Page 17 of Fallen Crown

For the first time all night, I’m grateful for the flats as I practically flee the benefit, my dress fluttering behind me. No one tries to stop me or intervene in my escape. The memory of Grace, heavy in my arms, makes my stomach ache. A bud that will never bloom.

In the car, I sit with my hands on the steering wheel, willing myself not to cry. With a glance at the clock, I see it’s too early to take my medication. The sadness that’s sweeping over me isn’t new, but I’d forgotten its fierceness.

On autopilot, I realize I’ve driven to my house rather than my apartment. From the driveway, I stare at the security lights that keep it lit. A picturesque two-story stucco house with no ocean view but a garden fit for a family. When Enzo and I picked it out, we had so many plans. So much hope for the future.

Stay or go? Stay or go?

I throw the car in reverse, and this time, I keep myself focused on making the right turns to get me to my top-floor apartment with the ocean view. It’s not mine, technically. The Tucker family owns it, but when I couldn’t drag myself out of my pit of despair after Enzo left, my parents packed me up and brought me here. They thought the view might help.

It didn’t, but the medical intervention my older sister, Sawyer, and my older brother, Nathaniel, arranged did. Clinical depression isn’t solved by someone telling you to snap out of it or offering you pretty things or packing up their bags and leaving you behind.

I go through the motions of getting ready for bed, and as I lay staring at the ceiling, tears leak out of my eyes and onto my pillow.

When my phone rings, I contemplate ignoring it. Answering it never gets us anywhere, but there’s still part of me that longs for what we once had, that wishes he’d just come home.

“Hello?”

“Hey, M,” Enzo says, and his words are slurred like they always are when he’s had one drink too many and remembers he has a wife.

The deep timbre of his voice, coupled with the nickname he gave me years ago causes the tears to fall faster. “You’re drunk.”

“And you’re crying.” An accusation. “Gage told me you were getting better. You said you were getting better.”

“Better isn’t linear,” I say.

“I don’t even recognize you anymore,” he says. “How do we get past this?”

Not by leaving the country. But I’ve said that so many times even I’m tired of hearing it. Doesn’t change his response, make him want to come back.

“You’re not the only one who’s lost something,” he says. Bitterness. So much fucking bitterness.

Comparing who’s lost more has never gotten us anywhere either. We’re both losers in that scenario, and he’s so focused on his feelings that he never acknowledges mine. Maybe he thinks I do the same to him. We haven’t had a civil conversation in months.

“Are you ever coming home?” We’ve danced around this question, but my conversation with Caitlin is fresh in my mind. Since he’s drunk, he’ll be honest. The one benefit of him calling when he’s had one drink too many with his buddies is the lack of filter.

“Yeah. Yeah, M. I’m gonna come home. I don’t know when. I don’t know. Our vows mean something to me. I just—I need time to process everything. We need some time to regroup.”

Regroup. Doesn’t that imply there’s more than one person? A group. A team. But it’s just me and just him. Separate. Grouping with no one. I curl into a ball on my side, and I listen to him breathing through the phone line.

“Do you want to come to Boston for a while? Maybe a change of scene’ll help us.”

“I can’t right now.” The words are tight in my throat because I know what’s coming next.

“Please tell me you’re not back fucking training.” Enzo releases a huff of air into the receiver. “You promised you were done. Wasn’t what happened enough?”

Tears run in rivers down my face, and I can’t speak, can’t explain. Racing is in my blood, and while I have no idea if I’ll ever work up the nerve to compete again, I can’t let it go. Training and medication are the only things that have made a dent in my depression. He doesn’t understand what he’s asking, how low I sank, how hard I’m scrambling to keep my head above water.

In the first few months after my fall, I told him I wouldn’t race anymore. At the time, I thought it would appease him, keep him in the house, on the island. But he left anyway, too far away to see me waving my arms as my head sank under the water.

“It’s late,” I say.

“M.”

“I have to go.”

“I love you, Maren. You know that, right?”

“I can’t.” My voice is thick with tears. “I can’t.”