Page 44 of The Wrong Heart

Me:Fine… I’ll ask, but no pressure to answer. I just wanted to know… how is your new heart? What’s it like?

I wait.

I wait some more.

Anxiety surges inside me, and I wonder if he’ll ever respond.

Shit.

Maybe I crossed a line.

“Did you want dessert?”

Shutting off my phone, I sit upright on the couch, watching Mom approach from the kitchen. “Oh, no thanks. I was actually going to head out. I’m drowning in my own desserts at home.”

That’s code for:It’s hard to be here. Conversations are difficult. Sitting in this living room without him makes me want to jump off the roof.

But I can’t tell her any of that, so I just smile my farewell.

I’m good at that.

I’m sitting in park, waiting for a freight train to pass through, when I notice my phone light up from the passenger’s seat. Thinking it might be Zephyr, a little zing of anticipation shoots through me and I snatch it up, checking my notifications.

Only, it’s not Zephyr.

My stomach drops when the name stares back at me:Eleanor March.

Charlie’s mother.

I haven’t spoken to Charlie’s mother since the funeral. Her heartbreaking wails still rattle my eardrums whenever it’s too quiet. I still see her swollen, lifeless eyes whenever I close mine. Sometimes I feel her stiff embrace as I collapsed into her arms in front of his casket, ambushing her with my grief and despair, soaking her dress with a cataclysm of tears.

And I still feel the way my skin prickled with goosebumps and dissolution when she let me go.

Shelet me go.

I needed her then; I needed her more than I needed air. Eleanor March was my final link to the biggest piece of my heart, and I think that’s why I never made any progress in my healing. Losing her was like losing Charlie all over again.

Every day that she shut me out was just another day he died.

My hands begin to quake as a torrent of rainfall blurs my windshield, the wipers hardly able to keep up. I open her text message, my throat burning, my ribs aching with the weight of my heart.

Eleanor:You’re a wicked girl

I blink, and then I blink again. I’m having trouble processing the four words glaring back at me. I don’t understand what they mean. Did she text the wrong person?

No.

No, these words are meant for me.

She hates me.

She hates me.

A sob pours out of me, and I don’t even notice the train has passed, even when cars begin to honk from behind me, demanding I move. But they don’t know that I’m frozen, suspended in disbelief, so I just reread her message over and over again, crying harder, sinking further into darkness and self-loathing.

I’m a wicked girl.

Horns blare, people yell through their windows, cars swerve around me, but the only thing that registers is my cell phone vibrating in my grip when her name lights up the face.

---