Gazing out the window, I watched as Lorna hugged Jamie goodbye.
I’d stayed inside the house because my ex-best friend had made it clear my presence was not appreciated.
The last ten days had been a blur. I wish I could say that grief had numbed me to any other emotion, but I couldn’t. Anger played center stage. Anger at Skye. At Lorna.
And mostly at myself.
I didn’t want to be angry at Skye.
She hadn’t meant to go away.
Waiting five days for the coroner’s report was the most excruciating wait of our lives. Jamie was a mess. Despite the way he clung to me through the night, there was this mile-high wall around him I couldn’t scale. I understood that no matter how we all might be in agony together, grieving was a solitary journey. No one else could do it for you. Though someone might mourn at your side, that didn’t mean they were mourning the same way you were.
I knew Jamie.
I knew he was a writhing ball of devastation, loss, anger, and guilt. Moreover, for those five days, there was the terror. That maybe it hadn’t been an accident. That someone we loved was in extreme pain, and we didn’t look deep enough below the surface to clue in.
During those days, I clung to one of my last conversations with Skye, and Jamie made me repeat it word for word over and over again, finding solace in it. His sister had been making plans for the future, that much was certain.
It had been an accident.
Raiding her bathroom, we found pills that substantiated that belief.
And the coroner’s report corroborated my gut feeling.
Skye had gotten her hands on a friend’s prescription medication. We hadn’t known it, but she was taking two different antianxiety meds. That day she’d not only taken those meds, she’d taken painkillers, and something to help her sleep. She died of acute intoxication. An accidental overdose.
There were days as I pondered a future of never seeing her again that I wondered if I could survive the physical sorrow crushing my chest. Then I’d look at Jamie, his face drawn, dark circles under his eyes, those beautiful eyes dim—the light gone out—and my suffering would increase by a million as I took on his. I wished I could bear the weight of this loss for the both of us. Knowing I never could devastated me.
The powerlessness was almost as agonizing as the grief.
Through it, I had my own guilt. I’d convinced Jamie that Skye was okay. However, if she was taking antianxiety meds, then she wasn’t okay. He’d known something was wrong, and I convinced him not to push her.
We were also plagued by the paparazzi that camped outside our house for days and hounded us to and from the funeral.
Today was the first day they hadn’t shown up.
I couldn’t bear to look at the internet to see what they were saying about Skye. Through the messages of love and grief, there would be gossip about her addiction and speculation over her death. There was no point reading all of that. It would be like picking at a fresh wound.
Watching Lorna lower herself into the cab, I felt relieved to see her go.
From the moment she’d flown in, she’d treated me with a cold fury. Three nights after her arrival, she got drunk and told me I was to blame for the distance between her and Skye before she died. That she wished she’d never brought me into her life.
It was hard to shut those words out.
If it hadn’t been for Jamie, I might never have bothered trying to.
But he needed me.
Although Lorna clung to him at the funeral and made it clear she didn’t want me in their space, Jamie needed me. He wouldn’t sit in the front pew until Lorna moved to his other side to let me in.
The day Skye died, Jamie got a flight home and I met him at the morgue. He wanted to go in alone. When he came out, he collapsed at my feet, and I held him while he sobbed deep, wrenching cries that I could still hear in my head when I closed my eyes.
That was the last time he cried.
Until the funeral.
Lorna organized everything. The place was packed with friends, celebrities, and industry people. I was barely aware of them or those who approached Lorna and Jamie to offer condolences. Despite the ill feeling she had toward me, I was proud of Lorna as she stood up