Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
I didn’t look at Darcie, my eyes only on Grace.
Her bruised, bloodied eyes swam with tears. “Bea never forgot that time at school when you swapped skirts with her.”
A hammer slammed into my chest, cracking open my rib cage to expose my insides. No one else knew that. Not a single person. Bea had been too embarrassed then, and later, it had become a memory shared only between the two of us. Of how we’d been two awkward teenage girls who thought the incident the end of the world.
She’d been thirteen, her period had come early, and she’d stained her skirt. Though I was older than her, I was shorter. Short enough that I could roll up her skirt at the waist and still not get in trouble for a uniform violation. Add in the oversize blazer I wore as part of the uniform, and we’d successfully masked the stain.
Our secret memory. Not to be spoken to anyone else.
I wasn’t angry Bea had revealed it to Grace. I recognized the act for what it was: a message that I could trust Grace, that Bea trusted Grace.
“How do you know Bea?” I asked this stranger who wasn’t a stranger after all.
Then I looked at Darcie at last . . . and had to accept the rest of it.
“What did you do to Bea, Darcie?” I asked before Grace could answer my question. “Don’t lie. You could bleed out in the time you waste lying.”
Darcie sucked in a breath, hung her head. Her shoulders shook, her sobs beautiful theater. “I did what needed to be done.” With her hands taped, she couldn’t use them to wipe away the tears and they dripped soft splashes onto her sweater. “I wanted to help her.”
“Liar!” Grace kicked the back of Darcie’s seat hard enough to rock it.
“Grace.” I shook my head in a curt negative.
Jaw shoving against her taut skin, she nonetheless sat back. “She did it because she wanted Ash, who only wanted Bea,” she bit out. “Darcie’s hated Bea from the instant she realized who her sister was going to become. She was meant to be the golden child, Bea the one in her shadow—only it didn’t work out that way.”
“It wasn’t like that.” Darcie’s eyes, so lovely and so blue, held a silent plea. “I told you she had mental problems. Serious mental problems. They began to intensify that year, but she wouldn’t get help.”
“I don’t believe you.” Because Darcie was implying a sustained decline at a level that would’ve begun to affect Bea’s everyday life. I didn’t care how good someone was at masking a condition, they couldn’t hide that kind of a change from a friend who saw them day in and day out.
I closed my hand around the necklace I hadn’t taken off since the day I put it on. “I dropped in on Bea without warning all the time. Not once did I surprise her in an unstable state.”
“My sister was clever at hiding her fragmentation,” Darcie sobbed, her gaze swinging to Bea, then back to me. “She was this dazzling butterfly around you and the others, and then when she was alone, she’d lie on her back and stare at the ceiling. She even cut herself. In places you’d never see. Been doing it for years. Had scars all down the inside of her thighs.”
Grace laughed, a genuine belly laugh.
Darcie’s expression flickered. “She’s mad. Listen to her.”
“No, Darcie. She’s laughing because you had to push your story too far and now I know you’re lying.” Because that shoot in the studio with the piano? It had been the nude one.
Beatrice’s skin had been flawless. “Bea had no scars on her thighs.” She still didn’t.
“She was very good at hiding it,” Darcie insisted. “Makeup, tanner, whatever it took. She was broken, Luna! I was just trying to help her!”
Grace jolted forward against her seat belt. “You tried so hard you had her drugged to the gills and locked up in a mental institution.”
The silence inside the car was a voracious, grasping thing that dug its claws into my brain and cut bloody furrows. “Darcie?” My nails sank into my palms. “What is Grace talking about?”
“She needed help!” Darcie screamed. “She was spiraling. I was afraid she was going to really hurt herself. Then she did! She tried to kill herself!”
“Only after you’d locked her in that horrible place and thrown away the key!” Grace shouted from the back seat. “You shut her away from the entire world, from everyone she loved, when you knew that she needed the energy of the world and of her people to thrive.”
It was at that moment that I accepted Grace truly knew my Bee-bee. Because that was what I had always understood about my friend. She was bright and lovely and beautiful—but she couldn’t be alone. She needed people, needed our attention to fuel her spirit.