I grasp the comforter and drag my unwieldy body precariously up to her level, vaguely realizing I’ve forgotten to cover my eye, but the cotton candy in my brain prevents me from caring. Stella stares, her head tilting. Or maybe I’m tilting. “Did you give me those?” I manage.
“No. I wasn’t trying to kill you like you were me. You’ve just had some of my S-pills, Phoenix.” She smiles beatifically. “You’ll be all right after you take a long nap.”
Phoenix, that’s my name. How does she know my name? Sleeping pills. I swing around and careen into the bathroom, banging into the door and landing on my knees on the cold tile before the toilet, where I jam my finger down my throat until I wretch into the bowl. I do it again and again until nothing comes up.
She hovers over me, her arms crossed. “It’s already in your system.”
I sit on the cold floor with my back against the vanity, staring at the rain lashing the windows. The gray day has turned to the blackest night, leaving us blind to the storm outside. “Not all of it.”
“When were you going to kill me?” she asks, tossing the bag of pills onto the counter.
“I wasn’t,” I croak.
“I trusted you and you lied to me and used me.” She looks genuinely hurt. “Has anything you’ve told me been true?”
“I’m sorry.” I rest my cheek on the cabinet, warm in comparison to the floor. “I had to know what happened to my mother.”
“I would’ve told you if you’d asked.”
I shake my head, fighting to keep my eyes open. “I had to lie…to get to you. I thought you killed her.”
“I loved her,” she protests. “I would never have hurt her.”
I allow my eyelids to close. “I didn’t know. I wanted to tell you last night, but you were too drunk. You might’ve told Cole…” An idea pushes its way through the fog. “It was him, wasn’t it?”
She sits next to me and takes my hand in hers. “No one killed your mother.” The anger has drained from her voice. “She just overdosed.”
“No.” I desperately want to share the details of what I remember and the reasons I believe Cole murdered her, but I’m too drugged. “She hated heroin,” I get out. “She was happy.”
“That’s the thing about heroin,” Stella says. “Even when you hate it and think you’re past it, it can come back and bite you.”
I curl into a ball atop the soft bath mat, allowing my eyes to close. I can hear the ocean sloshing against the underside of the floor, rising higher and higher. “I was there that night.” I force my mouth to continue pushing the words out. “I saw Cole come home. I was worried you would find them—I told Jackson to warn them.”
“Have you talked about it with Jackson?” Her voice is tentative.
“This afternoon.” It’s becoming more and more difficult to speak.
“Why did you choose me?” she asks. “Why not him or Cole?”
“You said…a book. In an interview. You talked about coming clean. I thought you were ready to stop…”
She inhales sharply. I feel her move and hear her walking away, the cloud of sleep finally settling over me like a fuzzy blanket, melting my worries into oblivion. Sudden cold and wet. My eyes flutter open to see her standing above me with an empty glass. She pulls me up to sitting and pours a warm Red Bull down my throat. “What the hell?” I splutter.
“I’m sorry.” She jams her knee into my back to keep me sitting. “You can’t go to sleep.”
I wipe the water from my eyes to see she’s crying. But then she’s always crying. The woman cries more than anyone I’ve ever met. “You shouldn’t have drugged me if you didn’t want me to sleep,” I grumble. “I have caffeine pills in my purse.”
I allow my eyes to close again while she rummages in my purse, coming up with the bottle of seven-hour Zing pills. She places one on my tongue, then puts the Red Bull to my lips to wash it down.
“It was Cole’s idea to drug you,” she admits. “He wanted me to kill you, but I refused.”
The news would be more upsetting if I weren’t so damn tired. “Why?”
She extracts a picture from her back pocket and thrusts it into my hands. It’s the picture of Iris and me that I keep in my wallet. “You went in my wallet?” I ask, surprised. I never should have brought the picture with me, but it gave me strength, reminded me of why I was here. And I never thought anyone would be rummaging around in my wallet.
“Madison did. She broke in wanting to get dirt on you so you wouldn’t take her role. She showed Cole, and he brought it to me.” She shoves the Red Bull in my mouth again before I can respond. The effervescence is sharp on my throat. “You didn’t let Mimi go, did you? Cole said—”
“God no. I adore her. That much is true,” I swear.
Outside, the wind howls. “I’d wanted to meet you,” Stella says. “But Iris was protective of you. She wouldn’t introduce me until she was sure I’d stay in your life. Then after she died, I tried to find you—”
“You did?” Even in my diminished state, the irony of our situation does not escape me.
She nods. “But you’d disappeared. Your grandparents didn’t want you to have anything to do with your former life.”
I finish the Red Bull and wipe my chin on my shirt, feeling ever so slightly more alert. “I wish you’d found me. Things would be different.” I yearn to talk more with her about all of this, but there’s no time now. “What’s Cole’s plan with me?”
“He wanted me to kill you before you killed me,
