Taking both, I glanced at the paper’s heading: Narcotics Anonymous.

I didn’t want to be that butterfly anymore. I no longer wanted to be on display, my beauty merely a convenience for strangers who wished to admire it. “Okay,” I said, wiping my eyes with the tissue.

“Good. And Grace, you’re a writer.” Trevor held my gaze. “That’s an incredible gift. You need to use it.”

I felt the familiar tinge of shame. I hadn’t written in years. “How would I do that?”

“Well, I think a great exercise would be for you to write about your experiences and emotions. Write about everything you’ve been through. Write about your childhood, and your parents. Just write it all down.”

“But I was never any good.”

“How can you say you were never any good? How can you even measure that?” He gestured as he spoke as though his hands were an extension of his mouth. “Tell me this, Grace, why were you writing?”

I had never considered this, so I thought for a moment. “I think when I was little, I had all these stories in my head. All kinds of questions and observations. I didn’t know what else to do with them.” I ran my fingers along my lips; catching myself, I returned my hands to my lap. “Then I stopped, for a long time. I started again to help deal with my mother leaving.”

Trevor nodded, inviting me to continue.

“I think I kept writing because Jack liked it. It was part of how he saw me, or wanted to see me. The idyllic version of me.”

“Do you think you were writing for Jack, or for yourself?”

I hoisted myself up in my chair, my skin tingling. All this time, it had been for someone else. First, my parents, then Jack. The words I let out, the words I kept in. In my performance of being who they wanted, I had sacrificed myself. “It was for other people.”

Trevor’s head bobbed. “It’s sounds to me like it wasn’t working because it wasn’t for you. You need to write for you, like when you were a child. Just write, without judgment, as if no one is going to read it. Do it for you.”

Chapter 95

“And they lived happily ever after.” My father closed The Little Mermaid. It was my favourite bedtime story, and the one he read me most nights before I went to sleep. I had preferred the Grimms’ version, but after having a recurring nightmare of my tongue being cut out by a witch, my father switched to the adaptation with Ariel and Prince Eric.

“Father?” I asked as he reached to shut off my lamp.

“Yes, Grace?”

“Do people really live happily ever after?” I grabbed at the edges of my covers, feeling the indentations of its seams.

My father ran his hands along his forehead, messing his thick eyebrows, wiry hairs sticking out in every direction. He exhaled. “I’m not sure. I think people want to be happy, and they can be happy most of the time. But I don’t think anyone is happy all of the time.”