“She was high.”
“Or withdrawing.”
Ren frowned.
Daring to look at him again, I sat back on the cushion and squeezed my legs. “A while back, she’d invited me to her place. Sam and Gina were there too. They’d all been drinking. Then one of them pulled out something from their purse and it was pretty obvious what it was. Gina made a line on the coffee table and started…snorting it, and Sam and Kat were trying to get me to let loose.” His jaw ticked before he opened his mouth to ask the obvious question on his mind, but I shook my head. “I didn’t do it. I told them I was leaving because I didn’t want to be part of that. Kat wasn’t herself then, saying she’d done it a few times before and that I’d like it. That I’d…lose weight if I did it.
“She gave me some and I kept it. I don’t know why I did it, Ren, but I did. Maybe even thought about using it a few times. Until I forgot. Until I found other ways to cope when I was having bad days and wanted to… It doesn’t matter. Anyway, she kept asking me about it when I met her at Divers and that was when I realized it was still in my purse. I didn’t have to give it back to her, but I did.”
Ren swore again. Something he didn’t do often unless it was justified. If now wasn’t one of the times I wasn’t sure what was. “You can’t think that giving her that led to—”
“How can I not? She’s dead.”
Ren scrubbed his palms over his face, his silence thickening the tension in the room. I stood and started pacing, Ramsay near me with each anxious step I took. “I practically killed her! I handed her the weapon that took her life.”
Ren stood too, face red and eyes full of exasperation. “You didn’t kill her. Jesus, Della. I get that this must be hard for you, I really can’t imagine. But you didn’t hand her a gun or anything else that prompted her to end her life. That was her choice. She killed herself. And you don’t even know if she overdosed using the shit you gave her. If she was using before, it could have been anybody’s supply. Feel me?”
I didn’t feel him. I felt too much. Her death was a weight dropping on me from the Empire State Building. It crushed me. It’d end me. And maybe it should have because I’d never know for sure if I handed her the final dose that took her or not.
Stopping in the middle of the room, I hastily scrubbed the tears from my face. “I told her to get help. That was what I wanted. She s-said she wouldn’t use it. I wanted to believe she meant it.”
Ren walked over and gently grabbed my upper arms, squeezing them. “Thinking about what happened isn’t going to help anybody. You can’t go back and fix it.”
What he said sent chills through my body as I thought of Kat’s words to me. “I messed up, Della, but I’m trying to fix it.”
Sniffling back tears, I moved out of Ren’s hold. I wanted him here, but I wasn’t sure what I needed from him. He wasn’t wrong. There was no way I could blame myself solely for what happened to her, but that didn’t make it any easier knowing Katrina Murphy, one of my oldest friends, had died today.
Died.
Vanished from existence.
“I’m going to be sick,” I groaned, bolting to the bathroom. I heard Ren close behind me as I bent over the toilet and emptied my stomach and what little was inside it. He was at the sink, running water, and came over when I sat back against the wall behind me.
“Here.” He squatted down and handed me a wet washcloth, watching as I cleaned off my face and then flushing the toilet while I stared off at nothing in particular. “I don’t know what to say to make you feel better. But I’ll do whatever you need. Call somebody. Have you talked to your guard—Theo about this?”
His correction should have made me warm and fuzzy, but those feelings were buried under grief and mourning. “No. I didn’t tell him about any of it.”
“Della…”
“I don’t want him to look at me differently or be put into the middle of it if something goes wrong.”
His nose scrunched. “What could possibly go wrong?”
“I gave her drugs,” I reminded him dryly, not bothering to look at his face which I’m sure was staring at me with an argumentative look. “If she had it on her, my fingerprints would be on them. People would say they saw us together and she was acting strange. I could be—”
“Stop. Stop right there. If you think that anything is going to happen to you, then you’re an idiot. Not when you’ve got somebody like Theo in your life who’d rip the head off anybody who came close to trying to hurt you. I’d know, I was on the receiving end a time or two. He’s protected you for this long. He’ll do it for as long as it takes.”
I parted my lips to disagree, but…didn’t.
“You know I’m right,” he whispered, sitting beside me on the floor. He draped an arm over one of his knees and bumped my closest knee with his. “I may not like the guy all that much, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think he’s good for you. I’d just like to think you’re too good for him.”
I wanted to smile, the temptation was there, but I couldn’t. Instead, I stood
