OUR PLAYLIST | JENLISA

FORTY-FOUR

Lisa

Playlist: If I Get High | Nothing But Thieves
***

I don’t even know how I made it back to the venue in one piece.

I’d tempted Fate by going to the gallery, and Fate had called my bluff. I was fucking destroyed.

Seeing her with somebody else tore through my heart like a hot knife. It took the wind right out of my lungs.

Men had always looked at her, even when I held her hand. I went mad thinking of someone else touching her. Of her smiling at their jokes or cooking them dinner.

I’d been following the updates to The Huntsman’s Wife. I checked it every day. It was the only direct link I still had to her. She’d started posting regularly while she was living in Ely and she was cooking the game Dad had in the freezer. But a few weeks ago she’d posted a recipe for wild boar.

Dad didn’t hunt boar.

I didn’t think much of it at the time. I thought maybe it was something old, from when Taehyung was still alive, that she hadn’t gotten around to sharing. But now that I knew she was dating, my mind went crazy wondering if she was seeing someone who hunted, obsessing about who she cooked for, who she was spending time with.

I knew she hadn’t been ready to date when she met me, so I’d hoped, for my own selfish reasons, that she would stay single for a while, that maybe we had been a special circumstance. It was the only thing that had kept me halfway sane all these months. But she wasn’t waiting. She was seeing someone.

Nobody would ever love her like I would. She would never find the same devotion, even if she looked for a lifetime. I knew that with every cell of my being. She’d never know about it, but it would always be there. When she married someone else, had children, when she grew old, I would still be out there in the world, cherishing her in secret. If she ever needed anything, I’d make sure she had it. It would be my penance for the rest of my life for not being able to do it in person.

Three hours after the gallery, I was in my dressing room, sitting with my head in my hands, like I had been for the last hour. Jessa was on and I had about thirty minutes to showtime. I’d go through it like the puppet I was now. My label finally had its marionette. Everything would be an act from this point forward because I had nothing real left to give. All my joy in life had been drained out of me.

Someone knocked on my door. I didn’t move. I didn’t even look up. “Yeah?”

“Um, it’s Courtney. Can I come in?”

I let out a tired breath and dragged myself to my feet to open the door.

She stood there biting her lip. “Um, Lola’s here.”

My face brightened into one of my rare smiles. “Really? Where?”

She threw a thumb over her shoulder. “She’s in Jessa’s dressing room. She came to see you. I didn’t want to tell her where your room was in case—”

“No, it’s fine. Can you bring her?”

She nodded.

I was actually excited to see her. I wanted to see how she was doing. I’d called her a few times in rehab. She’d never come to the phone or called me back.

A moment later someone knocked on my dressing room door. I opened it, and when I did, I stood there, staring.

The woman standing there was nobody I knew. Even as I recognized her, it still was nobody I knew. The transformation was so shocking it disarmed me completely.