I shake my head. This is mine to deal with. I open the door, and Lincoln is standing there, still in his uniform, but he looks… wrinkly. His eyes are red and I can tell he’s been crying. Then I see the set of his jaw. “I couldn’t go in,” I whisper, wiping tears from my face. Lincoln grabs my left hand, sees the empty finger and takes a deep breath, fury emanating so thick I can breathe it.
“You know what? I can’t take this anymore. You’ve been distant. I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with this if you can’t be a grown up and tell me what’s on your mind. What do you want, Maeve?”
Silence hangs awkwardly until I muster courage. “I don’t know.” I know what I want, but what I deserve is what I’ll never be able to reconcile. Self-sabotage looks different at every stage of life, apparently this is what it looks like today. “I don’t know what I want.”
He nods solemnly once. “That’s a shame, because even now when you’re too afraid to be with me, I love you. Any time you’re lost, I’ll love you, but right now? You need to find yourself.” He sucks in a ragged breath. “Because in my time of need, you’re only thinking about yourself. You’re downplaying how important you are to me—leaving me when I need you. You’re supposed to be on my six, right? Where are you? Where’s your ring?”
Ramona comes in. “It’s right here. She just took it off to wash her hands.” It’s a lie and my best friend is trying to save me, but neither of them realize I’ve been gone for a long time now. She tries to force the ring on my finger, but I stop her.
“No.” I shake my head. “I never should have accepted this.” With a shaking hand, I extend the ring to Lincoln, and he visibly recoils. His downcast eyes meet mine.
A tear slides down his face, but he’s quick to wipe it away. “You keep it.” His jaw works. “Hang it on the necklace next to the other one. A talisman of failures.” He swallows hard. “Pretend I went down in the helicopter with my brothers.” Lincoln turns and heads down the stairs. My knees buckle when the door closes behind him.
“What did you do, Maeve? What did you do?” Ramona kneels next to me and pulls me into a hug. I let out a blood-curdling scream as my heart shatters into a thousand pieces.
* * *
“I didn’t think you were supposed to chug wine,” Aspen says, reaching over to take the empty wine glass from my hand. “You need an alcohol break. Where is Ramona? It’s her turn to watch you.”
“I need no breaks from the wine. Pour me another.” When you feel like you can’t control anything, sometimes the opposite happens. Or at least that’s what I told myself on the party bus at the third winery. The flight to Sonoma was fuzzy, and everyone keeps looking at me like I’m pitiful, which drives me to drink even more to prove them right.
Tasha appears next to me, sliding onto the barstool holding her own wine glass. There’s an old antique bar that covers an entire wall. Our rental house is massive and beautiful. If I was sober, it would be awkward talking to Tasha, but because I feel nothing at all, I welcome all company. “You doing okay?”
“More than okay,” I slur. “I’m fabulous.”
“I’m worried about you,” she says.
I shake my head and the room spins. “Why would you be worried about me? That’s not your job.”
“I care about you and you seem to be a bomb imploding. I know what you’re feeling. The apprehension, the cold feet, the fear that comes from loving a man that seems to be dispensable.”
I forget to breathe, so I suck in a noisy, drunken breath. “I’m not saying you don’t know what it’s like, but I’m a little more complicated than you.”
She furrows her brows. “How do you know that? Why does your trauma trump anyone else’s?” Tasha holds up a finger. “Don’t answer that. I’m sorry you’re hurting, but Lincoln is a good man and you’re hurting him for no good reason.”
I want to argue, but can’t so I lay my head down on my arms instead. “Isaac wanted me to remind you that Lincoln set up that interview with Autumn Glass tomorrow morning. If I were you, I’d go sleep it off now if you intend on talking to her.”
In the midst of my self-inflicted heartbreak, I’d forgotten the whole reason why I wanted to come here in the first place. Now, it is serving as an escape route, at least for a little while.
Raising my head to reply to her, I see she’s already gone. I’m running people off left and right. Ramona is watching me from across the room. She’s wearing a bathing suit, probably getting ready to get into the hot tub. I stumble off my stool and make my way upstairs to the bedrooms and push myself into the first open door and fall face-first into the bed.
Ramona shakes me awake before the sun rises. “Get up, glutton. We’re going to prison.”
“Oh, God. That’s real? I thought I dreamed that it was happening today.” I press my palms on each side of my head and press against the pounding headache. “Tylenol,” I gasp. “Stat!”
“I’m only indulging you because you ruined your entire life.” Ramona fetches the bottle, hands me a couple pills and a glass of water. “You broke the man’s heart when it was already broken.” She acts like I didn’t break my own in the process.
I swallow the pills and chug the water. “A man is not my entire life.”
“You didn’t let him try, Maeve.” She coughs. “I’m not going to argue with you. Go get in the shower. This might be the only chance you have to get closure with this woman, and I won’t let you fuck this into the ground on my watch.” When I don’t move, and continue staring blankly at the wall, she yells, “Go shower, Maeve!”
That gets me up and into the bathroom. I crank on the hot water and stumble into the water before it’s hot enough. Rubbing my arms to rid myself of chill bumps, I let my mind wander to Lincoln and Turner. The ache in my chest is sharp. I’m in no condition to talk to my birth mother. Maybe it will be a good thing to feel this humbled and broken. I’ll hate her less for the things she did. Monster mommy. My stomach turns over and I realize I haven’t put anything except wine in it for at least a day.
I clean myself, take my time with my makeup, and put on the outfit Ramona has laid out on the bed. She’s waiting in the rental car when I open the large front door and head down a grand staircase. The sun is just rising in the distance as we drive toward the prison. The silence is broken up by my cell phone ringing. It’s Aspen. She wishes me luck, and I thank her in a droll tone. We have to fill out paperwork and show our driver’s license to get behind the barbed-wire fences that seem to touch the sky. Ramona has to drop me off because I’m the only one on the list. A guard escorts me from the car and walks with me to the front office, if you can even call it that. This is different from the jail where I visited Rufio. This is grittier, scarier, a place where all dreams go to die. I swallow the stale air as a female guard ushers me into a side room to search my person. She remarks that I must have friends in high places to be able to see Glass.
I don’t tell her I’m her daughter. I would never want to associate myself with someone like that, but bile rises in my throat as I think of being born of her loins. “Does she know who is visiting her? Or don’t they tell the prisoners the names of who is coming?”
She shakes her head and clears her throat. “She won’t know. She’s usually in solitary, so just getting out of there will be a thrill.”