“Samantha,” Yves says with heat. “Now is not the time to—”
“You’re the one who’s always saying we can’t coddle her! She should know that she only has the seat because her friend died before he could take it.”
Clarke’s vision tunnels. A chill cracks open her skull and slithers down her spine.
“That’s not how it happened,” she hears Elise say. “Clarke, honey, look at me.”
“Clarke?” Imogen’s hand finds Clarke’s under the table. Clarke can barely feel it. “Are you all right?”
Across the table, Julian’s leaning over Ihaka to talk to Ndira. “Is it true? Did Elemental make Connor an offer?”
“It wasn’t firm,” Ndira says, looking worriedly at Clarke. “They were interested, and Connor was thinking about it, but—”
But Clarke wanted Elemental. Ever since Julian put the idea in her head that she could wipe Anders off the map by surpassing everything he’d done while flying for Elemental, that had been Clarke’s goal. Connor knew that.
“He didn’t accept it because of me,” Clarke says. The words are thorned, barbed, doing damage on the way out. “He wouldn’t have—he didn’t eventalkto me about—”
Voices raise and overlap. Raff says something about Clarke’s path to F0 that makes Ihaka’s face go thunderous; Anders says something about backup plans that makes Elise threaten to stab him with a fork. Yves tries to calm everyone down, and Imogenreacts as well as she ever does when a man tells her to stop having feelings.
Clarke can’t breathe.
It’s Kuari who notices. He says Clarke’s name, quiet and urgent, and shakes her arm.
Clarke tries to reassure him. She can’t. The words aren’t just barbed anymore, they’re vined, all clustered together and wrapped tightly around her throat. She’s panicking, and drowning, and reliving every conversation she had with Connor in the weeks before he died and wondering how she missed this, and—
22
Time skips. One second she’smotionless in her chair, the next Julian’s around the table and hauling Clarke to her feet, and the next they’re out of the dining room.
There’s air to breathe out here, even if it’s just a hallway. Clarke takes a gasping inhale. The oxygen breaks up some of the fog in her brain, the last few minutes coming into focus, and it’s not a pretty picture. She needs to do damage control. The cameras were rolling that whole time, and Sara won’t have been streaming live but there’s still footage.
She tugs on the hand that’s tucked into Julian’s. “I have to go back. I have to apologize to my management for causing a scene, and to my family for that happening in front of them, and Ndira and Elise for—for—”
There’s a sound behind Clarke, probably a restaurant employee coming down the hall. Julian swears and drags them both through the nearest door. It’s a single-occupant bathroom, probably meant for the private dining room their party is in. Ostentatious, like the rest of the restaurant. The sink is big enough for Clarke to take an ice bath.
Julian taps his knuckles on the panel next to the door to lockit and turns to Clarke. He looks equal parts worried, sad, and infuriated. “Finish that thought.”
No.No. Clarke doesn’t want to finish that thought out loud. Clarke doesn’t even want to have had that thought in her head.
“Clarke.”
“Don’t.”
“Clarke, ple—”
“I’m the reason he’s dead,” Clarke hisses, covering the two steps from where she is by the stupidly massive potted plant—why would anyone want atreein a fuckingbathroom—to Julian by the door in a heartbeat. “You want me to finish the thought? I need to go back in there and apologize to Ndira and Elise for being the reason that their son is dead.”
Clarke feels like she’s been torn in half. She feels like she’s one hitched breath away from puking in the ridiculous excuse for a toilet. She feels like going back in time and throwing her younger self out a window for putting one of her best friends in an impossible position without even knowing it.
Most of all, she feels overwhelming guilt.
Julian doesn’t back down in the face of her whirlwind. “Keep going.”
“If he’d taken the contract right when Yves offered it, he wouldn’t have been there that day.” The need to move takes over; she starts pacing. “He’d have been up with you in F0. And the only reason he wouldn’t have accepted the contract was because I wanted—”
“You knew Connor, Clarke. He loved you, but he wouldn’t have passed on a chance at F0 to spare your feelings.”
“But Ndira said—”