is—you lost something, and now you want me to lose something too?”
“Yeeeep.” Kiersten wears her awfulness like a badge of honor. “I think you should be thanking us for giving you time to figure it out on your own first, though.”
Kiersten’s self-ascribed role as judge, jury, and executioner would throw me into a fury if I had any fire left.
Finish me.
“I’m outta here,” Kiersten finally says. She stares at me like I’m some kind of beast she’s never laid eyes on before. “Sorry, Sarah. Iliana, I’m serious: You have forty-eight hours.”
My stomach feels like it’s going to fall out of my ass.
I need time.
Weeks.
Months.
It takes knowing I’ve lost Rhodes forever to realize she’s what I want. I will never, ever, ever make this happen in forty-eight hours.
“How will you know?” I ask.
Sarah’s eyes drop to the sidewalk under our feet, and Kiersten nudges her with one elbow.
“We all have our way of finding things out,” Kiersten says. She walks past Sarah and me without another word, a girl who struck a match and doesn’t wait around to watch the entire world catch fire.
Sarah doesn’t hang around, either.
She takes Kiersten’s apron in her hands and turns to step back inside the diner.
Sarah is gone. Alice is gone.
For the first time in my entire life, I’m alone, and I absolutely did this to myself.
CHAPTER 22
RHODES
Username: n/a
Dusk’s connection is terrible; half her face is pixelated.
Still, her office is easy to make out behind her: walls covered in concert posters, bookshelves, and paintings from her clients with the signatures masked over for confidentiality purposes. She sits back in her chair, distancing herself from her laptop camera.
“Why did you let my mom pay you off if you told me what she was doing?” I’m not pulling punches anymore.
“I applied it to your balance,” she says. “Your mom keeps me on a retainer, so she didn’t notice until she called to ream me out for telling you after our last face-to-face meeting.”
“That still doesn’t tell me why,” I say.
The second-floor gallery gardens are freezing this morning. The vegetation has been pulled out for the winter: Gone are the brown, very, very dead vestiges of what used to be plots and plots and plots of verdant green. Everything is stark, barren until spring sends another round of sci-tech students up to try Mendel’s theories for themselves. Still, it’s the best place to hide for impromptu web conference therapy sessions.
“Because—” Dusk clears her throat. “Permission to be frank?”
I nod.
“You spend a lot of time in flux between the adults in your life—your mother. Me. Your faculty advisor. This odious June woman. I wanted you to be aware that this was something your mother was doing, because I wanted to be here to support you in exploring how it makes you feel—exploring your options. You won’t be in your mother’s shelter forever, you know? Either you can take the steps to solve this problem now, with people around you that support you, or it can be something you deal with when you have no safety net and a mother that is very much used to manipulating everyone around you with her money.”
“You let her think you were doing it, though,” I say.
Dusk shrugs. “You’re my client, but she’s my customer.”
I frown. “I think you should be honest with both of us from now on.”
“Aaaaaand there it is.” Dusk jots something into her notebook. “Good work, Rhodes. Now, I want you to take what just happened with me and apply it to the other areas of your life, too.”
I nod. An email blinks at the top of my phone screen: It’s from Bootsie Prudhomme.
I’ve been waiting for this.
For the first time in God even knows how long, motivation is the wind in my sails. I have something I want, and I’m ready to do what I need to get it.
I consider telling Dusk this, but the email from Bootsie is time-sensitive, and I can’t spend the next thirty minutes picking apart the how or why behind why I actually feel like accomplishing something. Or why that something is circumventing my mother.
“Hey—thanks for meeting with me. I need to answer this email. Can I text you later?”
“Of course. Keep me posted on how things go with your art and this Cheshire girl, okay?”
“It’s not,” I say. My voice tugs. “She never DMed me again after we didn’t meet, so I deleted my account.”
“Good on you. Bye, dear.”
I don’t want to hear that it’s good, or that I made the right choice,