What Grows Dies Here

But were that hope of pride and power

Now offered with the pain

Ev’n then I felt—that brightest hour

I would not live again:

For on its wings was dark alloy

And as it fluttered—fell

An essence—powerful to destroy

A soul that knew it well.

The Happiest Day

~Edgar Allen Poe

PROLOGUE

Great Divide – Ira Wolf

“If you could’ve told yourself one thing before all of this, what would it be?”

A pause. The clock in the corner ticked. Street noise hovered over the classical music that was always playing in the expensively appointed office.

Whenever I heard Bach or Beethoven, I thought about the white slip covered sofa I was currently sitting on. The view of the ocean out the window, the color-coded books artfully arranged on the built-in shelves, the framed degree from Princeton. The sensation of wanting to tear it all apart, escape my skin, scream at the top of my lungs.

I picked at my manicure.

The need to escape was overwhelming. But I’d made a promise to myself. To my friends. That I was going to try to deal with this how a normal, well-adjusted human might, not in the self-destructive ways I had for the past year and a half. Even before the intervention, I’d known that it was a matter of time before I really hurt myself. Before I killed myself in my quest to escape the past.

I’d known that all along. That was the point of it all.

But I’d made promises, seen the pain on my friends’ faces, the reality of what I had been doing to people I loved dearly. I’d seen the way I’d ruined the man I loved. How I’d killed everything we had, scorched the earth so nothing else could possibly grow.

And I didn’t do anything halfway.

So I had to do this. Had to answer her question.

“That the future is going to break you,” I said, my voice a husky whisper. “That it will absolutely ruin you. But you will survive. Even when you don’t want to. You will survive.” I rolled my eyes. “Jesus fucking Christ, I sound like a Gloria Gaynor song,” I muttered.

My therapist regarded me with a tilt to her head, her green eyes assessing me over the top of her Chanel glasses. I figured they weren’t prescription. She wore them because, along with her office in Santa Monica and her hourly rate, they helped her look the part.

That’s what we were all trying to do, wasn’t it? Look the part? Play the part? Avoid, under all circumstances, being seen for what we were.

“You think you’re broken?” she asked finally, in that placid, calm voice of hers.

I raised my brow at her in a ‘really?’ gesture.

“I fell in love with a murderer, got impregnated by him, let myself hope for some kind of warped future, and then got it all shattered, literally, by a bullet tearing through my body, killing my baby,” I said when it was clear she wasn’t going to be satisfied with an eyebrow raise. “Now, I’m a good liar. A great one, in fact. But even I can’t say there’s a way to be whole after that. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

My voice didn’t shake. No tears fell. No outward emotion. Inside, I was torn, bleeding, screaming. But I’d come to tolerate that. I’d perfected the mask on the outside to look as close to the woman I had been before. Almost everyone was fooled. Except those who knew me best. They saw that I was wrong, ruined and broken. And they also knew me too well to think that they could do anything to change that.

But they wanted me to change myself. Heal myself.

Almost all of them wanted that, at least.