Jacob deflated a little. “Oh. Right. Yes.” No fetching Eve just yet, then. Fetching Eve later. Never mind. He had a feeling he’d be able to sleep, now, so that was something. “Thanks, Mont. Bye.”

* * *

No matter how hard she tried, Eve couldn’t make her old bedroom feel like home. All the things she used to do here—lying in until noon watching porn, ordering new T-shirts because she was bored with the many, many slogans in her walk-in wardrobe, bitching about her “friends” in her journal—felt silly and pointless and wrong. Which, in turn, made the room itself feel silly and pointless and wrong, because it offered no other diversions. She couldn’t even focus on her favorite romance novels, since the idea of reading about love suddenly made her feel sick to her stomach.

This was most unfortunate, since she also couldn’t get up and leave her room. If she did, she might bump into one of the relatives lingering worriedly about the house, and she hadn’t yet decided what she wanted to say to them. She knew she was pissed off about their behavior yesterday, but she couldn’t quite articulate why.

She was too busy thinking about Jacob.

As in, Mariah Carey’s “Through the Rain” blaring from her speakers, the aforementioned journal in her hands, one sad, used tissue on the bedside table—thinking about Jacob. She was trying to write something horrible and scathing about him, but she couldn’t quite manage it. Every time she put pen to paper she’d remember something terrible, like the way he forced himself to say soft, gentle things when she really needed it, or the way he threw himself around to rescue her from minor disasters in clumsiness, and then she’d cry a little tiny bit. Again.

Although, at this point, she was getting sick of crying. Because yes, Jacob was lovely and blah, blah, blah, but he’d also been monumentally shitty yesterday, and actually, she was rather fucking pissed about that, too. The more she thought about it, the more she suspected she was furious.

She remembered his iron expression as he’d asked, Did you tell anyone? and wanted to shout, This isn’t fucking chess. Stop trying to checkmate me.

She knew she’d done wrong. She’d lied, and she’d lost his trust, and she’d pressed down on a barely healed scar without ever meaning to. But he’d done the same right back, acting as if all she cared about was having her cake and eating it, too. Acting as if she was some sort of spoiled brat, after everything.

So, yes: Eve was pissed.

Satisfied, now that she’d identified the burning in her diaphragm, she put down her pen and flicked back through her journal—back through all the other times she’d been pissed off. Because that was the theme, she realized, as she combed through random dates. Something happened, she didn’t like it, so she ranted about it in silence.

Hello darling,

Olivia was absolutely frightful today, so I put coriander in her lemon drizzle cake and then I blocked her phone number.