Page 126 of The Unraveling

But it’s neither of them.

“Cynthia?”

She jumps and then turns, almost dropping the ice tray in her hands.

“You’re up,” she says.

“You’re here.”

“You’re welcome.”

Another wave of pain passes through me. “Can you catch me up? I don’t…I don’t know what happened last night. I never get fucked up like that. I feel like maybe someone spiked my drink or something.”

“Go sit down, I’ll bring this stuff over to the living room. I don’t know everything, but I think I figured some of it out. Here,” she says, handing me a one-liter bottle of alkaline water.

I look at the clock on the wall. It’s almost eleven. In theory, I’m supposed to be performing opening night in one day. And I have less than twenty-four hours to be at the theater for my last rehearsal and prepping for the night’s performance.

Fuck. I thought one glass of champagne would be fine. I thought one shot would be okay. Sometimes it helps get me out of my head the weekend before a big performance. How had I been so stupid?

She comes over with a bowl of chicken soup and a small bowl of white rice.

“It’s probably not what you’d normally eat before a show, but trust me, it’ll save your life.”

“It looks delicious, actually,” I say, sitting on the ground to eat it from the coffee table. “But I’m confused, why are you doing this? Why are you helping me? I thought you hated me.”

“I don’t hate you. I hate Arabella.”

“I thought—”

“Yeah, well.” She sits down heavily in the armchair beside me. “We’ve been doing whatever we’ve been doing for like a year. She won’t commit. I get it. It’s fine. But sometimes it seems like she does things just to hurt me. She gets fixated. Like how she’s fixated on you. Not in a romantic way, but just like…an obsessive way.”

The first spoonful of soup seems to run through my body like magic. It courses through me, warm and reinvigorating.

“She set you up last night. She drugged you and she came home drunk, laughing about it. She was being such an asshole.” She shakes her head. “She said she used your phone to text Alistair, saying you needed help. But pretending to be you. Then she called Clementine from her own phone and told her what was going on. Clementine booked it down here and discovered the whole thing. Including the apartment, which I guess she didn’t know about?”

I nod. I’m starting to feel human again, but everything Cynthia’s telling me is making me feel like retreating back to bed.

“I don’t think she knew. No.”

“I guess from that she figured out you two really were having an affair. Which…I don’t know…were you?”

I look at her and I don’t need to say anything for her to understand the confirmation.

“It’s none of my business. No judgment,” she says.

“I don’t even know where my phone is,” I say.

“Oh, I found it over here, one sec.”

She gets up and then brings it back to me.

I open it and look through my texts with Alistair. Sure enough, last night, just before ten, there’s a text I never sent.

Come to the flat. I need help. Emergency

“I don’t even know how she knew where the apartment was.”

She exhales. “Yeah. That’s how I found the apartment. Can I see your phone?”

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