Page 23 of Ruin
The old Selene would have answered immediately, breathless and grateful for the connection to her normal life.
The old Selene needed Emilia the way a drowning person needs a life raft—someone bright and good and uncomplicated to remind her that the world wasn't all darkness and blood.
I answer on the fifth ring.
"Oh my God, you're alive!" Emilia's voice is high and warm and achingly familiar. "I've been calling you for like three days. Where are you? Are you back from Boston? Please tell me you're back because I need brunch and gossip and your face immediately."
"I'm back." My voice comes out smooth. Practiced. Like I'm reading from a script I wrote during the flight home. "Got in a few days ago. Sorry, I've been slammed with work stuff."
"Work stuff. You literally just came back. What work stuff could you possibly?—"
"Sorry. It’s been chaotic since I’ve been back."
The lie slides out like silk. Easy. Seamless.
A year ago, lying to Emilia made my stomach twist.
She's been my best friend since we were sixteen, since her father—Judge Hart—took me in after my parents were murdered and gave me a bedroom with yellow curtains and a door that locked from the inside.
Emilia was the first person who touched me without wanting something in return.
She braided my hair while I cried. Watched bad movies with me when I couldn't sleep. Held my hand at the funeral without saying a single word, because she understood that silence was the only thing that didn't hurt.
I loved her for it. I still love her for it.
But love and honesty aren't the same thing. I learned that the hard way.
"That's amazing!" she says. "Okay, but you have to make time for brunch. Saturday? That place on Seventh with the bottomless mimosas?"
"Saturday works."
"Perfect. Oh, and Dad says hi. He's been asking about you. You know Dad; he won’t relax until he’s actually laid his eyes on you."
I laugh. It sounds real. I've practiced. "Tell him I'll make sure we have family dinner sometime in the next couple weeks."
"Perfect. Okay, I have to go. Tyler is being impossible about wedding venues. Did I tell you he wants a destination wedding? InCabo? I said, Tyler, we are not getting married in Cabo; my grandmother is eighty-seven."
She keeps talking. I make the right sounds at the right moments. Ask the right questions. Laugh at the right jokes. Theperformance is flawless, and the ease of it terrifies me more than anything I've done in the last three days.
Because Emilia is telling me about wedding venues and mimosas and her father's political jokes, and I'm sitting on silk sheets, wearing a diamond collar given to me by a crime lord whose belt marks are still pink on my wrists.
And I feelnothing.
No guilt. No conflict. No pull toward the life she represents—the brunch life, the normal life, the life where the worst thing that happens is your fiancé wants to get married in the wrong country.
That life is a costume I've outgrown.
"Sel? You still there?"
"Still here. Saturday. Bottomless mimosas. I'll be there."
"Love you."
"Love you, too."
I hang up, set the phone face-down on the nightstand and stare at it for a moment.
Emilia Hart is the last good thing in my life.
