Page 21 of My Favorite Lost Cause (The Favorites #2)

MAREN

C harlie helps me drag the mattress back inside and then returns to his own cottage, though I wish he’d just stay with me.

I could always pin you in place.

He said it with his hand pressed flat to my stomach, as if he was ready to act. The memory of it is enough to make my core squeeze tight. I picture that hand sliding lower, beneath the elastic of my shorts.

Think about something else, Maren. Please think about anything else.

It’s not as if I don’t have anything else to focus on. That photo album has been freaking me out all day. Margaret and Papa .

I tried really hard all night not to make it into a thing.

Not to be crazy Maren with the overactive imagination, but when I dreamed I was walking down the road, lamenting that I couldn’t go to the dance…

was that my dream or was it someone else’s memory ?

Perhaps a memory belonging to the girl in those family photos, a girl standing beside her handsome brothers.

In the final photo, they were grown but still young.

Teens or early twenties at most. Samuel, Walter, Leonard, Raymond, and Margaret someone wrote beneath it in careful, curling script.

They must be dead by now, all of them. But how on earth, with all those children and probably a ton of grandchildren, did this house wind up for sale?

I could always pin you in place.

Jesus. I’m never going to get that out of my head.

Only Charlie Dalton could have a girl more focused on him than the fact that she was recently possessed by a ghost.

I wake on my last full day in Oak Bluff, determined to finish up Walter and Sam’s rooms…and avoid Margaret’s.

Today, though, the call from the room is harder than ever to resist. And I absolutely should resist because of the way being in there seemed to bend my brain: the sight of Charlie crouching in front of me, the urge to lean forward and press my mouth to his…I can’t seem to get it out of my head.

But when will I ever come back here? What possible excuse will I ever have to fly down to my stepbrother’s strange, haunted mansion once I return to Manhattan?

So I go. I walk into her room and reach toward the curling paper on the wall with its tiny lavender violets. When I give it a small tug, I’m half-braced for a scream from the room, a popping lightbulb, a shattering window, but nothing happens.

“Sorry, Margaret,” I whisper to the wall. “I don’t mean to destroy your room. I’m sure it was really pretty in your day.”

There’s a smell in the air, suddenly, though the windows are shut.

I close my eyes to place it. Roses—not the way they smell in a hand lotion but the way they smell fresh from the garden.

And that’s when I feel it again. That giddy, adolescent thrill, as if I’m about to hit the high point of a roller coaster, as if I’m Cinderella climbing the stairs to meet Prince Charming for the first time, as if my entire life lies ahead of me and I know it’s going to be perfect.

And then it doesn’t just fade…it bottoms out. I drop to my knees, racked by sorrow. A tidal wave of grief, unlike anything I’ve ever known.

When my eyes open, my hands are pressed flat to the wall. There are tears sliding down my face, and I don’t know if the tears are mine or Margaret’s. Perhaps she was sad, but I’m sad too.

I don’t want to leave the house.

More than that, I don’t want to leave Charlie, and it’s never going to be like this again.

I crawl from the room on my hands and knees, gasping, and sit in the hallway until my hands stop shaking.

Grief is instructive in mythology. Demeter’s grief creates the seasons. Achilles’ grief over Patroclus’s death is what makes him recognize his pride and stubbornness.

This grief…it’s meant to teach me something. I don’t know what it is, but I’m not leaving until I’ve figured it out.

I text Harvey with shaking hands.

Hey, something’s come up here. I’m not going to make my flight. Sorry about the party, but I’ll be back Monday.

Under normal circumstances, I’d be terrified. I’d be holding my stomach, waiting for him to explode.

But it’s as if I’ve emerged from the room a little wiser than I was when I entered: nothing Harvey can do to me comes close to what I just went through. If he left me, if he died…it wouldn’t approach the sorrow I just felt.

And it probably should, shouldn’t it? Maybe that’s what I was meant to learn…

that I don’t feel enough to stay with him.

I suspect I already knew that, but I can’t leave Harvey now.

Not when Kit’s on Everest getting engaged, perhaps at this very mo ment.

This is her summer, and it needs to remain her summer, rather than having it overshadowed by my divorce.

I rise on weak legs, yawning. Tears always tire me, but this is excessive—I need to lie down. I stumble out of the house, gripping the rail to maintain my balance just as Charlie emerges from the basement.

“You okay?” he asks.

I nod, suppressing a yawn. “Yep, just feeling a little off. I’m staying until Monday, by the way.”

He bites his lower lip, cautious as he meets my gaze. “What changed?”

I can’t tell him about the room. He’ll never let me go in there again.

And while a part of me doesn’t want to go in there again after what happened, I suspect I’ll go anyway.

Maybe it’s Margaret or maybe it’s just a wiser part of my subconscious, but if it wants to teach me something this much—it’s something I need to hear.

“If I attended every party where Harvey wanted to make an impression, I’d be attending parties every night of every year. I’ve paid my dues. It’s enough.”

His tongue prods his cheek. “I’m glad you found your backbone,” he says softly, his brow furrowed as he studies my face. “I’m just not quite sure why it took you thirty-two years.”

Yeah, me either.

Harvey rage-texts for most of the afternoon. The further I get from the weird thing I went through upstairs, the more my guilt starts to bother me until I finally tell him I’m turning off my phone.

In the evening there’s a party Elijah invited us to, on what was supposed to be my final night here.

It’s a rare night out for Elijah, whose mom has been sick, and it sounded nice enough at the time—some deck overlooking the water, a live band.

I beg off at the last minute, telling Charlie I still don’t feel great, which is true enough.

Even though I napped, I’m drooping with exhaustion.

He suggests that maybe he should stay home with me, but I send him off. “I’m going straight to sleep,” I promise. “Honestly, I’m fine. I just need some rest.”

Once he’s gone, I take a shower and climb into bed. I’m dying to sleep, but I told Harvey I’d call, and if he doesn’t hear from me after the day we’ve had, God knows what he’ll do.

“Hey,” he says when he answers. His tone is almost cordial, a pleasant surprise.

Perhaps my show of backbone actually helped. Maybe he finally saw exactly how far he could push and yell before I just stopped listening.

“Hi,” I reply. “Sorry about the party.”

“I’ll get over it,” he says.

I don’t even know who this calm man is, the one who isn’t telling me a thousand ways I’m a disappointment.

“So you’re in town tonight and tomorrow, and then you’re gone again?” I ask.

I hear the clatter of keys dropping onto a counter. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m going to LA for most of next week.”

I wince. A better wife would have come home to see him before he left.

How many times, though, has he left when he didn’t need to? How many times could he have invited me along and didn’t? A million.

“Are you going to take the dogs back to Lori?” I ask. There’s a regrettable note of worry in my voice, wheedling. I just can’t help it. “I can arrange to have them brought out to Brooklyn if that helps.”

“It’s not an issue,” he says firmly.

It’s not an issue… how ?

“What do you mean?” I ask, sitting up, because I know he’s not taking them with him.

“Look,” he says, “I didn’t want to get into this tonight, but those dogs have caused us nothing but arguments for the past year and we don’t have time for them. So I gave them to Elodie’s kids. Belated birthday presents. Hadley was fucking over the moon. She thinks you’re the best aunt ever now.”

“That’s a joke, right?” A hysterical laugh burbles out of me, but I’m already clutching my chest as if I know it’s true.

“No. If you actually cared about them, you wouldn’t have fucking left. They named them Buddy and Lolly. Everyone’s very happy.”

My stomach has dropped so far I’m not sure it can be found. It has to be a joke.

“You didn’t,” I whisper.

“Come on, Maren, those were fucked up names. Echo and Narcissus? You named siblings after mythological characters who were in love. Little incestuous, don’t you think? Then again, maybe that’s what you intended, given how you and Charlie act around each other.”

I can’t even address that. It’s so ridiculous and irrelevant. I press a hand to my chest. My God. How disastrously wrong I was when I went through with the wedding.

“How could you have done that to me?” I ask. “You know how much I love them.”

“Yeah, so much that you left them at a kennel for a full week.”

It wasn’t a kennel. They were with Lori, who they know and adore and?—

“You got too complacent with them,” he continues. “They made you feel like you were already a mother, so you took your eyes off the prize. Now you can fully focus on IVF.”

There’s a buzzing in my ears. Fully focus? He wants me fully focused? I’ve been so goddamned focused that I gave up my job and my independence. So focused that I let him mock me in public, implying I was too spoiled to work.

I stopped running.

I gave up drinking and coffee and nights with my friends.

I turned myself into a fucking wreck over whether my green juice had too much sugar.

What has he given up? Not a fucking thing. This wasn’t even about the dogs. It was about wanting to pull one more thing from me, a punishment for going to Oak Bluff in the first place.

Well, fuck Harvey. Fuck Harvey for constantly suggesting things about me I could change without ever changing himself.

Fuck Harvey for suggesting that travel was the issue so that I would quit working, that running was the issue so I would quit running, that the one cup of coffee I allowed myself was the issue so I’d give that up too.

Fuck Harvey for doing his level best to take everything away from me without taking a single thing away from himself.

I want children more than I want anything in the world, but not if it means raising them with a monster like him.

“Fuck you, Harvey,” I tell him. “I want a divorce.”

And then I hang up the phone and start to wail.