sophie.

Chapter 22

FEBRUARY 3RD, 2014

Peony managed to get away, Robert later told me. But she wasn't my target. In fact, I wasn't even sure if I had a target anymore. Daemon and the dissection of all his complexities was the closest thing I had to a goal.

And for a terrifying moment in time, I had no idea what to do with myself. I was falling backward off a cliff and I didn't know where I was falling, only that there would eventually be an end. And I'd closed my eyes, I'd curled into a ball. Like any other falling person, I'd screamed. I screamed my heart out. I went into the empty folds between worlds and I let every notion of hatred and sadness and confusion I had in my body ring out, where no one could hear. Most of the time I went alone. Sometimes, I brought Robert, or Robert brought himself. We'd find ourselves in the confines of a forgotten corner in time and just talk. Sometimes about Adrien, but mostly about where we were in our heads. About our reactions and our emotional locations. We could never talk about the actual loss because we were both too proud to let the other one in. But we had each other, and we could look each other in the eye. That was about the most comfort I could handle from anyone.

My parents obviously never knew, they were too far from understanding.

After a few weeks of confining myself to the upper floor of the house, I heard the door to my room open. I was in the connected bathroom, so I didn't know who it was.

"Please go away," was the normal response, and I used it again right then, because it usually worked. But this time the person's presence didn't escape, and when the door shut, I could tell they were inside. I peered over from the sink (I happened to be sitting on the counter) and saw, in surprise, Sawyer. And there he looked back, all gawk-y and unsure of himself. It was like I was witnessing an older version of who he was, before we'd had our fight. Because all he saw in me was concern, the friendly sort. And I'm not going to lie, I was having a small little sob right then, so my eyes were a bit puffy and tissues were all over the place. He didn't miss a beat.

"Wh- hey, what's wrong?" he asked, and hurried into the bathroom to sit next to me. But I shakily informed him through sniffles that "I'm pretty sure we were surpassing the weight limit of the counter," so I escorted him back to the bedroom with tissues in hand. I sat on the floor while he sat in my desk chair, and I took a moment to collect myself.

"You were right, Sawyer, I shouldn't have gotten involved with that boy," I said, which I knew was too vague, even for me. And he started asking about what he'd done to me, did he hurt me? Did Sawyer have to kick his ass for me? I shook my head quickly and dropped the tissue, having willed for the sad-girl-crying trope to make its exit. "No, no -- nothing like that. There was an incident. A- a confrontation."

I was awful at this. Every attempt I made to allude to the fact that Adrien died, always sounded like something else. So I just dropped the bomb.

"Adrien died." Yeah, that simple. But Sawyer wasn't particularly close to Adrien anyway. And in fact, I was pretty positive Sawyer blamed my prolonged absence in part on Adrien. But before I even looked up to see his response, I knew that he'd be devastated. And he was.

It's difficult to describe him, or anyone, in these states. You talk and you talk and their faces are always an entirely-too mixed bag of confusion and sadness and shock. You repeat things you don't want to, and in some cases -- yeah, this one included -- you had to explain how it occurred. He was shot in the face. A shoot out, actually. The killer died. I almost died. I should've died. No, you shouldn't have, Sophie. You couldn't control anything. But thing was, I could've. I should've done it all on my own. In the weeks after he died, I went over the situation and the decisions we made nearly a thousand times. Even though none of the outcomes seemed right, I still knew that somehow, there was a way we could've survived together.