Page 79 of Iridescent
My head feels light when I sit up, my body wrung out from the day. I spent most of it catching up with yiayia and Althea, keeping myself busy so I would not think. Yiayia’s wedding preparations. Fabric swatches and dress sketches. A guest list amended three separate times. Althea’s upcoming art event. Even the things that did not need immediate attention, I found a way to make them urgent. They let me.
Through all of it, I steered every conversation away from Xavier.
No one pushed. I knew they wanted to.
Being with them only deepened the ache already pressing at my chest. Sitting in this house again, hearing their voices rise and fall into each other the way they always do, made it impossible not to feel how much I had missed while pretending I was too busy, too far, too grown for homesickness.
I look at Althea now, sprawled across half the mattress, all elbows and tangled hair, and something in me softens. She is so grown now, and yet still so much like the girl who used to climb into my bed during storms.We haven’t slept beside each other in years—not since that visit to London before my injury, when she turned up looking so distraught and so stubbornly silent that I had felt useless beside it. All I could do was hold her until she fell asleep.
I push a strand of hair off her face. She shifts, turns more fully toward the other side of the bed, and mutters something incomprehensible into the pillow.
I wonder what she is not saying. Hiding things is one trait both of us inherited from Baba. He would rather bleed in private than admit something hurts. I used to think Althea had outgrown that habit.
Now I am not so sure.
I reach for my phone and switch it on.
I turned it off earlier after yet another message from Xavier came in while yiayia and Althea were asking what I thought of different lace options for the wedding dresses. It had been easier that way. Cowardly, maybe. Necessary, definitely.
The screen floods with notifications the moment the signal returns.
Texts. Missed calls. Voicemails.
All from Xavier.
There are so many that, for one absurd second, all I can do is stare. More than a hundred.
He must know by now that I am gone.
The last voicemail came in ten minutes ago. I check the time at the top of the screen.
3:07 a.m.
What is he doing awake at this hour?
Not your concern.
I am about to clear the notifications when another message comes in, this one from the same anonymous thread that has been needling me for days.
My stomach tightens.
There is never a proper number attached to it. No name. No contact card. Nothing to block. All I have been able to do is delete the messages and file them as ordinary sludge that finds its way into every phone eventually.
This time, there is no text.
Only images.
I sit there with my thumb hovering over the screen, every instinct in me recoiling. Ignore it. Delete it. Go back to pretending none of this exists.
Instead, I open it.
More than twenty photos load at once.
My pulse turns brutal, pounding hard enough to rival the thunder gathering beyond the windows. At first, my mind refuses to understand what I am seeing.
Xavier.
With a woman.
