1. Maybe And Might

ONE

Maybe And Might

NICHOLAI

People used to tell me that everything would be okay. When they found Elspeth, she was blue in the face with a belt tied around her neck. They told me that she was still breathing and that she would be okay. As they lowered her into the ground a week later, they all clapped my back and told me the worst was over. Her suffering was over. She was happy now. At peace.

The rest of us would be okay.

A month later, my mom fucked everything up in her desperate attempts to feel okay . She mixed the wrong prescriptions and passed out in the bath. I found her floating there several hours later, lavender-scented candle wax still ripe in the air, a teacup of diluted whiskey on the counter, the pages of an abused paperback stuck together in a soggy mass, soaking in the tub with the body. Nobody could tell me if it was deliberate or accidental. Bad luck, bad timing, bad news … or planned, staged, and arranged as a dramatic, lavender-scented portrait of pain.

It was while I was standing there, absorbing the lavender and the whiskey and the soggy pages, that I realised things were not going to be okay. Not if people continued to sit back and do nothing, hoping beyond hope and believing beyond rationality while the whole world went to shit around them.

Surviving was hard . All the pain in my life built up like limescale inside a kettle—once shiny and new, now rusted and used, poisoning me with every sip of the memories it contained.

I wasted eight years after Elspeth's death with my head thumping against a parade of textbooks. I wanted to know everything there was to know about the science of saving people. I filled my head with trauma, with information, with statistics. I studied until it became a compulsion. Until my skin itched with the need to know more, to do better, just more, more, more . I skipped sleep, I refused to eat, and I drove my professors and supervisors crazy in my dogged quest to fast-track my degree and get to the next step, and the next.

But still … after all these years … there was no specific solution. There was no secret formula for saving a person, no magic wand to wave to make things righ t again. I was an all-or-nothing guy, and this epiphany drove me insane .

They gave me the same consolation over and over again .

It wasn't your fault.

There's nothing you could have done .

Eventually, I graduated from learning to practising, but it was all a waste because I still didn't know . I was still losing. I was losing friends, friends of friends, and complete strangers. I lost a student in my first six months of social work at the school. He jumped in front of a bus three hours before our appointment.

He didn't even want to give me a chance .

Around me, they were dropping like flies, and I was losing hope.

I was beginning to believe them.

There's nothing I could have done.

It isn't up to me .

The reality was that people needed to save themselves, and there was nothing I could really do—nothing any of us could really do. Our only hope was to stand by on the sidelines, waving our pathetic flags of support every day and fearing the shrill sound of the phone every night.

Fuck, I hated that . And there were times when I couldn't accept it.

Like when she walked into my office .

Mika Grey .

She had the same look about her—the one I'd seen on Elspeth's face. I couldn't shake the sick suspicion that it was only a matter of time before the need to chase pain would start up inside her, driving her to change, to slip into that cupboard of psychology that flipped the world into a game of chance.

This might help.

This might change everything for the better.

You might survive this.

I might be able to save you.

The difference was that Mika didn't have anybody. She wasn't anybody else's Elspeth. Nobody wanted her, and nobody was going to stop her when that little monster inside her grew fangs. When I saw that look on her face, I finally tipped over the line between understanding madness and experiencing madness. It was the only explanation for the errant thoughts that flittered through my mind.

Maybe it's time to throw it all away. I could just … toss it out. Everything I had learned. The certificates, the awards, the half-finished books and my clusterfuck of a thesis. Everything I had wasted my life on leading up to this moment.

None of it works. Throw it away. Do whatever it takes to save her. Just do something different.

Step up, force yourself into her life .

Take over.

Save her.

I was only a month away from finishing my time at the school, only days away from handing in my thesis, and admittedly a few years off resolving my toxic saviour complex. I had a job lined up at the centre in town, the same one I had been interning at for the past year. Everything was set in concrete. The life I had been working towards was right there, within grasp, but then … so was Mika Grey.

Her skin was too pale, her eyes too bright. She looked feverish, her cheeks flushed, and her hands shaky. She had slipped into my office like a pale shadow, already a year older than the other students, but looking like they scared the crap out of her … until she spoke, and I heard the complete lack of fear in her voice.

It was toneless, smooth as silk, a little deeper and huskier than I expected. As soon as she spoke, she pressed her fingers to her pursed lips like she wanted to feel the words. Like she could capture them and examine them for the strange curiosity they were.

Maybe in my temporary insanity, I forgot to see her as a task and began to see her as a person. White as a sheet and shaking like one strung out in strong winds. She was barely tethered, hanging on by her fingertips … and I hadn't heard what she had sa id.

Fuck , what were we talking about ?

I was distracted.

There was just something about her. She was completely closed off and completely aware. Her large, unblinking eyes were taking in every minute detail of my office, glancing at things I hadn't even noticed. She stared at my plants for an abnormally long amount of time, a tiny crease appearing between her eyebrows.

She was so fucking sad, so fucking lost, and yes, she was fucking beautiful. I could be honest about that. She was objectively stunning. All thick, heavy golden waves and eyes so green they were hypnotising.

I could imagine her at my college—she would be a freshman by now if she hadn't been kept back a year. I could see her laughing in the sun, leaning back in the grass with a circle of friends who all adored her, drawn to this stunning creature. If she were happy, she would glow.

She would be a magnet.

I would have to fight through a line of men just to beg her to have coffee with me.

Sitting there in my office, pale and thin and drawn, without even the ghost of happiness left to haunt her, she was breaking my heart.

Do whatever it takes .

That thought dug roots, attaching to my psyche.