The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(6)

“Tell us about Sophia and Whitney,” Victor says, content to leave the tattoo for a time. He has a feeling what happened when it was done, and he’s willing to call himself a coward if it means not hearing it yet.

“I lived with them.”

Eddison tugs the Moleskine from his pocket. “Where?”

“In our apartment.”

“You need—”

Victor cuts him off. “Tell us about the apartment.”

“Vic,” Eddison protests. “She’s not giving us anything!”

“She will,” he answers. “When she’s ready.”

The girl watches them without comment, sliding the bottle from hand to hand like a hockey puck.

“Tell us about the apartment,” he says again.




There were eight of us who lived there, all of us working together at the restaurant. It was a huge loft apartment, all one room, with beds and footlockers laid out like a barracks. Each bed had a hanging rack for clothing on one side, and rods for curtains on the other side and at the foot of the bed. It wasn’t much for privacy but it worked well enough. Under normal circumstances rent would have been hellish, but it was a shit neighborhood and there were so many of us that you could make your rent in a night or two and call the rest of the month spending money.

Some even did.

We were a strange mix, students and hoydens and a retired hooker. Some wanted the freedom to be anyone they wanted, some of us wanted the freedom to be left alone. The only things we had in common were working at the restaurant and living together.

And honestly? It was kind of like heaven.

Sure, we clashed sometimes, there were arguments and fights and occasional pettiness, but for the most part those things blew over pretty quickly. Someone was always willing to loan you a dress or a pair of shoes or a book. There was work, classes for those who took them, but otherwise we had money and an entire city at our feet. Even for me, who grew up with minimal supervision, that kind of freedom was wonderful.

The fridge was kept stocked with bagels, booze, and bottled water, and there were always condoms and aspirin in the cabinets. Sometimes you could find leftover takeout in the fridge, and whenever social services came to visit Sophia, and see how she was improving, we made a grocery run and hid the booze and condoms. Mostly we ate out or had things delivered. Working around food every night, we generally avoided the apartment kitchen like the plague.

Oh, and the drunk guy. We were never sure if he actually lived in the building or not, but in the afternoons we’d see him drinking in the street and every night he’d pass out in front of our door. Not the building door—our door. He was a fucking pervert too, so when we came back after dark—which was pretty much every night—we took the stairs all the way up to the roof and then came down one floor on the fire escape to come in through the windows. Our landlord put a special lock on there for us because Sophia felt bad for the drunk pervert and didn’t want to turn him over to the cops. Given her situation—retired hooker–drug addict cleaning up to try to get her kids back—the rest of us didn’t push.

The girls were my first friends. I suppose I’d met people like them before but it was different. I could stay away from people and usually did. But I worked with the girls and then I lived with them, and it was just . . . different.

There was Sophia, who mothered everyone and had managed to be completely clean for over a year when I met her, and that was after two years of trying and slipping. She had the two most beautiful daughters, and they’d actually been kept together in the same foster home. Even better, the foster parents fully supported Sophia’s goal of earning them back. They let her come see the girls pretty much whenever she wanted. Whenever things got rough, whenever the addiction started screaming again, one of us would stuff her in a taxi to see her girls and remind her what she was working so hard for.

There was Hope, and her little stooge Jessica. Hope was the one with the ideas, with the vivacity, and Jessica went along with everything she said and did. Hope filled the apartment with laughter and sex, and if Jessica used sex as a way to feel better about herself, at least Hope showed her how to have some fun with it. They were the babies, only sixteen and seventeen when I moved in.

Amber was also seventeen, but unlike the other two, she had a bit of a plan. She got herself declared an emancipated minor so she could get out of the foster system, took her GED, and was taking classes at a community college to get her AA until she could figure out a major. There was Kathryn, a couple of years older, who never, ever talked about life before the apartment. Or about much of anything, really. Kathryn could sometimes be prevailed upon to go with the rest of us to do something, but she never did anything on her own. If someone lined all eight of us against a wall and asked who was running from something or someone, a person would point to Kathryn every time. We didn’t ask her, though. One of the basic rules of the apartment was that we didn’t push on personal history. We all had baggage.

Whitney I mentioned, she of the periodic breakdowns. She was a grad student in psychology, but was so fucking high-strung. Not in a bad way, just in an “I don’t react to stress well” kind of way. Between semesters she was fantastic. During semesters we all took turns getting her to chill the fuck out. Noémie was also a student, getting one of the most useless degrees known to man. Really, I think the only reason she was going to college was because she had scholarships and getting an English degree gave her an excuse to read a lot. Luckily, she was very generous in sharing her books.