Daybreak (Sorrowsong University, #2) — Chapter no 26

Chapter 26

OPHELIA

The ache in my knee wakes me up, like it has each morning for the past seven days.

And just like every other day this week, a snoring Josie is wedged

between Alex and me in bed.

I fly home late tonight.

I’m trying not to think about it.

I fly home. I keep saying that, but I don’t even know where home is, anymore. When I say the word in my head, no picture or place accompanies it. Really, I’m just flying back to Scotland before I get expelled.

I miss Colette, Magda, and Divya, too. I’m craving a movie night with them, so we can unpack the events of the last few weeks with popcorn and beers. They spam my phone all day, constantly checking on me in the group chat.

Alex is asleep beside me—someone so in love with me that he bought the car we spent our first night together in.

It feels like I have six little sisters now. Elise is like a third parent in my life, dishing out the best advice. Cain Green is in hospital, likely his last stop before heading to a maximum-security prison to live out the rest of his days. He’ll never shred another family apart again.

It’s surreal. It’s ridiculous.

Peace is all Alex and I have ever longed for, and I’m beginning to feel it.

It’s here in this room. It’s in the way the line between his brows is relaxed as he sleeps. It’s in the way that Cain is finally out of their lives. It’s in first couple of cardboard boxes Alex has packed up, preparing to move anywhere that isn’t here.

He shifts slightly, opening an eye. The bruise on his eyebrow is fading, and though it’s only been a week, the events that transpired in his office are fading, too.

Cain Green has been shackled to me for years. I’ve been dragging him around like a heavy weight, turning even the most level of days into an uphill climb. But when Fleur shot him, I finally let go.

Cain may die soon, or in thirty years. But seeing him on the floor, begging for whatever scraps of his life remained, I realized that watching his family move on, losing his children, losing his wife—it’s punishment

enough for me.

“What’s on that mind of yours?”

“Guess.”

He smiles. “Knowing you, it’s either the pointlessness of life and the decay of modern society, or croissants.”

I laugh softly. “I feel quite … positive.”

He frowns, looking so genuinely alarmed as he checks the temperature of my forehead that my laughter gets loud enough to wake Josie.

Alex prods his sister and cocks his head toward me. “Ophelia’s in a good mood, Jo.”

She frowns, spinning to face me. “Weird.” Two small arms wrap around me, clad in bright blue Spider-Man pajamas. “I don’t want you to go.”

“I know. I’m so sorry. But Alex has been very kind and paid for a clever doctor to help me talk about my fear of flying.”

“So you can visit?”

“Exactly.”

She squishes her face into me. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.

I love having a big family.

Alex stands, tugging a T-shirt over his head. He points at Josie. “Jelly and butter?”

She whoops with joy at the knowledge that our toast-in- bed party is making its appearance for the fourth consecutive morning.

I watch Alex head out into the hallway, my eyes lingering on the way his muscular shoulders taper down to a narrow waist, on the way his thighs fit into those gray sweatpants.

I do love Josie as my own personal hot-water bottle in bed, but I need to catch him alone today. Maybe in the shower.

The door creeps open, and then Charlotte is beside us. “Are you really

leaving today?”

“I have to go. But I’ll be back.”

“Pinky swear?”

“Pinky swear.”

“Double pinky swear?” comes a voice from the hallway. Elise leans against the doorframe, a fragile smile on her face. “I’m going to miss you sorely, Ophelia.”

“I’ll miss you more,” I reply, struck by just how true that is. I’ve been here for weeks. I haven’t stayed anywhere other than Sorrowsong or the house near Inverness for this long in my life.

The mornings are hectic here, the evenings packed full of dance recitals, tennis games, movie nights, arguments, tears, family dinners, and exasperating bedtime routines. In a month, Sorrowsong will close for the summer, and I’ll head back to my parents’ house. And though I’ve enjoyed my time here, I just know it’s going to make the silence bite harder.

But I’ll tread water, just like I tell Alex to do, because this distance is temporary. We’ll get our time, and it’ll be even sweeter when it comes.

I pat the space on the other side of Josie and Charlotte, inviting Elise to sit. Her whole face brightens, and my hand steadies her as she lowers herself onto the mattress. Other than one particularly bad day earlier this week, her moods have been more stable. The highs aren’t so high, the lows aren’t so low. But years of eating disorders, drug use, surgeries, stress, and

health trials are catching up with her.

She looks so fragile.

Her hand slips into mine. “If you’re in that house alone, call us every night. We’ll put the phone at the dinner table if we have to.”

“I’ll try to visit you guys before the end of the year.”

She winks at me like she knows something I don’t. “We’ll see.”

Charlotte sits up, her hair sticking up at every possible angle. “Maybe we can visit Ophelia, too!”

Elise drops a kiss to her forehead. “Maybe we can, mon chou.”

“Is Dad coming back?” Josie asks, for the four hundredth time this

week.

“No, my love.”

“But—”

“Your dad wasn’t very kind to Alex, Fleur, and me. And he especially wasn’t very kind to Ophelia. That’s why he can’t come back.”

“We didn’t even finish playing Animal Crossing at Christmas.”

I don’t know how Elise does it. No frustration, no impatience, no anger, no sadness. Just a kind warmth in her eyes as she promises them that she’ll learn to play it with them.

Alex comes in, balancing three plates of toast. I know one was supposed to be for him, because it has peanut butter on it, but he smiles at Charlotte and gives it to her instead, handing the buttered one to me and the strawberry jam to Josie. The ravens inked into his skin flutter as he stretches those thick arms above his head, exposing a thin strip of muscle at his waist.

If I don’t get an hour alone with him today, I’ll just cancel my flight.

Oh god. The flight. I drag my palms down my cheeks. Alex is at my side in a second, shaking his head. “We’re not worrying about the trip home until ten p.m., remember?”

“Okay,” I rasp, wiping my sweaty palms on my thighs.

A tiny voice in my head tells me to stay. To worry about my education later, to catch up with my friends on the phone.

But the girls go back to school tomorrow and Alex back to work. This cocoon we’ve been in, the calm after the storm, will burst.

I owe it to my younger self to fly home.

I COULDN’T BRING myself to get on the first flight.

But a serious pep talk from Alex and a threatening text from Belladonna about missing the swim meet next week had me on the next flight an hour later, promising to pay Alex back for both tickets—or all four, if you count the ones he bought to accompany me to the plane steps.

The flight back felt a lot shorter than the one to New York, so short that when I watch the wheels touch down with my nose pressed against the acrylic window, I can still feel the dried tears on my cheeks and the ghost of Alex’s lips on mine.

“I might lose a finger in a minute,” the seventy-something-year-old lady beside me says, as people stand to grab their bags before they’re even

allowed to. I glance down, and, sure enough, no blood is flowing to her hand. I release it quickly, cheeks turning red.

Mabel is my new best friend. She held my hand the whole way, let me trade my weird salad pot for her bread roll. When I convinced myself that the wing looked a bit worse for wear, she reminded me I have no fucking idea what I’m talking about. I told her about my fear of flying, and then we talked shit about her ex-husband for six hours.

“Safe travels up to the Highlands,” she says with a warm smile.

“Thank you,” I say, chewing my lip as I look at the train prices. It’s not the fourteen-hour journey time that bothers me—I’ve managed my fair share of horrendous travel days since I lost my parents—but the price.

There is no reason for a train to cost that much.

Mabel scowls at my phone, too. “Robbing bastards, aren’t they?”

I hang my duffel over my shoulder, following her off this horrific flying tin can. “Couldn’t have put it better myself.”

My feet hit the tarmac, and I have half a mind to kiss it. I feel like the star of one of those videos you see of astronauts returning to Earth from space. I will never take solid ground for granted ever again.

“I did it!” I exclaim, suddenly overcome with emotion. Then Mabel and I are bouncing around like two footballers who’ve just scored the winning penalty.

“I can’t jump anymore, I’ll piss myself,” she says, stopping abruptly.

“Never have kids.”

I pick up her bag, too, and head inside the terminal at a busy London Heathrow. She scowls as we join the short queue at passport control. “I hate these new machines. Whatever was wrong with the people in the booths?”

I watch a woman put her passport in upside down. “Same.”

“And everything is becoming an app now.”

“Oh my god, thank you!” I say, hands dragging down my cheeks. “No one else understands. Why do I need an app to claim a free croissant? Why can’t they just give me one anyway?”

“World’s gone to shit,” she grumbles, as a short man in uniform directs her to a passport machine. I scan mine, turning to see where Mabel is. She makes eye contact with me, mimicking shooting herself in the head as the man asks her to step back from the machine and head to a booth instead.

I don’t want to leave her without saying goodbye, so I pull my phone from my pocket and switch it from airplane mode. Heart rate not yet below one fifty, I type out a text to Alex while I sit and wait for Mabel to stop flirting with the older gentleman checking her passport.

Ophelia Made it!! And I only cried twice.

It takes a minute to send, but when it does, a reply comes straight away.

It’s past five in the morning there.

Alex I miss you. Proud to be yours.

The picture attached is the little highland cow I got him for his birthday, resting on the pillow beside him, right where I should be.

Mabel appears, giving me a warm smile.

Why am I emotional? Is it sad that I’m so much better at befriending older people?

“Funny how you get attached to people after a only few hours,” she says, echoing my thoughts aloud.

I wrap her in a hug, squeezing tight as the whir of people goes on around us.

“Things have been ever so lonely since my daughter passed,” she says, voice wobbling. “Maybe we could be phone friends.”

“I was too scared to ask you,” I say, on a laugh.

“In case I thought you were trying to get into my will?”

“Mabel! No!”

She laughs, pulling away and handing me her phone, open on her contacts. I smile at the name she’s already put in. Ophelia Scared of Flying.

I put her in mine, too. Mabel Not Scared of Flying.

“You’ll have to come for tea next time you’re in Yorkshire.”

“I promise I will.”

She takes my hand in hers, the skin tanned and mottled with age, giving me a sincere look. “If he’s the right fella for you, you’ll get through the long distance.”

I squeeze her one last time, setting her off in the direction of the luggage claim. I head to Arrivals, trying to talk myself into spending the last of my

emergency savings on a series of train tickets, even though it was supposed to be for driving lessons.

I wander aimlessly through to the airport foyer. It’s people-watching heaven. Men in sharp suits and earpieces hold iPads with people’s names in unhelpfully small text. That surely cannot be the most effective way to do it. Mabel would agree with me.

A girl with a giant backpack runs past me, leaping into the waiting arms of her parents. A couple kiss under the harsh airport lights, his hand lifting the tote bag off his husband’s shoulder. A woman and three toddlers whoop with excitement as a man jogs over, a big grin on his face.

A year ago, a month ago, it probably would’ve made me cry. A year ago, I found grief in the joy of others, self-doubt in the beauty of my friends.

I wait for the misery and the envy to hit me, but it doesn’t. All it does is warm my heart, restore my faith in the world a little more.

Or maybe I’m so happy to not be forty thousand feet in the air that I’ve gone delirious.

A flash of orange catches my eye, a ridiculous bundle of gold, orange, and yellow balloons, and another foil balloon shaped like a star. Each

balloon has a letter on it.

YOU SURVIED.

I’m so distracted by the message, I almost miss the hands beneath them, waving frantically. Hardly notice Colette, Magda, and Divya bouncing around to get my attention, holding a flattened cardboard box that says Welcome Back Ophelia in big pink letters.

I gape at them like a goldfish, feet seeming to grow roots into the vinyl

flooring of the airport.

I … what?

And then I’m just like that girl with the big hiking backpack, rushing past people to get to them. We collide in a group hug so enthusiastic that it momentarily knocks the air from my lungs, makes me realize how right I was to come home. Colette’s Chanel perfume invades my lungs. “You did

it!”

“I did it!”

“Do you like the balloons?” They rearrange them again.

“I survied.”

Colette sticks out her glossy bottom lip. “They only had one V balloon in stock at the party store we went to on the way down.”

Divya sighs, thrusting a take-away cup of tea into my hand. “Apparently some bitch Vivian is having a birthday party.”

“Slag,” mumbles Magda, in her trademark black lipstick.

Colette claps her hands, leading us to the exit. Her satin minidress has some sort of neck scarf built in, the cream fabric the same shade as her heels. How does she not get cold? “Let’s go!”

Eike is stood outside a bigger car than usual in the pickup area, on what looks to be a bit of a tense phone call.

“How’s Eike?” I ask Colette, as we head toward him.

“I’m surprised he’s climbed out of my stepfather’s ass long enough to drive us home, let’s just put it that way.”

“Are you going to ask for a new driver?”

“They’re all shit, Ophelia. The next one will be, too. They’re not really drivers. They’re just spies who report back on my every move.”

I glance over at Eike, who is pacing the drop-off zone with his phone pressed to his ear. I can’t help but feel some sympathy for him—I’m sure Colette’s tweed-wearing, old-money stepdad is a nightmare client.

“I’m sorry. We can catch up at Sorrowsong.”

“I would love that. Apparently, Hemlock is opening up a cozy café in their common room to the other houses.”

“You know it’s been a slow month at Sorrowsong when this is what we’re excited about,” says Divya, as Eike comes over and takes my bag off my shoulder. Magda takes the front seat, sliding her purple headphones over her braids, and I think she’s asleep before we’ve even paid the charge at the airport barrier.

Colette presses a button to put a screen up between us and Eike and then turns to face me like she’s been holding a piece of information in for days.

“I caught Belladonna making out with a groundskeeper.”

“What?”

Divya nods, looking like she might burst with excitement at the fact we’re all back together. “And I caught my lecturer making out with Carmichael’s new PA!” She waves her hand like she’s trying to dismiss her own conversation topic. “What am I even talking about? You first! Tell us everything.”

I lean back in the plush leather seat, taking a sip of my tea. Alex’s mom, the fight with his father, the fact that things between Alex and me couldn’t be any better, the flights, Mabel, Fleur. Christ. Suddenly I’m glad the drive is two days long. “We have so much to talk about.”