Ginger's Heart (A Modern Fairytale, #3)(94)

She picked up the remote, changed the channel from Lifetime to Hallmark, and stared at the screen. A woman was yelling at a child whose eyes were filling with tears. Yelling mother. Distraught child. Mother shaking the child’s shoulders. Child’s face crumbling.

And Ginger stared, unmoved, glazed over.

She didn’t feel much of anything lately.

She didn’t leave the cottage very much either. Not even to see Gran, whom she hadn’t visited in a month, since the day before Woodman’s funeral, when she’d cried so long and so hard at Gran’s bedside, she’d eventually fallen asleep. The nurses hadn’t had the heart to wake her, so she slept there, waking hours later in the dark with her head on Gran’s bed, disoriented and frightened. She gathered her purse and walked in a daze to her car, driving back to the cottage at two o’clock in the morning and falling into bed still clothed.

Her mother periodically left bags of groceries and fashion magazines on the back stoop of the cottage. A lone cupcake appeared on Ginger’s birthday, but otherwise her mother let her be.

Her father occasionally knocked on the door, looking disappointed when she answered it wearing pajamas with limp, greasy hair framing her thin face. She would stare at his mouth, watching his lips move as he gave her a back porch speech. Some of his words registered—“fresh air,” “talk to someone,” “can’t go on like this”—though they meant nothing, flying over her head like the autumn leaves that had started falling, blown away by chillier and chillier breezes. She would nod at the right place, he would kiss her forehead, and she’d close the door as he walked back to the manor house.

When Cain told her about Woodman’s death, she’d felt her chest crack open in agony, the feelings so potent and painful, part of her wanted to die. But it was later, at the funeral home, when she’d looked into Cain’s eyes, that she realized how very alone she was. Woodman, for all that she hadn’t loved him the way he wanted her to, had been her very best friend, her foundation, her safe harbor, her comfortable future. She’d already lost Cain some years before, but as long as Woodman was by her side, she wasn’t alone.

But now? Now she was alone.

Gran was sick and wouldn’t last much longer.

She’d never been especially close to her parents.

She had no siblings, no real friends.

She was an island.

At the funeral—the full military honors had made it feel even more unreal to Ginger—she remembered the little girl who loved two boys. And now she had, as her grandmother had predicted on her twelfth birthday, lost them both.

Woodman was gone, and Cain hated her. And since they’d shared her heart in different ways, losing them meant that her heart was broken beyond repair, with no hope for salvation or solace. She didn’t fight this realization. She quietly accepted it. Then she changed into her pajamas, slipped into bed, and, aside from the occasional cup of tea or the need to relieve herself, didn’t get out of her bed for a week. And when she finally did, she saw no reason to leave her room. And when she finally did, she saw no reason to leave her cottage. And so she hadn’t. She hadn’t been outside in almost a month. Nor had she cried once. And every day that passed made her feel more dead inside than the day before.

That was just fine.

In fact, it was for the best.

She pressed the pad of her thumb into the channel-return button, and Lifetime returned. Two female police officers questioned a young pregnant woman who had her elbows propped on a table, looking confused, disbelieving, then distraught. Ginger stared at the young actress who sobbed and screamed, beating her hands on the metal table. What had they just told her? That her car had been stolen? That her house had burned down? That her boyfriend had been killed?

That would be sad, wouldn’t it? To be a young pregnant girl with no car, no house, and no boyfriend? That was the sort of heartbreaking story that should make Ginger cry, and yet no tears came. No lump in her throat. No burn behind her eyes. Nothing. Just . . . nothing.

She sat up, then stood up, then walked into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water, standing at the sink for a moment.

How long will you go on like this? she wondered. Will you just keep fading away? Until someday the ghost that you are is the ghost you become.

“Maybe that’s how it ends,” she said softly, to no one. “You just fade away until you’re gone.”

Aknock on her door made her turn listlessly toward it. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, willing her mother or father to leave, to go away, to just leave her the f*ck alone. Couldn’t they see that she was an island? Didn’t they know a ghost when they saw one?

Again, a soft knock.

She leaned back from the sink and glanced at the window over the door, but her parents were smart. They didn’t peek into the window. They stayed out of sight so she couldn’t just wave them away.

Knock, knock, knock.

“Fine,” she muttered under her breath, crossing the small kitchen and swinging open the door.

Her eyes slammed into a heather-gray waffle-weave Henley, then slid upward to a square jaw. She lingered on his lips for a moment, ruthlessly pushing down the tiny spark of a memory of those lips pressed against her own. Raising her gaze, she took in the cut-marble slashes of his cheekbones, finally meeting the arctic blue of his eyes.

“Ginger,” he whispered gently.