I've Died Here Before novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Jealous

Holden's POV

Addie read the seventh line three times at my kitchen table, with her bare feet on the next chair.

"This one's different," she said. "The others are what happened. This one's got a fight in it."

I had written it the morning after.

Sept 12. I told her the truth. She called me a liar and went to tea with Giselle.

"What did I say?" she asked. "Say it exactly."

"You don't have to hear it."

"I do."

I stood at the counter with my back to her, because I could not say it to her face.

"I told you everything at breakfast," I said. "I told you Dean would kill you at 8:44, and that I had watched it six times. I begged.

"You put your coffee down and looked at me for a long time.

"You said, 'You're jealous, Holden. You've always been jealous of Giselle, and now you're making up a murder to keep me away from her.'"

The kitchen was very quiet.

"Then you put on your lipstick," I said. "You said she was the only person in New York who had been kind to you this week.

"You walked out in your cream coat.

"And at 8:44 I was standing in the door of the Linden Room, looking at a clock, with her brother's text on my phone that said it was done."

My voice had gone wrong somewhere in the middle.

I heard the chair scrape.

Addie crossed the kitchen and put her forehead between my shoulder blades.

"I'm so sorry," she said into my shirt.

"You didn't know."

"I should have."

"You couldn't. That's what I'm trying to tell you. It was never you. It was that I couldn't make you hear it."

"That's what you've been carrying."

"That's the line I hear when I close my eyes," I said. "You were always jealous."

She turned me around and took my face in her hands.

"I'm not going anywhere," she said. "Not to tea. Not to the water.

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