hana’s Reviews > Nightshade > Status Update

“I can’t be a CEO, Robert. I can’t raise six girls. I can’t manage her care. I can’t do any of it.” My voice cracks, a hoarse whisper. “I’m twenty-three.”
“Slow down, Alex.”
“I’m twenty three,” I whisper.
“I’ve watched you do most of those things before just fine. You’re the most capable man I know.”
“I’ve never been fine.” Not until her. ”

“let yourself be loved until midnight.”
There’s only so much willpower a woman can have. And for the first time, I let myself relax in his company. I surrender myself to his stupid plan. “Midnight.”
“Midnight, a hundred years from now.”

“It feels like I’ve been alone in my corner for a long time, okay?” I sober my expression. “I’ve built my walls too high.”
“They’re worth the climb.”
“They aren’t.”
We stop on the mansion steps, his tone soft. “They are. For me, they are.”

“Whatever secret reason you’re here for,tell me Shawn Miller is all part of it.”
“It wouldn’t matter if he wasn’t.”
“You’re too good a woman for a man like him.”
“And you’d be better?”
“Ophelia,love,I’d be significantly worse. But I can’t watch you with him.”
“Then look away.”
He looks at me like I’ve asked him to pluck the moon from the sky and bottle it for me.“Can’t.”

“He didn’t deserve it.”
My shoulders tense. “The date?”
“That dress.”
“Don’t say things like that.”
“You look beautiful.” He says it so simply, like it’s not an opinion but a fact; not up for debate.
“The dress is Colette’s,” I whisper. I don’t dare tell him that I spent half the date imagining him pulling it off me, not Shawn.
“It was made for you.”

Eike pulls his car door open again and I jump out of my skin. He deposits a bag of Jelly Babies onto my lap. “Colette said you would want them, miss.”
To be loved is to be known, and this week, I feel both. “Oh…thank you. These are the best.”

“Problem, Winters?”
You’re my problem, Alex. You’re all of my problems.

“A son should not need his father.”
I needed him a long time ago. I needed him when I broke my first bone at seven. When I had my first breakup at fourteen. When I first dialed for help for my mother at sixteen. When I first checked all my sisters into a hotel at seventeen. When I left Yale at nineteen. My life could’ve been made easier by a present father.
I needed him then.
I need him now.”

“Rather die than go in?” he asks, an easy grin spreading across his face.
“Something like that.”
With two fingers, he shifts the car into reverse. “I’ll back up. I can make it look like an accident. You’d be the third one I have done today.”
“Marvelous. If you could just throw me off the drawbridge when you’re done.”
“I heard the fish needed feeding.”

“There are two girls living inside me: the one clinging onto her final shred of hope, and the one that wants to burn the world down. One tugs me backward, the other forward.”