I didn’t put up a fight. At that point, I was beyond making my own decisions. I slipped and tumbled further into the darkness in those months after Connor, until there was nothing but empty grief and pain. All I wanted was to block it out, to numb myself to the terrible heartache that sliced through me, every second of every day.
It was easy to fall without even realizing. The darkness closed in, smothering me a little more every day, until I could barely get out of bed in the morning, or drag myself to the bathroom to take a shower. I lost myself, that’s the only way I can describe it: as if the person I was just drifted away, further out of reach, while I lay there and watched it disappear over the horizon. I sank into the emptiness, the paralyzing melancholy of grief, but as bad as it got, I didn’t hit rock bottom until I was laying there at three a.m., slumped on a random friend’s floor in some Hollywood high-rise condo. An empty bottle of painkillers in one hand, my cellphone in the other; 911 on the other end of the line, and a terrified voice in my head repeating the same mantra over and over until the darkness swallowed me up.
You stupid, stupid girl. What have you done now?
4.
I can’t sleep.
The nightmares are the same as always, and when I wake, gasping in a cold sweat, the moon is shining too bright outside the windows, reflecting off the water in a silver sheen. I wrap myself up in a blanket and grab my phone, moving silently through the dark house and out onto the deck. The night air is cool, and I pull the blanket tighter as I climb down the stairs and hurry barefoot past the dark pool until I hit the beach and feel sand, cool between my toes.
The beach is empty, waves lapping the shore in a soothing rhythm. My pulse slows, until finally the last dark whispers of sleep melt away and I can breathe easy.
It’s eight a.m. in Paris, so I call my best friend, Zoey. She answers on the first ring.
“You should be sleeping,” she says.
“And you should be in the office already.”
Zoey laughs. “The Dragon is out of town. We practically threw a party the minute she left the office. So, how did Dex take the news?” she says without pausing for breath. “Did he send in SWAT to drag you kicking and screaming back to LA?”
“Nearly.” I sit cross-legged on the sand, and watch the waves lap the shore. “But I talked him around.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“How do you feel about it, now that you’re there?”
I pause. Zoey is the one person in the world I don’t bullshit. We’ve known each other since we were sixteen, the year my brothers shipped me off to boarding school. We bonded the first night in the dorms over our shared love of trashy Harlequin romance novels and British rock bands, and have been best friends ever since. Her parents are troubleshooters for big corporate clients so they moved around a lot; most vacations she spent back with me, playing pranks on my brothers and driving us out to the ocean to sunbathe and flirt with the surfers. She’s been living in Paris for the last year, working at a fashion magazine; I went to visit her a couple of months ago and had a great trip, but it only reminded me how far away she is, separated by an ocean and a six-hour time difference.
“I’m…confused,” I admit quietly. I sift sand through my fingers, watching the waves. “I guess I thought I’d show up here, and everything would make sense. I’d know what I want to do with my life, or what’s going to happen next.”“You’ve been there, like, ten hours,” Zoey points out with a wry note in her voice. “Maybe give it more than a couple of days.”
I smile. “I know. It’s just…I’ve been drifting for so long. I feel like the whole last year of my life has all been about him. Even now that he’s gone, he’s still controlling everything I do or feel.”
When we were together, I felt like I was drowning. It’s that same feeling that grips me in the night. Pulled under by the memories, gasping for breath to pull myself up to the surface again.
“That will change,” Zoey says firmly. “You went through a lot. You can’t just wake up one day and be over it all.”
“I know.”
I learned the hard way that there are no cheat codes to healing. The only way out is through the pain.
“So tell me about you,” I say instead, shifting to get comfortable. “Did you go on that date with Luc?”
“Kind of. We didn’t make it out for dinner…” Zoe sounds smug.
I laugh. “Doing your part for international relations then?”
“Naturellement!”
I smile. “Tell me everything,” I order her, needing some happy distraction. “I want all the juicy details.”
“Well,” she begins. “He started by taking me lingerie shopping…”
We talk until the sun comes up, and Zoey finally has to go to the office. I say goodbye, feeling better, like I always do when I talk to her.
“Say hi to Luc for me,” I joke.
She laughs. “And you take it easy. Just relax and try and have some fun. The answers will come soon enough.”
“I hope so.”
I hang up and watch the clouds lighten, dawn sunlight streaking through the darkness, turning the sands a pale gold.
Zoey’s right. Even making the decision to come here was a big deal for me: to strike out on my own, away from the comfortable familiarity of LA. There, I could call up anyone from my contacts list and have a lunch date set in five minutes flat: plans for a rock show or movie or dinner. A huge network of almost-friends and kind-of-acquaintances ready to provide me with distraction any time I called.