Page 88 of Windlass

Stevie supposed if one had the money to pay for it, almost anything was possible. She thought with a throb of guilt of Angie’s roof and the other maintenance the house needed. Money didn’t solve everything, but it did make living a hell of a lot less stressful.

“One more thing.” Ivy paused at the tack room door, her eyes on Jaq’s sweatshirt, which hung from a hook. “See if you can get a look at Jaq’s wrists. I thought I saw a bruise the other day during our lesson, but she wears all those bracelets so I couldn’t tell.”

“A bruise? What kind of bruise?”

“Fingerprints.”

The watercolor pigment bled across the paper, following the wet streaks left by her brush. She added more red to the horizon line. Sunrise. Pain didn’t change the sky.

She closed her eyes on the sudden flinch of memory, ducking away before it could spread like her paint. Three days since her slip with Lana. The guilt hadn’t lessened, or the unease that stained everything for weeks after a trigger—the reminder that nowhere was ever truly safe. Peopleneededthe illusion of safety for sanity. Angie needed that illusion. But memory was like a fish, darting up out of the dark.

Angie rinsed her brush and set it aside, pushing back from the desk, which she’d found in the back of the barn when she’d first inherited the place. She’d sanded the desk down and stained the wood, but some of the old marks of use remained. She liked to think it had been her great-aunt’s, though in truth it could have belonged to anyone in the family.

Her phone lay face up on the surface. Two new messages from Lana sat unread, but she hadn’t cleared them yet.

LP:You all good?

LP:Thought you said you weren’t ghosting me.

Guilt urged her fingers toward the phone again. Stevie wouldn’t think Lana deserved a response. None of her friends would, but Lana . . .

If Lana was a monster, then so was Angie, for Lana was the other side of the same bitter coin.

She typedI’m sorryand deleted it several times. Lana wouldn’t be watching the dots. She would have put her phone down, returning to whatever, or whoever, she was doing. Lana didn’t know Angie was typing. She had time.

AR:I’m sorry I’ve been a bitch about this. I’m okay. Thank you for the other day.

It was too easy to picture Stevie reading that message and getting the wrong idea, not that Stevie would go through her phone. She tried again.

AR:I’m sorry I’ve been a bitch. I’m okay now. Thank you for talking me down.

Predictably her phone buzzed swiftly.

LP:We should hang

Her sigh ruffled the papers on her desk. Discovering Lana was capable of feeling certainly didn’t preclude her from being a douche.

AR:I meant it when I said I can’t. Please take care of yourself, though.

Lana didn’t respond for a solid twenty minutes, which was something of a record. Dread pumped through her veins. Lana could be vicious when she didn’t get her way.

LP:Fuck you too

Pause. She waited for a block text of diatribe telling her all the ways she’d regret this, how she’d never find anyone who fucked her like Lana, blah blah blah, some swearing and promises that she’d be back.

The text came in. She considered deleting it unread, then remembered Lana’s hurt, scornful words:You can’t just ghost people.

Except she could apparently. And had. And it had been easy. All this time, she’d thought she went to Lana because she, Angie, wanted to be hurt without hurting other people, but that had been a lie she’d told herself. Had it felt good to ghost Lana? Had there been release in swiping away her messages unread, no explanation, leaving Lana wondering what she’d done to deserve that hurt? As Angie had often wondered what she’d done to deserve the hurts she used Lana to excise? Yes, Lana was an asshole. No, Angie did not love her. The ease with which she’d put Lana aside, though, sent a chill through her stomach. The void had swallowed another person whole and found no satiety.

She did not want to be that person. Heart pounding, she opened the message.

LP:Stevie? Seriously?

The dread morphed into a relieved anger so sudden and intense she struggled to breathe around the space it took up in her chest. There was still time for Lana to lash out, but the reprieve was welcome however momentary. A squabble over Stevie was manageable. Lana knew Angie well enough to hurt her badly if she wanted to, and she had chosen restraint even if Angie did not deserve it.

What had Lana said about Stevie?Maybe she’ll like being used?

That wasn’t what Angie was doing with Stevie. Her fingers flew across the screen as she responded in kind.

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