“Margot, what’s wrong?” I ask.
“It’s nothing,” She takes a few steps forward, trying to herd me away from whatever upset her. My feet stay planted firmly in place.
“Is he back there? Did he hurt you?”
“No, he’s gone. He just ruined some of my things on his way out,” she says, adding, “It’s not a big deal.”
But it’s too late. I’m already striding off towards the room. When I step inside, I stop dead in my tracks, taken aback by the mess. The room is mostly empty. No bed, no dresser, no nightstands. Just one empty bookshelf on the far wall and a huge pile of… well, I’m not really sure what.
“What is all this?” I ask Margot, who’s standing right behind me.
“My books,” she answers quietly. “He tore them all up.”
Taking another step inside, I survey the mess. Book pages are torn from their spines and scattered in heaps on the ground. Amidst all the white pages and black text, an occasional dash of color sticks out. Those are the mangled covers. Some are aliens, others are pastel flowers or couples. She must’ve had over a hundred books, and they’re all ruined.
“Why would he do this?” I turn to ask her.
“He was angry that I wouldn’t talk to him or tell him where I was this weekend.”
Running a hand through my hair, I look around the room. “What about the rest of it? Where’s all the furniture?”
She shrugs, looking tired and defeated. “He took it all.”
I open my mouth to speak again, but Margot cuts me off. “It’s fine, Ethan. I don’t care about any of the furniture. I can buy new stuff. Jeremy knew the only possession I really cared about was my books. I guess that’s why he took his anger out on them.”
“We should call the police. This is destruction of property.”
Margot just shakes her head. “I don’t want to do that. I just want to move on from this whole situation.”
“Okay,” I grit out, tempted to call them anyway. Jeremy shouldn’t get away with this. I can tell Margot is destroyed by it, even if she isn’t willing to admit it. “Can we at least take some photos, in case you change your mind?”
“I guess,” she says with another small shrug.
Margot disappears for a minute while I snap some pictures of the wreckage on my phone. She returns with a trash bag in one hand and starts shoving handfuls of paper inside.
I’ve never seen her like this. She seems broken. Hollow. A shell of the smartass woman I’ve come to know over the past two years.
She plucks one paper out of the carnage, stiffening as she reads it.
“What’s that?” I ask.
Without a word or so much as a glance in my direction, she passes it to me. Scrawled across the page in thick, black marker are the wordsHave fun sleeping with your book boyfriends tonight, bitch.
A quiet sniffle echoes through the room, but she doesn’t stop grabbing fistfuls of pages and cramming them inside the bag.
“Margot,” I say softly.
“It’s fine,” she insists, sniffling again.
“It’s not fine. This is seriously fucked up.”
Her head whips in my direction. “You think I don’t know that, Ethan?” she snaps.
Without thinking, I march forward and pull her into a tight hug against my chest. A sob breaks free from her chest, making her whole body heave against mine.
“It’s okay,” I tell her, stroking a hand over her back. “It’ll be okay.”
We stand there like that for several minutes. Her crying, and me doing my best to comfort her. Is it the right thing to do with my employee? Who knows. But right now, Margot needs someone to lean on, and as far as I can tell, there’s no one else.