Looking Inside

“Go, Trey,” she said miserably. “Just go. Please.”

“Jesus,” he hissed. He was floored. “Eleanor, what the hell is happening?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered, sounding so incredulous, he couldn’t help but believe she was just as bewildered as he was at that moment. “I don’t know anymore. Maybe my mother has been right all along. Maybe I have been grieving unnaturally.” She sniffed and raked the back of her hand across her cheek. “Look, I’m sorry. I know you came all the way out here to get me. But I think I should stay here with my parents tonight. Is it all right if you just let yourself out?”

“Eleanor,” he called, but he was talking to her back. He strode after her down the hallway, halting only when he saw the rear of her disappearing up a flight of stairs. A moment later, he heard the sound of a door shutting briskly.

He just stood there for a minute, as dazed as he would have been if someone had just clobbered him on the head for no reason.

TWENTY-TWO

She arrived back in the city the next day as dusk began to settle. The temperature had plummeted that morning. A frigid wind blew off a lead-colored Lake Michigan. Entering the condo felt like walking into a cold tomb.

She turned up the heat on the thermostat. She walked through the chilled condo, pausing to look out the window onto the traffic flying down Lake Shore Drive. It struck her then, how she had previously imagined asking Caddy for her advice about how to progress with her seduction of Trey.

It’d never once crossed her mind that Caddy had been much more familiar with Trey than Eleanor had ever been. It was so bizarre to consider it, that there was such a crucial thread of Caddy’s life that she’d never even imagined. Logically, it made sense, of course. Everyone associated with dozens, even hundreds, of people through their jobs on a daily basis who their family members and intimates never knew about.

But the unexpected connection—a special connection, according to Trey—between Caddy and the man she’d fallen in love with had left her reeling.

Bleeding.

Was it jealousy? Is that what she was experiencing?

Maybe, in part, it was. It was a hard pill to swallow, to realize that her sister and Trey had shared a special relationship way before she’d ever shown up on the scene. But that’s not what was mainly paining her.

It was that she’d fallen in love with a man under false pretenses. She’d been pretending to be something she wasn’t. Trey’s admission that he’d been attracted to Caddy, that he’d found her special, was like a knife in her side, but it also made perfect sense. Caddy was passionate and exciting, beautiful and brilliant. It wasn’t difficult to imagine the two of them together at all.

In fact, it was sickeningly easy.

She kept picturing Trey’s bewildered expression last night. She’d been shocked to the core by his revelation that he’d known and cared for Caddy, but he’d been sideswiped as well. Confronting Caddy’s death in such an unexpected way had obviously pained him. She remembered the look on his face when he brought up losing his friend, that bad-boy rocker Gerald Sturgis, who had died from an overdose.

He’d seemed even more torn up by Caddy’s death.

Trey had tried to call her several times since last night. She hadn’t answered his calls. With a heavy heart, she’d revoked the permission-to-enter form she’d left at the front desk for him. The idea of him knocking on her front door, confronting him . . . well, it broke her heart to consider it. She couldn’t bring herself to talk to him. It was hard to put exactly why into words.

It was a little like that first time she’d ever done a striptease for him. She’d gotten so hot during her performance, so lost in her role. After she’d brought herself off, it’d suddenly hit her in a rush. She’d just masturbated in front of a stranger. She’d just been intimate with a stranger.

Shame swamped her every time she thought of how baldly, how selfishly, she’d seduced him.

Her need mortified her. Was she really so desperate as to enter into a frenzied, hot, mind-numbing relationship with Trey because she needed to forget her grief?

She suspected now it was true. Her mother had been right.

She’d been acting out, behaving like a bold, passionate playgirl—acting like Caddy—because she needed to fill that gaping hole in her chest.

Caddy had advised her to take a bite out of life, to stop being afraid. But Caddy and Trey and her mom—and Eleanor herself—hadn’t understood just how ill-equipped she was to take on that role.

The realization that Trey and Caddy had known each other for years, that they’d been attracted to each other, had shattered the illusion somehow, vanished the glamour of what was happening between Trey and her. Last night, when Trey had said he knew Caddy, it’d been like the magic spell had suddenly evaporated. She’d been left standing i

n front of him naked, all of her inadequacies, her lies, the thinness of her character, all exposed to his eyes.

The atmosphere of the silent, oppressive condo swallowed up the sound of her choked sob.

—

The following week, she looked up when she heard a knock on her opened office door.

“You’ve been avoiding me ever since you got back,” Jimmy said, stepping past the threshold.