CRYBABY | mitch rapp ✔️

34. the end

In London, the sky wept a lot and it was always grey. Winter or summer, it didn't matter. There was always a dull tint over the city, and it seemed to affect the people, too. On a weeknight in December, the only people seen with smiles were the tourists visiting for the Christmas lights. They looked magnificent but it was all a show.

Angeline mourned California. She mourned the bright mornings and pink sunsets, and all of the parts in between that. She yearned for the sea salt breeze on her skin. She wanted to feel the sun's heat on her shoulders instead of the blasts of hot, petrol-coated air against her face every time the train pulled into its tube station.

Angeline mourned a lot of things that she tried not to think about.

This was her life now. Her life was restless six a.m. starts and packed tubes and coffee spills and the rain. And feeling alone. A lot of feeling so fucking lonely.

A man was yelling down the end of the tube. He was playing music through a portable speaker, God knows what he was actually saying and nobody around him cared. They all kept their heads swinging low, their eyes on their phones or their newspapers or the shoes of the person in front of them.

Angeline blended among them, pale and frowning. Her black trench coat hugged her figure, her long dark hair tumbling past it as she yanked off a glove with her teeth to swipe on her phone. Her other hand held a Pret coffee. Nobody made a caramel frappe as good as her old barista Dan, so she didn't go to Starbucks anymore.

At least that was the reason she told herself. Starbucks would be a lot more convenient- it was closer to her tube station- but caramel frappes seemed to leave a bitter taste in her mouth these days.

She was squashed in a seat. A businessman on one side of her, his newspaper practically on her lap also, and a woman talking loudly on the phone in a language she didn't recognise on the other side of her. She was giving the shouting man fifty feet away a run for his money.

Angeline sighed loudly when her stop was announced. She moved with the other bodies off of the tube. Up the escalator. Through the barrier. Out onto the grey pavements of London.

Her gloves were back on by now. It was freezing. Christmas had just gone, and it was January, so not only was it cold, but it was also raining.

Her coat didn't have a hood. Of course it didn't, that wasn't fashionable, and Angeline didn't have an umbrella— which, of course, she didn't— Angeline had the memory of a goldfish.

Her hair stuck to her face. It clung to her neck, it itched her skin and water flicked up the back of her legs as she paced down the pavement. God, she hated the fucking rain.

Angeline was lucky her apartment wasn't too far from the tube stop at all. Within five minutes, Angeline was back at her apartment complex. A huge building that overlooked central London. Security stood at the door, there were pin codes on practically everything.

Perhaps the only good thing to come out of the whole mess was the fat lump of money sent to her account weeks after her father's arrest.

He had killed himself. Hung himself in his prison cell. Too scared to face the jury, too much of a coward to spend the rest of his life behind bars where money and status would get him nowhere with his cellmates.

Angeline was furious when she found out. Sick with rage, even. Her mother spent the entire night consoling her. Angeline mourned everything she had lost because of that man, and she was so angry that she would never get to look him in the eyes and tell him how much she hated him.

Angeline always swore she would be independent. She swore as soon as she turned eighteen, she'd be studying clinical psychology at Harvard, living independently, and living her best life.