’m coming,” she repeated.
Forty minutes later, she walked into the emergency department wearing leggings, a raincoat over pajamas, and the expression she used to have in high school when someone hurt me and she was ready to make it the entire city’s problem.
She stopped when she saw my face.
“Oh, Ellie.”
That childhood nickname undid me all over again.
She wrapped her arms around me carefully, avoiding the bandage at my temple, and I held on to her like I was twenty-two again and our parents had just died and she was the only solid thing left in the world.
“I’m sorry,” I said into her shoulder.
She pulled back. “No. Absolutely not. We are not doing that tonight.”
“I should have told you.”
“Yes,” she said, wiping under her eyes. “You should have. And tomorrow I will be furious about that. Tonight I’m just glad you called.”
May you like
That was Claire. Honest enough to hurt, loyal enough to stay.
She drove me to her house in Pasadena just before dawn. The city was washed in gray light, palm trees black against the sky. I sat in the passenger seat with a hospital discharge packet in my lap and watched Los Angeles wake as if nothing in the world had changed.
