The Comeback(99)

“Do you wish you’d killed him?” Esme asks before I’ve swallowed my first mouthful.

“I don’t know,” I say, trying not to lie to her anymore.

“They said that if you’d crashed in the tunnel, you would have both been killed instantly,” Esme says, pretending not to look at me.

“I really didn’t think it through that much,” I say, and she lets out a snort.

“It’s still raining,” I say, and Esme ignores me, dipping the corner of her sandwich into the soup. “Do you want to talk about what happened at the party?”

“No,” Esme says through a mouthful of cheese. “I guess it’s like you told me, sometimes the bad guys were always supposed to win.”

“When I found you, Esme, were you . . . trying to hurt yourself?” I ask, because I have to.

“I don’t know,” Esme says quietly, taking her mood ring off and turning it over in her fingers. “I don’t think so. I just wanted to feel anything, I guess.”

“I’m so fucking sorry. I should have stopped you from going to that party.”

“It’s okay,” Esme says.

“It’s really not,” I say. “I messed up.”

“Why are you making this about you?” Esme asks, rolling her eyes.

“Because I’m your sister,” I say, and I wipe at my eyes roughly with my sleeve, embarrassed. “And I’m an adult and I let you down.”

“Well, you’re not exactly an adult,” Esme says, shifting a little next to me. “Remember you froze in time when you became famous. So you’re actually younger than me.”

I smile gratefully at her, and she concentrates on her food for a moment.

“I did catch their setup on camera,” Esme says dully, after a moment. “They said some pretty enlightening things about me. Really pushed the English language to its limits.”

I turn to her, something snapping in my chest. “Can I kill them? I will literally kill them if you just say the word. I’ve got money, I can pay someone to do it.”

Esme looks at me like I’m completely and hopelessly insane, and for just a moment, everything slots perfectly back into how it always was. The moment only passes when I remember that it’s raining outside, and that everything has changed, and that Esme and I will probably always have the scars to prove it, visible or not.

“I’m so sorry. They’re cretins.”

Esme closes her eyes.

“At least you can use that footage for the movie,” I say.

She opens her eyes for a brief moment before closing them again.

“There is no movie.”

“What do you mean? Of course there’s a movie,” I say slowly.

“There is not going to be a movie,” Esme repeats. Then she raises an eyebrow. “Are you going to the awards?”

I shrug, but after a moment I shake my head because I don’t want to lie to her again.

“See? It’s over. All of it,” she says, just before she closes her eyes.

I think she’s fallen asleep when Esme speaks again, softly. “Grace?”

“I’m here,” I say.

“Your apology wasn’t entirely horrible. I think you could be growing up,” she says, and there is a faint shadow of a smile on her face.





CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN





So you were just swimming,” my mother says, frowning at my sister and me over a breakfast of Lucky Charms with diced strawberries.

“I was just swimming,” Esme says authoritatively.

“In the torrential rain.”

“In the torrential rain,” Esme repeats.

“Like your sister was just driving off a mountain on Christmas Eve.”

My sister and I exchange a look. I swallow a mouthful of milky, powdered chemicals.

“Just like that,” I say, shrugging.

“I don’t know how we raised two such thrill seekers,” my dad says, pouring more cereal into Esme’s bowl, “when I’ve never even smoked a cigarette.”

There is a long moment of silence before Esme and I start to laugh, and it’s the kind of laughter that comes after a funeral, loud and grateful, checking you’re still alive. While I’m laughing, I have this strange notion that one day we might discover how to stretch time, and if we do, I would be happy to just live this one little moment over and over again.

“Will you be staying over again tonight, Grace?” my mom asks, once we’ve stopped laughing.

“I don’t know,” I say, looking down at my hands. “I should probably get back for . . .”

“Nothing?” Esme says, staring me down.

“I guess nothing.”



* * *



? ? ?

I find my dad in the kitchen later, preparing lunch. He’s standing in front of the oven, frowning down at a stick of homemade garlic bread. The outside of the loaf is dark and crispy, but there is a hard lump of butter stuck in between each groove he has made in the baguette.

“The butter won’t melt,” he says, looking up at me.

“I think you set it to broil instead of bake,” I say, switching it over. My dad smiles gratefully and I sit on the chair by the window, stretching my bad leg out in front of me.