Page 22 of Breaking the Dark

“I sure will. He’s my buddy—he’ll love seeing you again. Anything else I can do?”

She swallows down a wry smile. My God. How about rescue me, she wants to shout. How about help me pack a bag and get me out of here. How about somehow telepathically know that I am in love with you without me giving you any single suggestion that that might be the case. How about ask me if I might be pregnant and tell me that you’d be fine with it if I was. How about everything? Every damn thing?

“No,” she says. “Nothing else. We’re good.”

She waits for him to say something, anything that might make her feel that there’s more to them than friends with benefits. But he doesn’t.

“Well,” she says, an edge of slight coldness to her voice. “Thanks for calling. I appreciate it.”

“Jessica,” says Luke. “Anytime. Seriously. Anytime.”

“Well, not anytime,” she says, thinking of the time she turned up drunk in the middle of the night and found him with another woman. “Obviously.”

Luke sighs. “That was…”

“It doesn’t matter what it was. It’s your life, Luke. You’re a free man. Anyway. I’d better go. You take care now.”

And then she hangs up, before she starts crying.

Jessica never feels comfortable contacting people from her former community. For a while she had had a costume. And a name. Jewel. Yeah. A shit name. She’d been young and perky back then, though never really confident enough in her own pretty base-level powers to feel truly part of the gang. But she’d showed up, pretended she belonged, played her small part. And then a few years ago she’d been kidnapped by a psychopath who’d exerted mind control over her to make her do unspeakable things on his behalf.

And then one dreadful day he told her to kill Daredevil—and off she went, in a stupid, dumbass mind-controlled haze—and accidentally picked a fight with the Avengers of all people. Shit. “Her people” beat her so badly she was in a coma for weeks until one of them cared enough about her to break into her addled mind and shake it awake.

Afterward it had felt like her reputation, what little of one she’d had, remained in tatters, even once there was an explanation for her actions. The others made a good show of forgiving her and accepting her—they even offered her a job of sorts. But it will always be there, this thin wall of reserve.

She feels almost as if she should crawl toward them now, prostrate on her stomach. It doesn’t matter how many times they tell her they’ve forgiven her, that what she did wasn’t her fault, she doesn’t quite believe it. The power that sick man held over her had waned even as she left him to hunt Daredevil, but, still, she hadn’t been strong enough to seize her own will until it was almost too late.

She can never truly forgive herself for that and so now, as she tries to word her message to Danny Rand, she feels shame at burrowing into his precious time for help on a case that might be nothing more than two spoiled kids who had a glorified glow-up in the UK.

But then she recalls the weird sounds that emanated from Fox’s body at the Bleeding Heart, and curiosity makes her brave again.

She texts: Hi. It’s Jessica. Luke suggested I drop you a line. I’m working a case in the UK. Looks like it might involve someone with malign powers, and I don’t know anything about the UK. Luke says you go a lot. Could you give me some pointers? No need to go to any trouble. Only reply if you can. Sorry to bother you.

She rereads the message and deletes the final four words. Too pathetic. Too weak.

She presses send and waits. The cat waits with her.

EIGHT

MALCOLM IS IN her office again.

It’s six o’clock and Jessica was just about to shut her laptop for the day. In some ways his unexpected arrival is a blessing, as she has nowhere to be and nothing to do, she can’t drink because she might be pregnant, and she doesn’t even need to cross the landing to feed Speckles because Julius is back.

She blinks as she takes in his appearance.

“What do you think?” He runs his hands over his white-blond hair.

“I think—wow.”

“Do you like it?”

“Yeah. Uh-huh.” She nods and smiles tightly. “What did your mom say?”

“She hasn’t seen it yet. But she’ll love it. She loves everything I do.”

Jessica nods again. She’s starting to make sense of Malcolm. “So, what can I do for you, Malcolm?”

“I’ve been doing some thinking, about like how everyone these days presents themselves to the world as, like…perfect. I mean, it’s not like it was when you were young.”