Darker Than Night - Amelia Wilde Page 0,48
every morning so I can drink in the backseat both to and from. He hates me now. I don’t care. One afternoon he turns around in the front seat and levels me with his dark eyes. “You’re going to kill yourself.”
“Good.”
He’s been through a lot, and I feel a distant guilt. It’s hidden beneath the monstrous, all-consuming guilt I feel about Brigit, but I can’t ignore it. So I pour out the last of what I have and spend a miserable night cursing every god I can think of.
Sometime toward dawn, I fall asleep sober for the first time in weeks. Well—perhaps that’s an overstatement. What matters is that I wake up sober for the first time in weeks.
And it’s hell.
My stomach is an aching void. I haven’t been eating lately—who cares about food?—but now I regret it. I regret it while I brush my teeth. While I force myself into the shower. While I put on clothes, knowing all the while that each of these actions is pointless.
It’s almost eleven when I wander into the living room. All these books, and I can’t concentrate enough to read. It’s a miracle I can sign my own name.
The bigger concern is that I’ve started hallucinating.
I can hear Brigit.
Softly, faintly, through the floor, like she’s in my office.
Humming.
I stand near the window and tip my face into the sun, rejoicing in this latest development. This isn’t a concern after all. This means I’ve finally broken with reality, and I don’t have to stay in it anymore. Good for me. I am crazy, but I am free.
Maybe if I go down there, I’ll actually be able to see her.
A laugh breaks away as I throw open the office doors. She’s not going to be in there, of course. Or if she is, she’ll be a ghost, an apparition, a product of my imagination.
I step inside and let the doors close, surveying my office kingdom.
Surveying Brigit.
Who is standing in the middle of the floor, surrounded by what appears to be a deconstructed crib. A preconstructed crib. A pile of wood and screws that will become a crib. Her green eyes light up over the top of a folded instruction manual. “Hi. I wondered when you were going to get up. Help me with this.”
I open my mouth. Close it. Try again. “I told you not to come back.”
Brigit gathers her hair in one hand and tosses it back over her shoulder. “I didn’t listen.” She folds up the manual and looks around the office with an appraising eye. “For some reason, you don’t have a second bedroom, so this will have to do until we can make other plans. It’s actually big enough down here to divide off a new master and the nursery, and we wouldn’t have to go up and down the stairs when she needs feeding.”
“This isn’t possible.”
She peers at me. “Yes, it is. Are you drunk right now? There are rumors that you’ve gone to a dark place. I told them you’d be fine.”
“I’m not drunk.” Thank Christ it’s the truth. “What I mean is, how did you get in here?”
“James let me in, but that’s not what you really mean.”
“I mean—you can’t be here. You know it’s dangerous. I told you, Brigit—”
A slow smile. “Dangerous? Like you?”
“Yes, like me.” I growl the words because she doesn’t seem scared.
“I knew exactly what I wanted when I made a baby with you, Zeus. Maybe I knew it from the first time we met in your office, when I raised my chin and mouthed off to you. You could have beaten me. You could have hurt me in a million different ways, but you didn’t. You saved me, instead.”
“Don’t make me out to be the hero. You warned me about that.”
Her eyes glisten with unshed tears. “You’re a hero to every one of those women rebuilding their lives right now around the city. And you’re mine. My hero.”
“Fuck, Brigit—”
“Anyway, I need to find this certain kind of screw. So far I’ve found three other kinds, but not that one. I’m not entirely sure these directions are for this crib, actually.”
The elements from dying stars are flung out into the universe and they form other stars. I’m certain that’s what’s happening to me. Nothing else could be this bright. Nothing else could rearrange my atoms the way her words have done. I’m remade. The first act of my new life is to close the distance between us. To end it forever.
“Brigit—”
She smiles, and