“And I told you how I’d found her in my room with all my makeup lined up on the vanity, experimenting with my best eye shadow. Her eyes looked like garage doors.” Chris ran her fingertips under her eyes to dry them. “She thought she looked gorgeous.”

Chris sniffed and took the tissue Gabriella handed her. “She hated being sent away to school.” Her breath was shaky as she let it out and drew more in. “Dad thought it best, and he was right, really, but she hated it so. We all thought Eve was a lovely girl, a sweet girl, but not too bright. Lord, did she prove us wrong. She just refused to waste her time doing things that held no interest, so she wasted it with magazines or the latest CDs, instead.”

“She used to write you those funny letters. You’d read them to me sometimes.”

“The ones where she described the girls in the dorm or her history teacher. We should have seen then that she had a knack for the theater. Oh, God, Brie, how much longer?”

“Just a little while,” she murmured. “We used to think that she and Bennett … They seemed to suit so well.” She looked over at Alexander as he stared down at his own hands. “Isn’t it odd that the people we care for should have come together?”

“She loves him so much.” Chris, too, looked at Alexander, and her heart rose into her throat. “I wanted her to come back to Houston with me. She couldn’t leave him. It was almost as if she knew the time would come when she would protect him.” Her voice broke, and she shook her head before going on. “She said it didn’t matter how he felt, she only wanted whatever time with him she could have.”

Brie sighed. “Alexander closes himself in, so often even from himself. But I don’t think there can be any doubt now about his feelings. He blames himself. Not circumstances, not Deboque or fate, but himself totally.”

“Eve wouldn’t.”

“No, she wouldn’t.”

Understanding, Chris rubbed her hands over her eyes and rose. It wasn’t easy to cross the room to him. There was resentment. She couldn’t avoid it. There was blame and an anger wedged in her heart that had found no room for escape. The step she took was for Eve. When she sat beside him, he didn’t reach out to her, but looked over with eyes that were shadowed and red from the scrubbing of his own hands.

“You must hate me.” He said it in a voice that was both quiet and dull. “It is small comfort to know that you can’t hate me as much as I hate myself.”

She wanted to take his hand for Eve’s sake, but couldn’t. “That doesn’t do Eve any good. She needs us to pull together now.”