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It vibrated, and a message popped up.
David: Why should I tell you?
Groaning in exhaustion from the situation, I picked up my phone and replied.
Me: Because I am still at a loss as to how this happened.
Me: I appreciate that you’re upset about this. I am too. I’ll honor your wishes. I just need to know if she told you.
Me: Please. Just give me that much, Dave.
Another minute, another vibration.
David: It wasn’t Ava, but that changes nothing.
It…wasn’t Ava? It wasn’t Ava. It wasn’t fucking Ava.
Dropping the phone onto the glass table, I stared at it with dread coursing through my goddamn veins. Michael’s gaze flicked from it to me, reading it upside down and gauging my reaction.
“Told you,” he said.
“I fucked up,” I breathed. I set down my glass with shaking hands, feeling the temptation to slip away again, to go back into disassociation where it was safe and slightly comfortable. “Oh my Ggod, I fucked up.”
“Deep breaths, man,” Michael said, hitting the button on the side of my phone to turn off the screen. “You should look into who did it. I don’t think pressing him more on the issue is going to help.”
I tried to measure my breaths, tried to stay in the moment. “How?”
He shrugged. “I can help you find a private investigator.”
“That’s insane,” I laughed, but it was hollow, broken. I’d fucked up. I’d fucked up horribly.
“It’s not,” he chuckled. “It’s pretty common. I’ve hired them before on the company’s dime.”
“You’ve…” I stopped myself from questioning it further, steadying my breathing again. “Fine. Okay. We can look into it.”
Chapter 35
Ava
Emily had been right. The first flurries of snow had come, and despite it not sticking, watching as the little, refracting crystals fluttered down from the sky had become my new pastime.
It seemed to be the only thing I was capable of concentrating on.
Hours passed as I sat in the window, eyes locked on each little flurry that drifted lazily down to the earth, swirling in the wind and meeting its fate on the roof of a car or the slightly too-warm sidewalk. Each one seemed to fall in slow motion, fragile and delicate and unknowing of its fate before it either melted or broke apart in the wind. If I were able to get myself together at least a little bit, I’d want to paint them—capture the way the light glinted off of them and turned each one into specks of silver as they reflected the cold exteriors of the skyscrapers around the West Village.
But that idea felt too far away to reach out and grab. Everything did.
In the moments where I couldn’t watch the flurries or the moments where the weather died down and there was nothing left to focus on, I found it hard to keep myself from drifting backto every second, every choice I’d made when it came to Adrian. The anxiety that had been coursing through my system for weeks had died down, but not in the way I’d hoped—it took everything else with it. Everything happy, everything sad, everything angry, it was all…gone. I was left with a shell that didn’t quite feel anything other than the smallest bit of intrigue over something I’d seen hundreds of times back home in Boston. Those stupid goddamn flurries.
I tried to sit down at my easel after four days had passed without being able to do anything at all. I couldn’t decide what colors to use, so I went through the motions of putting a drop of each on my palette board, my body thinking for me and going through each of the steps. But when the time came to actually use my brain and decide what to do first, what paint to dip into first, what stroke to make first, I stalled out, stuck in my chair with a brush in my hand, my eyes glazed over and staring into the middle distance.
I just couldn’t do it.
I tried to work, too—tried to sit down on the couch and open my laptop, tried to read the profiles of people Emily had set aside for me. Easy cases, she’d said. To take your mind off things. But all I could focus on was the little file on my desktop screen that had Adrian’s full name on it. Page after scanned page of handwritten notes, downloaded profiles of women I’d thought could work, that stupid question that I kept going back to over and over again:
Ideal date? A night at an art museum, finished with a glass of wine on my sailboat.
I felt nauseous just thinking about it. The morning sickness had wound down significantly, but every time my mind drifted back to Adrian and all of those stupid choices, I wondered if it truly had calmed down or if I was just so numb I couldn’t feel it until emotions crept back in like a viper.
