Page 79 of A Match Made in Hell
‘You said it was important to you.’
I take the bracelet with shaking hands. It’s exactly as I remember, with a heart dangling from the band. It’s chipped. The engravingto Willow, from Mumis still there, but there are scratches on it from – I’ve no clue, honestly. I treated this bracelet about as well as I did my whole life.
‘She died,’ I whisper.
Sath hesitates. ‘I know.’
Tears fill the corners of my eyes. I don’t wipe them away. I spent weeks pretending they weren’t there, all to spare Sasha and Noah the hassle of dealing with them, and they still gave up on me. My mum died. Shedied.
I let out a shuddering breath as I put the bracelet on, wincing as I force it over the part of my wrist that’s a tad too wide. Although the weight’s familiar, it’s also a shackle, chaining me to the person Mum wanted me to be. The person I’m supposed to be becoming.
Everything about it is uncomfortable.
I twist it round and round, trying to make it fit. ‘I told you why she gave it to me. I didn’t tell you what happened afterwards.’
Sath stays quiet, waiting. There’s no tequila on the table, no stupid game I’ve made up to force this confession from me. But I want to tell him. I feelsafetelling him.
‘Once the novelty of pleasing her had worn off, I hated every second of that course. I would sit there in lectures and stare at this bracelet, trying to remind myself it would all be worth it at the end. I was a few months from graduating when I realised it wasn’t going to be just those three years. It was going to be my whole life. Everything mapped out for me in some boring career I never cared about, everything dull and grey and dreary when all I wanted was colour. Sasha couldn’t stop talking about her trip to Thailand, and it was eating me up inside that I’d neverget to go. Noah had no interest in travelling, and Mum kept reminding me over and over again that I had to stay with Noah, but the more she said it the more it felt like I was suffocating. The day Sasha left, I snapped. I quit. One of my lecturers was this stuffy guy wearing tweed who told me I needed toapply myself betterif I wanted to pass my final exams, so I told him to apply a stick up his arse instead, and walked out.’
My voice turns shaky.
‘Mum was driving to see me,’ I say. ‘Screaming over loudspeaker about what a mistake I’d made. How I’d disappointed her, that I’d let my temper get the best of me and thrown my whole life away. It was dark, and foggy, and . . . the car went off the road. Crashed into a tree. I heard the whole thing.’ Tears flow into my mouth, fat and hot and wet, flooding my tongue with salt. I choke, and Sath’s arm is around my shoulders, pulling me into him.
I shrug him off. I can’t stand him touching me after what’s happened, and, besides, I don’t deserve his pity. I did this to myself. If I’d endured that class, she’d still be alive right now.I’dstill be alive right now.
‘Do you know what the worst part was? There was a little piece of me that was relieved,’ I whisper. ‘For the briefest of moments, I felt . . . free. Like I started breathing the moment she stopped.’
‘Willow . . .’
‘I’m a monster. You don’t have to tell me that.’ I swallow. ‘I knew it was wrong as soon as I had the thought. So, I made a promise. A vow to be a better person, to live my life the way she wanted as penance for all the terrible things I’ve ever thought or done. A way to keep her memory alive, to prove everything she did for me wasn’t for nothing. But I kept breaking that promise at every turn. Kept delaying re-enrolling on to the course, putting off applying for jobs. First by refusing to get out of bed,and then finding every possible distraction I could. She saw me as a failure, and what if she was right? What if I was never going to be good enough? I was too scared to find out.’
‘You’ve proven you can do anything you put your mind to,’ Sath says. ‘Maybe not in the way she expected, or wanted, but that was on her, not you.’
‘No, it’s on me.’ I shake my head. ‘Every choice I’ve ever made has been the wrong one, and it got her killed. Now, after the tasks, I know I can do better. I can say no to all the things I want, and I won’t hurt anyone else.’
‘You didn’t make her get in the car,’ Sath says gently. ‘She could have accepted your decision or waited for the weather to clear. Sometimes bad things just happen.’
His words loosen one of the many cords that have been choking me since her death, but it’s not enough. There are too many tangled threads for him to undo them all, especially not with platitudes we both know aren’t true.
‘What about my own death, did that just happen? You saw me that night. You were the one who forced me to admit how awful I was.’
‘If you’d let me get a word in edgeways, you’d have known you passed the moment you admitted it wasn’t a freak accident. That was all the task required – for you to own up to what you couldn’t accept at the time. That you weren’t coping. You were making mistakes, yes, but they don’t define you. They don’t make you an awful person.’
‘Yes, they do! A better person would have coped. Abetter personwouldn’t continuously make bad decisions the way I do.’
Sath falls silent.
‘No rebuttal?’ I should be pleased, but this is one argument I don’t want to win. I want him to tell me I am good and perfect and all the voices in my head are wrong. I want him to keep talking until all my ties are cut and I never hear Mum again.
‘The only one I have is selfish.’ He pulls me closer, holding my hand to his chest. ‘I was going to say, how wrong can your decisions be, if they led you to me?’
Butterflies I thought I’d squashed smash free of their chrysalis to do all kinds of acrobatics in my stomach.
‘You don’t mean that,’ I tell him. ‘Not when you didn’t want –’
No. No, I am not finishing that sentence. I should have left the library straight after he gave me that promise, before he thawed my icy exterior and left me melting under his touch all over again.
He lifts my hand to his lips and presses a feather-light kiss to my knuckles. His eyes glisten. ‘I’m sorry, Willow.’
