Page 26 of Bitter House
The one place no one else ever came.
The place she thought was safe.
In the small garden shed, Cole grabs two shovels, passing one to me. “I guess we should just”—he motions with the shovel, pretending to dig—“start anywhere?”
I swallow. Vera’s presence in the house is undeniable, but if I really think about it, this is where I see her the most. Tearing up her garden will be the ultimate betrayal.
Then again, she’s already betrayed me in the worst way possible. With that in mind, I stab the shovel into the ground. The dirt is hard and barely gives way, but I don’t relent. I dig again, unearthing a bush of bright pink flowers.
Taking a cue from me, Cole walks to the opposite corner of the garden and begins to dig. He’s faster than I am, and I swear his dirt must be looser than mine because he seems to clear a sizable space with relative ease, seven bushes of various flowers thrown aside in the time it takes me to remove two.
I pause, swiping the back of my hand across my forehead and huffing a breath.
“You good?”
At first I think he might be teasing me over how slow I’m going, but when I look up, there seems to be genuine concern in his eyes. I’m so confused by this man and who he is now. He’s nothing like the boy I remember.
“I’m fine,” I say, getting back to work.
Cole seems to be digging down deep, while I’m working to uproot the flowers across the surface, my arms burning from exertion.
“You can take a break,” he says, when I’ve paused again.
“Didn’t need your permission,” I snap, out of breath.
He returns to work, then stops suddenly. “You know, sometimes I think you’re nothing like her, but then…there she is.”
My eyes narrow on him, his face painted with shadows. “Excuse me?”
“You claim to be so angry with Vera, you go on and on about the fact that she’s cold and you could never understand her, but how are you any different? How have you ever been any different? You’re her made over.”
Rage grips my organs, forcing my throat to constrict. I grip the wood handle of the shovel. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Oh”—he chuckles to himself—“I do.”
“I’m nothing like Vera. I have friends. Real friends.” Well, a friend, anyway. “I’m a good person, Cole. Just because I’m not nice to you, because you’ve never been nice to me, doesn’t mean anything.”
“I’m being nice to you now,” he points out. “All I’ve done is be nice to you since we arrived, Bridget. What more do you want from me?”
I open my mouth to argue, to give an example of when he hasn’t been nice since my arrival home, but an example eludes me. Is he right?
“I’ve been nice to you since I came back to Bitter House. Yes, I was a shitty kid who was overcompensating for the fact that my house wasn’t even mine, and you reminded me of that every chance you got, but I’m not that kid anymore. I guess you can’t see that. To you, I’ll always be the kid who teased and ignored you because I was jealous, but?—”
“Jealous?” I cry out, nothing about that statement making sense. “Jealous of what? The fact that my parents were dead? The fact that my grandmother could hardly stand to look at me? That I was alone all the time?”
He swallows, dropping his gaze. “Perception versus reality, I guess.” He meets my eyes again. “Because, from where I stood, I saw the big house, the fact that you got everything you could ever want?—”
“Except love. A family.”
“I had my mom, I won’t apologize for that, but I had nothing else. Don’t you see that? I’d lived in Bitter House since I was six years old. It was the only home I’d ever known, and yet I didn’t have a room I could make my own. I didn’t get to make requests for dinner or have birthday parties with all my friends. I walked on eggshells my entire life here. Add to that the fact that I didn’t have the money to do half of what you did. I didn’t have a car when I turned sixteen or a new phone when my screen cracked, like yours did all the time. And yeah, maybe looking back, those are pretty crappy things to complain about in the grand scheme of things, but when you were constantly being handed everything you could want and all of my things were shoved into the one room I was allowed to exist in inside this house I didn’t belong in, it wasn’t exactly the time of my life.”
“So why fight to stay here, then?” I demand. “Why not just walk away?”
“Because it is mine now. It’s proof that…” He stops, pressing his lips together with a huff, and looks away. “It’s proof that Vera actually wanted me here. That I misread all of this. That she gave me the house over her own family because…maybe she thought of me as family, too. Maybe she…maybe she didn’t hate me after all.”
I stare at him, listening to his words, the truth of them in his voice, and I realize I’ve had him wrong all this time. We were just two kids living in this tomb of a house, feeling unwanted and out of place.
“I’m sorry,” I say finally, my voice powerless. “I never thought of it like that.”