Page 2 of The Grosvenor's Ghost
He isn’t dead—that’s a fact, not just some theory I made up in my head, by the way. Although I’m sure, Digby wishes it was.
“I’m going to the loo,” I whisper in his ear.
He nods, all very solemn and beaten up. Bit worse for wear in the ego department, I imagine.
I make my way through the thick throngs of people gathered at Stratton House. I mean, new years at Stratton House? Biggest event of the year, Forbes said.
I barge my way through into the ladies, stare at myself in the mirror and tell myself for probably the billionth time that it’s been two years and too many months to still be thinking abouthim. I have a boyfriend now, my mind tells me. I shouldn’t be thinking about him anymore, my mind tells me. Stop worrying about him the same way you did at seventeen, my mind screams at me.
But it’s impossible to listen.
I can’t listen to it because it isn’t true. Will never be true.
It’s still daylilies and marigolds in Windsor Gardens in my mind.
I’m reapplying my lipgloss when the door swings open dramatically, bouncing off the wall. Athena comes tumbling in like a tornado, heaving when she reaches the sink next to me.
“Are you…okay?” I frown, blotting my lips on a tissue.
“Phoebe,” she breathes heavily. “I need to tell you something.”
“What?” I roll my eyes.
She composes herself a bit, leans against the sink, swallows.
“Arthur’s back.”
“What?”
“He’s back—Arthur’s in London.”
Slowly, I turn to face her.
“Athena—”
“Listen, I am on a crazy amount of acid but it’s true—”
“You’re on acid?!”
“Yeah,” she nods quickly. “I can’t feel my fingers but it’s true.”
“What the fuck?” I throw my arms out, facing her, slightly angry. “How do you even know?”
She blinks, pupils the size of planets. “The guy who gave me acid told me.”
My stomach sinks the same way it did back then because obviously I’m now thinking the worst.
“Oh no,” Athena bends over, laughing. “Not like that! No, no—oh god, I just realised how that sounds,” she howls, clutching her stomach.
When she stands up, she giggles one more time before touching my arm. “The guy who gave me acid has a friend who works at The Daily Mail who told the guy who gave me acid that Arthur was spotted in London earlier today.”
“Jesus Christ,” she mutters as I process. “Have you ever taken acid? I feel like a ghost—fuck.”
I float out of the bathroom, back into the club and back to the side of my boyfriend while my body stays rooted in my bed with a letter in her hand because the truth? I never got up. I never left. I’ve been there for two years, five months and twenty-two days, reading the same words over and over again in hopes that they were fiction.
He slipped away into the night like a fragment of my imagination that was so vivid I questioned if any of it happened at all. All the drugs and the fighting and the arguing and the heartbreak and the sorrow and the pain and the bruises and the shattered promises. Something as turbulent and violent as that doesn’t warrant a goodbye so light and airy, like a dandelion being gently blown away on a spring evening. He stayed floating around me, all these dusty particles, dancing around me, getting stuck in my hair and my throat.
I wanted to hate him so badly.
