Page 59 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

No wonder I was haunted. Day and night. By everything.

By Max’s fate, by Resi’s tomb, by electricity, and by having been buried alive beneath the layers and layers of rock that often had me jerking awake in the darkness with a scream and a name—the name—dying in my throat as if it would remain trapped below unless and until I was addressing the boy it belonged to.

And haunted by the faded, reddish-yellow half-moons all over my body, so many that I had to flip my gold-rimmed cheval mirror so I wouldn’t stand for an hour obsessing over them every time I got undressed.

Haunted, in full, by the bombed-out bunker I’d once called my life.

It had been a good life, too, for a while, at least with the privilege of ignorance on my side.

But a person with scars like mine could never live that life again. And I didn’t want to.

In the end, I’d kept it simple, breaking the news at a casual Sunday breakfast by the pool with my father, right after the housekeeper—the only one of the slaves still working—cleared the plates.

The old valet was convalescing after a fall, and my father was now valiantly footing his medical bills.

As for the maid, I had been saddened but not particularly shocked when my father had announced plans to sell her.

At the last minute, though, he’d found an alternate solution: renting her out to a friend from the country club to fill in for their cook, who was also having health problems. To his credit, he’d promised the maid he’d put away a percentage of the money she brought in to eventually free her.

But we all knew—like my promise to take her to the ocean, which finally happened thanks to five hours in the Cadillac each way, one night in a kooky hostel in Pacific Beach, and a lot of awkwardness and eye rolling—there were no guarantees.

He’d promised something similar to the housekeeper, too, and even finally put the house on the market to raise cash.

I was convinced his heart was (finally) in the right place. It was just his wallet that wasn’t.

And neither was his daughter.

“I need to be somewhere else right now, Daddy,” I said. “I need to be someone else. I already am someone else.”

Mourning doves cooed in the palo verdes as my father stared into the depths of his coffee cup for what felt like an hour before responding.

“You know I can’t spare a cent right now, Loulou.

You’ll be on your own for everything your scholarship doesn’t cover, and Boston is far from the cheapest city these days.

And with most of the service roles filled by slaves, a job won’t be easy to find. ”

“But, Daddy?—”

“Hold on, Loulou. I’m telling you this just to inform you, not to dissuade you. If you think this is the right choice for you, then—well, I have no doubt that it is.”

“Really?” I asked, blinking in surprise. “You’re not going to try to talk me out of it?”

A smile played on his lips. “I’ve noticed that trying to talk you out of things hasn’t been very effective lately. In fact,” he added, “I’m starting to think that betting on your determination is the safest investment I could ever make.”

Well, shit. I didn’t even have that amount of confidence in myself.

It was settled. But as I packed up my inadequate wardrobe, booked a ticket using my father’s miles, and anxiously prepared to take my seat on the plane, one question kept tugging at me.

Will you be able to find me?

Yes, he’d told me not to wait, and I loved him for that.

For setting me free, for giving me the only gift he had left to give me.

Even if it felt more like a curse than a gift to have to grapple with the possibility that some hateful bitch, right this second, was filling the space in the hollow of that magnificent body that I had foolishly thought I would be the only one to ever fill.

And worst of all, was doing it openly. Was sharing coffee dates.

Was making dinner and streaming shows and walking with him side by side down an ordinary street like two ordinary people, the same way I had longed to do every goddamn day since we met but couldn’t, not to mention being the one holding his hand when he finally, finally got to enter a world he’d been in but never part of.

And that was when this hypothetical trollop was not teaming up with him to mount elaborate undercover capers at glamorous DC political galas wearing one of those slinky black catsuits, after which she would slowly and sensually peel it off, arch her long, flexible back, and—well, I could continue this ridiculous and unproductive train of thought, but that was the gist of it.

Look, I knew that in his mind, regardless of what he wanted—even with his colossal jealous streak that I’d never, ever get him to admit to—he’d had no other choice. It would kill him to imagine me wasting even a second of my life—let alone three whole years—waiting for him. Waiting for a ghost.

But if he was a ghost, why could I still feel him?

Ghosts were incorporeal. They were cold.

Ghosts haunted. They didn’t—when you were lying wide awake in a frozen, barren bed, shivering and haunted by everything else—hold you.

They didn’t make you feel loved and warm and safe.

They didn’t, night after night, murmur, it’s okay, m?i léift, we’ll figure it out, we always do in your ear and make you believe it, enough to finally get you to close your eyes, even out your breathing, and sleep.

Well, maybe really clever, charming ghosts could figure out a way.

In any case, how could I—in the face of one trollop or a thousand—ever let go of that? How?

In the end, that’s what I told Milagros.

After a goodbye dinner of homemade pozole with my other family, under that August dry heat that swelled unbearably during the day before dropping to perfection and lingering into the night.

And I was delighted to find that the crystal-blue phosphorescence emanating up from the bottom of the pool—that light that had once adored him—made his sister’s face shimmer just as brightly.

She lay in the hammock next to me, her remaining fingers curled and resting lightly on the sleeve of my white lace coverup.

Between the cannabis smoke and the peace of Maeve’s soft, sage-scented breath, I felt more relaxed here than anywhere else, even though in mere days, I would fly into the void.

“No one’s asking you to let go, you know,” Milagros said, resting the cane she was using these days on the side of her chair and settling herself back into it. She relit the joint Ivy had passed her.

“They’re not?” I asked from the hammock, genuinely surprised, twisting the stem of my glass of Spanish wine, its bouquet alone a pineapple-scented headrush of memory. “It sort of seems like everyone is. Or at least the world is.”

“Well, if I’d let go of Erica, I wouldn’t be here,” Milagros pointed out, inhaling deeply.

“Of course sometimes you should let go, too. And before you put this thing out in my eye for suggesting that, I mean on your own timeline, no one else’s.

And in the meantime, whatever you do—I can’t stress this enough—take care of yourself.

Which is something I really wish someone would tell Erica.

Someone other than me so she’ll listen.” She exhaled slowly.

“Where is Erica?” asked Ivy, her long, languid legs draped over the lounger, her black crochet coverup elegant as ever.

An afternoon of splashing in the pool—not to mention being talked to, given treats, and treated like people by someone other than Ivy—had worn the kids right out.

They had both passed out on the guest bed, which was both cute and mortifying given my own memories of that bed and that pool.

Meanwhile, my professor had slipped into the house soon after dinner, not to reappear.

“Working,” Milagros said with another puff. “Don’t ask. Since she was reinstated by the department, her hyperfocus has been through the roof. But it’s something that will benefit all of us. So she says. Then again, she says that about all her work.”

“It’s true, though,” Ivy said.

“I know. How convenient that it also makes it impossible for anyone to argue with her about it, especially me. But hey,” Milagros shrugged, blowing out an indolent cloud of smoke, “I knew what I was getting into with her.”

“But what if I don’t want to?” I asked suddenly. “What if I—” What if I can’t let him go, ever? What if I can’t let this die? Let us die?

“You know,” she said, seeming to read my thoughts, “maybe this is a stoner thought, but light is never lost.”

“Huh?”

“Photons travel until they’re absorbed, bent, scattered. Even when we think it’s gone—it’s somewhere, doing something. Warming a surface. Feeding a leaf. Lighting up dust in the air.”

Her gaze traced the arc of Orion rising above the coconut palms. “I always thought it was comforting, in a way. Back when I was scrubbing office toilets for ten hours a day, back when I never thought I’d see Erica again, never thought I’d get to use my mind, never thought I’d be free.

Back when I only had the memories of joy to comfort me.

I even sometimes thought it was a waste.

That none of it mattered. That it might as well not have happened.

But,” she said, “every bit of light we put into the world ends up somewhere. Even if it’s small. Even if we never see where it lands.”

“Why do I feel like this is something he’d be explaining to me, if he were here?” I remarked.

Her gaze slid to the door, toward the children sleeping in peace behind it.

“We don’t get to fix everything, Louisa.

We want to. We try. We almost always fail.

But that doesn’t mean what we do doesn’t matter.

A single act. A single feeling. A choice.

You never know what it might become, years from now, in someone else’s hands. ”