“This explains why you haven’t been yourself lately,” Matt said. “I wish I’d known, I—”
“Your problem is you think this isn’t myself,” she said. “Just like you think a day imprisoned by the Dark One was a pleasure cruise and I should be over it by now and . . . getting giddy about wedding dresses or something!”
“Yeah, you know what? I think you should have spent the last ten years doing the work to move past everything instead of wallowing nonstop and holing up like a hermit.” Matt had snapped, the harp string broken. “I have never once suggested that it should be easy. I have only ever asked you to try, and to stop acting like you’re the only person in the world who has pain.”
They both went silent. Sloane’s cheeks burned. She warred with the impulse to storm out, knowing it would only make her seem even more like the child he had accused her of being but also desperate to hide from his chastisement. Every time she thought she understood what she didn’t know about him, could never know, she remembered that was impossible.
Matt’s phone buzzed, glowing through the pocket of his jeans. He turned off the ringer. She breathed deep, remembering the photo still of the punch, the emptiness of her eyes, her gritted teeth. The stray dog in her.
“Man, the way you see me.” She huffed a laugh. “How can you want to marry someone you see as such a selfish child?”
“Sloane—”
Sloane’s phone, face-down on the coffee table, sounded out the first few bars of “Good Times, Bad Times” by Led Zeppelin—her ringtone for Ines. She reached down and turned off the ringer.
A second later, Matt’s phone started buzzing again. This time he answered it. “What, Ines?” Matt said.
He listened for a moment and then wilted, his body folding into his desk chair.
“Oh God,” he said. He covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “Albie’s in the hospital,” he said to Sloane, then returned to the call. “No, I’m sorry, we’ll be right there.”
12
HAVE YOU SEEN him since the Drain site?” Matt asked.
They were in Matt’s BMW on their way to the hospital, stuck at the world’s longest red light. Or that’s how it felt to Sloane.
She looked out the window. “No, I haven’t.”
It had rained, so the multicolored neon from the credit union on the corner glimmered on the road. The shush of car tires on wet pavement and the roar of the car’s diesel engine started up again when the light turned green. Neither of them had put on the radio to fill the silence.
“I’m sorry if I—” Matt began.
“Please, don’t,” Sloane said, covering her face with a hand. “I’m just . . . let’s just focus on Albie.”
She had discovered an origami penguin in a bag of flour the week before. All the creases had been sharp, which meant it was one of his old ones. But still, he had thought to put it there, knowing it would make her smile. Sometimes she felt like Albie was the only person in the world who knew her. And it was because he wanted nothing from her, not sex, not love, not secrets. There was no currency between them.
Ines had not said why Albie was in the hospital, but Sloane had a few guesses. An accident, maybe; it was always possible. It could also have been unknown repercussions from the magical device he had experimented with at the Drain site; they understood so little about magic, it would not have shocked Sloane to know that it was actually harmful, like radiation, and only got worse with prolonged exposure. But the best guess was predictable and painfully human: Albie had relapsed and overdosed.
Matt pulled into the parking deck at the hospital, and he and Sloane fell into old patterns. She was better at navigating new places—spotting and interpreting signs—and had better instincts about the layouts of buildings and public spaces. Matt followed along, chasing her heels to the walkway that led to the emergency room, then the waiting room, where Ines was sitting, her eyes red.
“I found him an hour ago,” she said, checking her phone to verify the time. “I guess he kept an old stash. Or went out for a new one when I wasn’t paying attention, I don’t know. The doctor said it’s probably not more than he used to take, but he’s been clean so long he can’t handle that much anymore.”
“So it was an accident? He wasn’t—trying anything?”