Page 94 of Sapphire Tears

I think about home as I walk up to the front door of Geneva’s duplex.

It’s strange that I haven’t missed my own space in the last few months. Every now and again, I try to picture the house I shared with Adrian. The nook where I used to read, the room I used to dance in, the kitchen where I spent my mornings nursing a cup of coffee between my palms.

The images don’t carry any emotion. It’s just a place now. Nothing more, nothing less.

I ring the bell. Geneva opens the door a few seconds later. She’s wearing a long maxi dress and her hair is tied up in a high bun.

“Going someplace?”

She shivers. “Uh, no.”

“So you just got dolled up for me?”

She rolls her eyes and laughs anxiously. “I was trying to—shoot, I don’t know. Get this conversation going on the right foot, I guess.”

I instantly feel more at ease. If we both want the same thing, it’ll all be so much easier. “Well, you look great,” I tell her. “I like the dress.”

“Says the girl in the Ralph Lauren,” she mumbles back, eyeing my white cotton sundress with envy.

“Everything doesn’t have to be a competition between us, Genny,” I say gently. “Mom and Dad are the ones that encouraged that. But we’re adults now. I think we can rise above it.”

Her eyes fall to her feet as she twists her bracelets around her wrist. “Sorry,” she says. “Habit.”

“I’m not criticizing. I do it, too.”

She smiles, and I feel myself relax a little bit more. An unclenching of a part of me that’s been cinched up tight for a long, long time. “Can I get you a drink?”

“Just water would be lovely.”

I follow her into the kitchen and sink into a bar stool as she goes rummaging in the cabinets for glasses. After filling two of them with water from the refrigerator, she comes and takes a seat next to me.

It’s quiet for a few ticks of the clock on the wall. “This place must feel tiny to you now, huh?” she asks.

I shake my head. “I’ve always liked your place. Living with Kolya hasn’t changed everything about me.”

There. I’ve said it, the forbidden word.Kolya.Might as well get it out of the way early. She stiffens at the mention of his name, but she doesn’t tuck tail and flee the way I might’ve expected.

I’ll take that, I guess.

“Genny,” I say, resting my hand on top of hers, “I want to say that I’m sorry for everything that happened between us. It wasn’t exactly a misunderstanding. It was more like a… lack of communication. But you have to know that Ravil was a bad man, and Kolya was only trying to protect me. If you believe just one thing I ever tell you, believe that.”

She absorbs that, bobbing her head silently while she runs the tip of her finger around the rim of her glass again and again. Then she sighs and looks back up at me. “I’m sorry, too,” she says heavily. “I didn’t realize that Ravil was going to… to do all that. I would never have signed off on anything so horrible.”

“He wouldn’t have listened even if you’d tried.”

“D-did he hurt you?” she asks, gulping and paling.

“He tried,” I admit. “But Kolya got to me in time.”

I decide to leave out the part where I had then run from him. As far as I’m concerned, it’s unimportant now. Geneva picks up her glass, but she doesn’t seem interested in drinking.

I wish I could tell her to relax, that the worst part of what I came here for is over. But there are so many skeletons in our closet to unearth. So much water under our bridge we could drown in it.

I inhale and dive into the next part. “The night you brought the cops to Kolya’s place… I said some things to you that I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry for that, too. I was just tired and emotional and—”

“You asked me not to trust Ravil and I did anyway,” Geneva interrupts. “I told him secrets that you trusted me with. It’s okay, June. I get it. You don’t owe me anything. Definitely not any apologies.”

“Sometimes, I think we don’t know how to love each other like family.”

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