Good at Being Alive(58)

I raise a brow. “The ground?”

Oh, the delicious awkwardness of this moment. She has no idea if I’m being a bitch or legitimately confused. She’ll figure it out eventually.

She blinks. “No, sweetheart. Heaven.”

“I’m not sure how much time you spent with Jessie, but—”

Theo tugs at my arm to pull me away. “It was nice meeting you!” he calls.

He waits until we’re around the corner before he starts laughing.

He’s laughing so hard that he has to lean over and brace himself, hands to thighs. “Jesus Christ. ‘The ground.’ I can’t believe you said that.”

I shrug. “You don’t know me as well as I thought if that surprised you.”

He rises and starts running again, dammit. “You’ve got to get out of this neighborhood before you make things worse. Though I’m struggling to see how you could get worse than that.”

“I could have told her all the shit Jessie said behind her back,” I reply. “Or that her husband hit on me when I was in high school.”

“Apparently you could have made it worse,” he says. “But seriously, Bex, put the house on the market. Start fresh.”

He isn’t wrong. I don’t even like it here. Yet I’m not sure what will keep me tethered without it. I already have no family. To also have no home? It’s too much.

“Where would I go at Christmas?” I ask after a moment. “And you’re probably thinking the alternative is sitting in my dead family’s home by myself and that’s not much better, but the point remains…where would I go?”

“You can do anything for Christmas. Go ski at Breckenridge with Erica. Get a group of friends and go on some crazy-expensive trip to the Caribbean, something entirely different.”

It’s embarrassing to admit the way I’ve cut the world off. That I fell out of touch with everyone from high school and college, that I just stopped answering the phone in LA. I could regather those people—if I use the dead family card, they’ll all take me back—but none of them truly knew me. I was playing a role, and I knew it even at the time, but ever since the crash…I haven’t had the energy to continue playing it.

“I’m not sure I have those kinds of friends.”

“Then you can come to London and hang out with us,” he says.

“I’ve met your friends,” I reply with a grin. “It’ll just be Bryce and Wendy talking about how poor you were and how you didn’t even have your own polo pony or had to do the fox hunt on foot. Thanks, but no thanks.”

He grins. “That is, roughly, how most of our conversations go. Fine. Come to my mum’s house and we’ll ignore your friends and my own. She’ll feed us sixteen times a day, then suggest that it’s bedtime when it’s barely dark, but there will be no talk of Breckenridge or polo ponies, I assure you.”

It appeals more than I’ll ever admit. I can’t imagine a better way to spend the holidays than with him and the woman who made him.

We run in silence down the street, our steps somehow in sync despite the vast difference in our sizes. “You know why I’m pushing you to move?” he asks after a moment.

“I assume because the house is a marital asset worth millions, and you’re hoping for half of the proceeds.”

He snorts. “There aren’t enough wizards in the world to make that house sell for millions, plural. We also had a prenup.” He ventures a quick glance my way before his gaze refocuses on the road ahead of him. “It’s because you don’t belong there.”

My mouth pinches tight. “Wow, did you specifically request that Jessie take over your body during the séance, or did she just force her way in?”

“You didn’t let me finish.”

I throw out my arms. “Yes, then by all means, tell me how I don’t fit in. I’m eager to hear.”

“I’m about to if you’ll bloody shut up for five seconds,” he says with a disgruntled laugh. “I liked your father and Bronwyn seemed fine the one time we met. But you’re…you’re the one who shines. You shine so bright that I’ve never seen anything as misplaced as you sitting in that dreary, dusty house. You say you didn’t fit in as if it’s a bad thing. I think you didn’t fit in because you were always meant for something so much better than what you got.”

I’m still running, but inside me it’s as if the entire world is tilting.

And I sense that when it stops tilting…I might discover an entirely different world on the other side. Possibly a world where I actually belong.





Theo


We finish our run, but barely. Bex is going to be in agony for the remainder of the day, so she needs an ice bath before I go into the office. Ignoring her repeated warnings about the kitchen, I enter and open the freezer door.

I assumed she didn’t want me to look because it was full of junk food. An entire drawer containing nothing but Skittles, perhaps. A water dispenser that provides Sprite instead.

To my surprise, it’s crammed to the gills with things I know aren’t hers. There’s half a frozen cake, covered in ice. There’s a soup can full of bacon grease, a casserole in foil that I know Bex didn’t make, a bunch of those frozen breakfasts Rick was so addicted to that he’d sometimes pack them in a cooler for trips.