“It was,” he replied. “Right up until the night of the accident. When you took off and—”
“And crashed your car,” I finished his sentence for him. “Everybody keeps telling me that, and I’m terribly sorry I behaved in such a way. It doesn’t feel like something I would do.”
“You’d be surprised,” he laughed. “You’re a very high-spirited woman when you don’t get your way.”
“And I wasn’t?” I asked, staring pointedly at him.
“Wasn’t what?”
“Getting my way that night?”
A shadow flickered across his face, and he said, “No, you weren’t.”
“Did we fight?”
“Not exactly,” he said. “We fought earlier in the day, but you wouldn’t let it go. So it is true you can’t remember anything? How muchcanyou recall?”
“Enough, I suppose,” I said, bluffing. I had an instinct that I couldn’t let him know that my mind was a blank slate where he was concerned. I didn’t want him rewriting our history for me. I needed to discover the truth on my own.
“That’s good,” he said. “But you don’t remember the very insignificant argument we had that night?”
“Not really. What was it about?” I asked, pressing him for more information.
The moment he started talking, I could tell he would lie. I didn’t know how. I just knew.
“You were jealous of some time I spent with my lab partner for Advanced Biomechanics,” he said. “That’s all. I had to stay late with him and finish our final project. But, like I said, you were high-spirited.”
“And apparently a bad driver,” I said, but not as bad as he was at lying. He had several tells, including the fact that he clenched his jaw muscle and his eyes looked up and to the left when he thought of a story.
“Yes,” he laughed. “A bad driver, yes. But I’m so sorry, Willow. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you when you needed me. As your fiancé, I always swore I would protect you, but I let you down in the worst way.”
“How could you have known what would happen?” I asked and tensed up as he approached me with his arms out. I steeled myself against his touch and let him hold me. He didn’t try to force me to kiss him, so it was tolerable, but again…everythingabout him feltwrong.
“I couldn’t have known what would happen,” he said and stroked my hair as if I was a child. “I still feel responsible for all the pain and suffering you’ve gone through because of that night. I should have hidden my keys or never set up your thumbprint access to drive my car. I should have come back to you and spent the night making it up to you instead of finishing my project.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said again and again and let his trembling arms hold me tight as I comforted him. How fucked up was that? I was his comfort and not the other way around?
Finally, I had enough and wiggled free. “We should get back down there,” I said. “People will be wondering where I am.”
“Yes, good point,” he said. “We don’t want somebody finding me in your room and you being punished in the Pit on your first day.”
I wanted to ask him what he meant by the Pit, but he released me at last and left my room.
I stood alone in the center of it and tried to attach myself to a single object, to draw upon a single memory, but just kept coming up blank.
* * *
“You look exhausted,”Victoria said after a couple of hours of us greeting new girls from the families and speaking with returning students. She had her little set of groupies, the nearly identical ones from the first time I saw her, and I just tagged along for the ride.
“Good, because I am exhausted,” I said with a wan smile. We weren’t part of a sorority, per se. However, the entire student body was already part of an elite club, so we didn’t do those things here.
At least they didn’t have anything on the record. Still, unofficially there were many cliques and social hierarchies that must be obeyed. It just so happened that Victoria was the queen bee of the whole place, despite her only being a second-year student. But, of course, having a father who ran an eastern European country with an iron fist had its perks. That and the fact that their wealth was literally limitless.
And it turned out being engaged to Alexander Remington, the only son of the Remington empire who had their fingers in every type of industry from shipping all the way up to biotechnology, meant I was second in command.
And that role was exhausting. People expected so much from me, like knowing their names or histories individually. Or being gracious and kind even when I felt like collapsing.
I wished I could pull off the acerbic toxic fake kindness that Victoria wore draped around her shoulders like a fur stole.