Page 48 of Swallow Your Sorries

We all watch the video in silence and then a half second later, I jump out of my skin as a loud crash sounds, and the Auclair’s Bentley wraps around a pole. But seeing the accident in real time, then in slow motion given the extensive edit isn’t the worst part.

Aria’s right. The only bit of the passing car that’s visible is nothing more than a black blur given the camera quality. It’s like one of those cameras on children’s rides that shake back and forth and then give you the shittiest black-and-white photo at the end.

But the worst part is when the video switches from CCTV footage to a cell phone camera video as a passerby stops to check the wreckage out. With each step the cameraman takes, my heart stills its beating, until it stops entirely when the camera pans inside the car.

Gant’s wheezing sounds like a death rattle as he suffocates on his own blood, but what’s more bone-chilling is Madame’s lifeless eyes staring into the camera and straight through my soul.

Her face is glistening almost ethereally in the shattered glass, forever frozen in sheer terror.

Elle

“So you weren’t just acting?” Stassi asks curiously after the video replays for a third time, and I stop it before it can pan to Madame’s face again. “Youreallydidn’t know?”

For the second time that day, I want to vomit, shit, piss, and have my period all at once.

I want to evacuate my own body along with all of its bodily functions.

“No.” I shake my head, trying to stave off the lightheadedness threatening to consume me. “When I last saw Madame, she wasverymuch alive.”

I sway on my feet, grabbing onto the vanity for support.

“That was…” I stare at the blank phone screen, unable to think of a fitting word. It went far past horrible…if I could barely look at the footage, how must Gant feel to have it undoubtedly scorched into his memory? He was awake in the video. Not lucid, but awake.

Then Stassi said it leaked a few weeks ago. Why? Why after two years?

So now Gant has his memories, along with the actual footage, to haunt him.

I can’t…I can’t believe I’m feeling sympathy for the boy who just used his dick as a water pistol on me. Whospitin my face.

“Indescribable,” Stassi finishes for me quietly. “When the email went out, she and Gant fled the studio. Gant thinks she wanted to grab their passports and flee town until things cooled off.”

“But she was too distracted to drive,” Aria says softly. “Her nerves were already shot and someone tried to overtake them. You can only see a black blur in the video, and they never caught the driver despite the Auclairs offering such a massive reward. Anyway, you saw the rest and, obviously, Gant survived.”

I take a deep breath, trying to formulate my words because, despite it all, the last thing I want is to come across as insensitive. “So Gant blames me because the email leak sent his mom into a panic? Maybe a panic that wouldn’t have been so intense if she wasn’t outed so publicly?”

“That’s only half of it,” Stassi says.

“He hates you because he never got to clear his name,” Aria says. “His mum died believing he’d been the one to betray her. Now that she’s dead, he can never have a resolution.”

“And it’s all my fault,” I whisper more to myself as my legs turn to jelly. “I have to sit down.”

I brush past Stassi, who grabs my arm before I can collapse on the bathroom floor. She guides me to my bed where I crumble and cling onto the knot in my towel like a damn tether to the earthly realm.

I get it now.

The lengths he went to to create the fake scholarship to lure me to Beaulieu.

The golden shower in the auditorium.

The spit.

I couldneverjustify the act of spitting on anyone and yet my conscience is suspended between revulsion and understanding.

I’d hate me too.

Not Jarett butme.

“Yeah, I don’t think she’s acting,” Aria says, coming into the bedroom and staring down at me pitifully.

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