The Arrangement

Chapter Twenty-One

It's come to my attention that I will be a certified mess when everyone pulls away in the coming months, moving and graduating and creating these hundreds of miles between us. Cassie's been gone for three weeks and yet it feels like an eternity, and the closer she gets to being home the more nervous I become.

Not because anything bad has happened, though perhaps it should be considering boxes of her things arrived out the front of Eliza's place. Sophie moved two days ago, and we had all anticipated the awkwardness of getting her things from the apartment she shared with Mark, but he helped kill off that worry.

Only proving to the rest of us that like Cassie had said, the person we had thought we knew, befriended isn't somewhere in there to be brought back to the surface.

It's not a story that we can demand or pull from Cassie before she's ready, and maybe some parts of that truth isn't something she'll ever share. I think we all have parts of ourselves and the things we have done or thought that feel too raw to be shared with the outside world.

Sophie was there, forcing her way through my defences and sitting in the silence of my denial, acceptance and anger, she heard every plead through the phone that day and protected me from all the people that I didn't have enough energy to face. Despite all of that there's some things, that I thought and contemplated in the darkest of all those days and in all the honesty I am known for.

The severity of it all is kept under lock and key, things that I don't believe I will ever be okay with sharing, not even with Hugo and becoming okay with that? That's more work than trying to not cry every time I see something and realise that my instinctual reaction of calling or texting Bentley is still unattainable.

It feels odd, I am not totally comfortable with the new change but sometimes talk out loud, to the air and my ceiling while recounting it all makes that constant weight of grief less consuming. I suppose that's the whole point of paying someone to dissect the inner workings of your brain, Im gushes about it all the time.

Insisted on coming with me and waiting in the car for the first four sessions when I could only schedule them during Hugo's classes, she might not go as often anymore. Once a month unless she feels she needs a little more, trying to convince Sophie that the three sessions she did weren't a great example.

I always thought she would be the one endorsing therapy, but as Sienna and Justin made improvements and Sienna's voyage into it got longer. The more she pulled away from the idea, Sam's been all over when she stops showing up and it doesn't happen as much anymore.

It's the knowing what that consuming darkness feels like now that makes me worry, it's been years for her and only recent for me. It might be sick to say but I don't know how she's made it all this time.

"There's nothing we can do to convince her?" I sigh, cheek rested against the edge of the sofa cushion, one of Alfie's patterned cushions clutched against my chest. "Things have been so good over the past couple of years, I don't want any of us to go back to worrying she won't show up again"

Devastation lines Sam's blue eyes but it's not for Sophie, it's for me. "I promise she isn't going to stop showing up" He assures, hand squeezed in mine. "That's just how depression works Claudie, and she has her family, mine and all of you supporting her. We just can't make her go back before she's ready, it'll do more harm than good"

"Why don't we all go there? Keep her company even if she doesn't feel like talking, that's what she did for me"

Sam's hand squeezes mine again, the sofa dips behind me and I feel Hugo's hands slide around my waist in a comforting gesture. "Sophie's okay, I wouldn't lie to you, and I think underneath his panic you know she is, would know when she truly isn't. You won't be blindsided by losing her, she isn't going anywhere, and I'll meet her back home after Cassie arrives, it's just a bad day"