Total pages in book: 151
Estimated words: 145746 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 729(@200wpm)___ 583(@250wpm)___ 486(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 145746 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 729(@200wpm)___ 583(@250wpm)___ 486(@300wpm)
At some point, you’ll have to reckon with the possibility that you may want to spend your life with someone, and if they want to spend their life with you, you’ll have to let them in.
I don’t know if Monk wants to spend his life with me, and I’m not even sure he should, but this taste, this glimpse I’ve had the last few weeks, of how we could be together—I’m willing to fight for that, whatever shape it takes. All this time, my fear has not been that Monk wouldn’t accept me once he knew the whole truth, but that he would. Not that once he knows the truth he will leave, but that he’ll stay.
How can I ask him to stay?
I don’t even know the turns my life will take, how bad it might get. He would have a front-row seat to my pain, my volatility, to that dark sinkhole that sucks me down. He’d witness that tornado that whirls me so fast and high my feet don’t touch the ground, and my head… spins. My world spins, and when I fall back down, who knows what havoc that storm will have wreaked?
This condition has robbed me of so much, and it’s not done. I’m sure there will be more opportunities, friendships, jobs I lose because of it, but this—Monk—I lost him once. I won’t lose him again, at least not without a fight.
Not without the truth. Finally the whole truth.
“I want to tell you something,” I eventually say. “You deserve to know what really happened back then.”
“At Finley.” He frowns, searching my face.
Swallowing my tears, I nod. “Yeah, at Finley.”
He’s only at the mantel, a few feet away, but it feels like there’s an ocean separating us. The muscle in his jaw ticks and he draws in a sharp breath through his nose.
I gulp down my trepidation and misgivings and say the words I’ve entrusted only to my friends and family, and to very few in the industry.
“Monk, I have bipolar disorder.”
FORTY-FIVE
Monk
“You what?”
I can’t wrap my mind around what Verity said. It’s like she’s speaking another language it’s such a foreign concept.
“I have bipolar disorder.” She stares at me unblinking, but also like she’s braced for something. I’m not sure what.
I cross the room and take a seat beside her on the couch. “Are you saying you have a formal diagnosis, or are you like colloquially bipolar? The way people throw around ‘I’m so ADHD,’ but they’re just kind of scatterbrained.”
“Oh, it’s definitely a formal diagnosis.” Her smile is a shadow of its usual self. “Bipolar 1.”
A dozen questions queue up in my head, and I’m not sure where to start asking.
“When were you diagnosed?” I settle on.
“Um, I was twenty-one.” She plucks at the dangling threads of the torn knee in her jeans. “Right after I left Finley. But it started in Cali.” She grimaces. “Earlier than that actually. It started with my parents.”
“Meaning what? You said they had a volatile relationship that ended badly.”
“My father and mother were very much in love.” She blinks and pulls in a sharp breath. “But Daddy had these… moods. We didn’t know what else to call them where he would act strangely. Way down one day and way up, like on top of the world for no reason, the next. We didn’t know exactly what was wrong. We never will. He was never diagnosed. Never took meds. Never spoke to a therapist. Like so many then—hell, like so many still—he just coped.”
“You told me they died together in the fire?”
“Not technically.” She stares at her hands in her lap for several seconds before going on. “He and Mama were arguing. He was paranoid. Hearing voices. He pushed her and she fell and hit her head.”
“You were there?”
“Yeah. I ran to get help, and when I came back, the house was on fire, and he was outside with Mama lying on the ground.” A tear glides over her cheek, and she swipes at it impatiently. “When he realized Mama wasn’t going to make it, he ran back into the fire.”
“Jesus, Vee.” The pain is so obvious all over her face, and even though we’re on the couch together, she’s too far away. I move over until I can take her hand. “That’s fucking traumatic.”
She chokes out a laugh. “Understatement. The aunties were there for me, though. They took me in. At least I had that.”
“Walk me through this. All of it. What happened in Cali?”
“I was severely depressed.” Her eyes—haunted, unfocused—are fixed on the rug. “I wasn’t getting out of bed, skipping class, extreme sadness. When I started having really dark thoughts, it scared me and I called my aunts. I ended up withdrawing from school and taking some time at home. The doctor started me on an antidepressant, but what we didn’t know—couldn’t have known—was that it was the beginning of a cycle. We treated the depression. I had a period of stability, but nothing addressed the mania, so when it came on, I spiraled.”