Gravity Rises (S3)

EG: Part Five

Edward Prewitt.

Her fiancé's name was Edward Prewitt.

Her new name would be Everly Grace Prewitt.

She tried the name out on her tongue. Over and over, she repeated it silently to herself as she packed her bags. As she carefully folded her clothes, she went over what little she knew about Edward in her head. As she arranged her beauty products into plastic containers, she wondered if he would treat their children better than Gaston treated his. As she shoved her entire life into a carry-on bag, she wondered how on earth she could fall in love with a man picked out for her by her parents.

She had a lot of her own worries. But beneath it all was an underlying current of concern for Gideon.

After she'd reached home that day — the day she'd told him, the day that his love for her was lost to his pain — she'd found Gideon shut up in his room, the door locked, not coming out for food, not coming out for anything unless Gaston Northwest himself came to the door and demanded it.

Grace couldn't handle it, couldn't handle his sudden coldness to her, and she took it out on her poor mother. When Gaston wasn't anywhere near, she cornered her mother in abandoned rooms and demanded that she treat Gideon better than she had in the past. "I'm the closest thing a mother he's ever had," Grace told Geneva, "and now that I'm leaving, you had better step it up." Her words left Geneva crying alone in her bedroom, but at the time she didn't care. Maybe she couldn't fix her relationship with Gideon before she left, but she was willing to trample over every other relationship she had on the chance that his life wouldn't be completely miserable after she was gone.

It wasn't enough to erase her memory of his betrayed expression, however. Nothing would ever be enough.

Gideon had finished bonding the amulet about a week ago, and he'd performed his first memory wiping for the Order, too. Grace wouldn't have known at all if she hadn't come across her brother, running from the Order entrance as if a dragon were chasing him.

"I broke her," he told Grace in a panic. "I broke her I broke her I broke her she's broken—"

"Wait," Grace had called after him. "Wait, Gideon, what happened?"

But he had already run past her to his room, and when she followed him, he slammed the door in her face, locking it audibly. She could hear him crying through the door, but he wouldn't let her in to comfort him.

Now, a week after the memory wiping incident and a few weeks after the clones, she was about to leave. She was about to move, about to become a Prewitt, about to join a new family, and everything here — everything in this family — was still so wrong.

She'd imagined so many times that she would fix everything. That she would get this family the help it needed to be healed. And now, now she'd been used up by the Order and spit back out by her parents. She hadn't helped anything.

Blind Lincoln had listened to Grace cry and scream and whimper, listening with a quiet understanding, even though he'd never been married off to another family when his little brother still needed help. Grace still felt like he understood, somehow.

But even catharsis with Lee was but a cauterizing iron when Grace was so close to leaving him forever.

The day finally came. Grace had everything packed up — she'd already sent most of it ahead — and she was about to walk out the door for the last time. She would stay in a hotel room tonight; the wedding was tomorrow; she would go on her honeymoon with Edward tomorrow night. No Northwests would attend the services.

She was terrified to leave without talking to Gideon one last time. She rushed to his room, leaving her carry-on by the front door. "Gideon," she called. "Charlie, please, I need to talk to you, I need to see you—"