Losing Everything

Chapter 12.7

Lucy sat there thinking. She was feeling torn. She wasn’t quite sure whether she was imagining things, or even outright making things up, things like Erica being about to break up with Allie, or things like it being Lucy’s fault. She wasn’t sure, but she was still worried, because if she was right, if Erica was getting more upset than she usually would do just because Lucy was there, and was making bad decisions because of it, then that meant that everything that had just happening was actually Lucy’s fault, and that Lucy ought to stop Erica.

Lucy ought to stop her, somehow, even though she had no actual idea how.

She ought to, she thought, but only if she had actually caused this. And she didn’t know whether she had. It did seem possible that she had set something off by saying the wrong thing, or by not saying the right thing quickly enough, one or the other. It seemed possible, but it also seemed impossibly arrogant to just assume that was so, when she didn’t know for sure.

There was a whole past between Erica and Allie, a whole shared tangle of their lives that Lucy knew nothing about. And she knew that she knew nothing, but yet she was still just assuming that she had caused something terrible to happen, that her being there for a single day had suddenly changed what Erica wanted from her life. And that assumption really did seem unbelievably arrogant, the more she thought about it.

The more she thought, the less sure she was that she had done anything wrong. But she also wasn’t sure that she wasn’t just talking herself out of doing anything because inaction suited her best.

She sat, wondering.

In a lot of ways, she thought, it didn’t really matter what she decided anyway, because even if this was all somehow her fault, she wasn’t sure what she could actually say to Erica to make any kind of difference. She didn’t actually want to say anything to Erica, anyway, because it would probably just make Erica angry. It was very likely to, Lucy thought. She was fairly sure it would make her angry herself, if someone said something like that to her. It implied all sorts of things that weren’t very nice.

It would probably make Erica angry, Lucy decided. She was almost certain it would, so she didn’t want to actually suggest it. Not and have Erica angry at her, the same way she seemed to be at Allie.

Lucy just sat there, uncertainly, unsure what to do, trying to decide whether to speak up, and work out some polite, reasonable way to try and convince Erica to be more cautious, or whatever it was she ought to do, or whether to just to keep quiet and let Erica do what she had to.