Verity

by Colleen Hoover

I hear the crack of his skull before the spattering of blood reaches me.

Death by routine.

Some don’t even look up from their cell phones as they pass right by the accident.

Here, I’m invisible. Unimportant. Manhattan is too crowded to give a shit about me, and I love her for it.

I just saw a man die. I was so close to him, his blood is on me.

He wants to be invisible in this city. Just like me.

“Lowen.”

“Jeremy,”

“I pulled my eight-year-old daughter’s body out of a lake five months ago.”

If we really are headed to the same meeting, it makes our chance meeting on the street seem somewhat suspicious.

My mother only ever brought guilt into my life. Nothing less, nothing more. Just consistent guilt.

Never mind that the other woman in our relationship was also me.

“Her name is Verity Crawford,” she says. “I’m sure you’re familiar with her work.”

Is Verity his wife?

And that’s why I stay at home and write. I think the idea of me is better than the reality of me.

“It was one of Verity’s favorite books.” “Your wife read one of my books?”

I didn’t stop our sexual relationship out of jealousy—I stopped it out of respect for the girl who wasn’t aware of it.

“She lost both of her daughters. Anyone who suffers through something like that would want to find a way out.”

Somewhere up there is the house, and somewhere inside of that house lies Verity Crawford. I wonder if she knows I’m coming.

“The world was her manuscript. No surface was safe.”

“I didn’t like being inside her head.”

Really fucked up characters.

I sometimes think back on the night I met Jeremy and wonder, had we not made eye contact, would my life still end the same? As soon as I see Jeremy’s name mentioned, I scan a little more of the page. It’s an autobiography.

Was it my destiny from the beginning to suffer such a tragic end? Or is my tragic end a result of poor choices rather than fate?

“I stretch truths where I see fit. I’m a writer.”

You can’t look at someone the way he looked at me—with the entirety of his past—without also imagining the future.

The kiss was full of both desire and respect—two things a lot of men didn’t seem to know could go hand in hand.

Until he discovered the one thing that meant more to him than I did.

The man was arrested for rape because his wife was unable to give consent. Much like Verity.

When Jeremy’s eyes are on mine, it feels like an exploration of the deepest parts of me.

I. Was. Taken. By. Him. Addicted to him.

It wasn’t until two months after I’d completely moved out that Jeremy found out I didn’t have my own apartment anymore.

I leaned forward, gripped his headboard, and then bit down on it, stifling my screams.

woman knows if she wants to keep a man forever, she has to act like she could get over him in a day.

But then the night we got engaged became the night we conceived.

But there is no light where we’re going. This is your final warning. Darkness ahead.

I lift my head again. She’s staring straight at me.

But two weeks in this house? With a woman who scares me, a manuscript I shouldn’t be reading, and a man I know way too many intimate details about?

He’s looking up at Verity’s bedroom window.

She wasn’t staring at me through the office window. She wasn’t standing at her window, looking at Crew. And she didn’t turn off her own TV.

It’s fitting when it comes to my mother. She cared for me like she cared for her body. Very little.

I’m here to discuss the first thing my baby ever stole from me. Jeremy.

Twins. Two of them.

“No, it isn’t. I could do things you would never forgive me for. But you’ll always forgive your children.”

He fell asleep while I was in the bathroom, attempting to abort his daughters with a wire hanger.

I don’t care how good of a writer Verity is; she would never compromise herself as a mother by writing something so horrid if she didn’t actually experience that.

Oh, let’s see, Jeremy. Your brain-damaged wife made eye contact with me. She walked to her bedroom window and waved at your son. She tried to abort your babies while you were asleep in your bed.

And, while I’m almost certain I locked it before I fell asleep all those years ago, it doesn’t explain why I woke up the next morning with a broken wrist and covered in blood.

-That’s how it usually works, right? Mediocre author gets successful, hires shittier author to do her job?

“Never read the comments. Verity taught me that years ago.”