Page 91 of The Reality of Us
He nodded. He’d watched it twice, the volume on silent because he didn’t need to hear her tell him to get lost again.
“What are you going to do?” The air around him shifted, and Nate sat down next to him, his long torso stretching forward as his elbows rested on his knees.
“I have no idea,” Owen said.
And that was the truth.
“Your dog peed on our dishwasher,” Rico said.
Alice flopped back on the pull-out sofa she’d spent so much of the last three days on. Rico had started calling it ‘Alice Island’.
“Sorry.” She cringed. Poor Murphy was bored. He’d gotten far too used to their nights at Owen’s where they’d go for a long walk before bed. Dougie and Rico’s small courtyard couldn’t compete, and their cat, Mr Whiskers, was totally disinterested in the boisterous puppy. Alice sat up and rolled her shoulders. Dougie swore it was the best sofa bed on the market, but her neck and back didn’t agree. She shoved her feet into her brother’s Uggs and pulled an old jumper over her head. “I’ll take him out back.”
“Why don’t we all go for a walk?” Dougie asked, poking his head around the wall that divided the kitchen from the study where Alice was bunkered down. He and Rico had been working from home so she didn’t have to be alone. They’d even packed up all their sample invitations and magazines, limiting their wedding talk to when they thought she was asleep.
“I can’t.”
Rico rolled his eyes. “Still sticking with the plan to never go outside again, are we?”
Easy to say when it wasn’t his life in ruins around him. Alice had only checked her emails once since she arrived, and she’d lost a swag of her new clients. There had been two emails from companies that sponsored her and Owen for the race, but she’d been too chicken to open them. Same for the messages Eloise had been sending each day.
Alice took a deep breath, but it didn’t have the desired effect. Stale, tangy air burnt her nose, her throat closing as she sucked it into her lungs. What was that smell?
“It’s you,” Rico said. “A shower would also be an excellent idea. Why don’t you do that, and we’ll start dinner, and then we can take Murphy out before we eat.”
Alice voiced her fear. “But what if someone sees?” Which was ridiculous because, seriously, what could anyone see now that would make things worse?
“No one’s going to see. It’s dark. One block and then we’ll eat something with actual vegetables in it. I promise it’ll help.”
“That’s unlikely.”
Rico propped himself against the wall, his arms folding. “Because you’re embarrassed about the first video or second video … are we still counting the video of Phoenix as the first one? I’m confused. Or, God, the video with Owen?”
“Don’t, please,” Alice whispered. She couldn’t talk about what had happened with Owen. Not yet. Maybe not ever. She pulled a crumpled-up tissue out of the pocket of her borrowed tracksuit pants. She was too far into her shame spiral to care if it was weird she was wearing her brother’s fiancé’s tracksuit pants. “I never deserved him.”
“And what exactly is it you think he deserves?” Rico asked. She’d expected Rico to fall into his cheerleading routine and tell her that, of course, she had deserved him. Obviously, he thought Owen was too good for her too.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Rico’s mouth twisted to the side, his gaze drifting to the ceiling before looking at Dougie, who raised his eyebrows. “Can we ask you another thing?”
Alice nodded because words were too hard right now.
“Why does he deserve more than you do?”
She hadn’t said that. She’d said she didn’t deserve him, which wasn’t the same thing. Was it? But as she fiddled with the cream-coloured tassels on the edge of the throw blanket she’d been using as a tablecloth when she ate all her meals on Alice Island, she knew Rico and Dougie were right. If he was too good for her, the flipside was that she wasn’t good enough for him. She pushed her thoughts aside and narrowed her eyes at Rico because this was too hard. The fragile shell she’d rebuilt around herself over the last three days was about to crack, and then she’d never be able to put her messy self back together again.
“This is partly your fault, you know.”
Rico pushed off the wall and wrapped his arms around Alice. He didn’t even complain about how much she stank. “Please don’t remind me. I still feel terrible about that.”
It hadn’t taken long for Alice to figure out the video Phoenix released—number two for those playing ‘The Many Disaster Videos of Alice Aspinall’s Life’ at home—where she looked high, was from when she’d fallen over after her appendix surgery and torn all her stitches. The paramedics had given her a green whistle while they prepped her for transfer back to hospital. Phoenix had been away performing, and Rico had sent it to him, thinking they were still happy and in love.
“You do realise you could explain what happened? You can see the whistle if you look for it.” Dougie crossed the room and sat on her other side.
Alice had been on a total social media blackout since the race. She knew if she looked, she’d get sucked into doom scrolling which would only make things worse.
“It doesn’t matter.”
