“Don’t change the subject.” He stroked a strand of hair back from her damp, sticky cheek, and let his fingertips linger there. “If you want to evolve, evolve. But please don’t do so from misplaced guilt and shame, because you don’t deserve it. More than that, it’s not—”
“—what Dee would have wanted,” she finished, quietly.
“Not at all. Not if she’s anything like you.”
As he’d said before: both a cliché and the hard, hard truth.
“She is. Was.” Biting that swollen lower lip, she looked up at him. Hesitated before speaking. “I still don’t understand how you can do this.”
Now she’d lost him. “Do what?”
Her voice was hoarse from her tears, but gloriously loud again. Strong in the way he loved. “Talk about emotions so directly. Handle mine with such ease.”
Irony, that.
“Want to hear my secret?”
When she nodded, he traded vulnerability for vulnerability. A confidence to counterbalance all of hers, and yet another way in which they shared commonality.
“I’m comfortable discussing other people’s emotions, but not my own. Not directly. Not with clarity. Instead, I reach for metaphors or”—shit, this made him sound insufferable—“poetry. It frustrated Marianne sometimes. And I didn’t tell her I loved her as often as I should have. Not in those words. Instead, I’d turn to favorite poems or pertinent lines from novels.”
The tips of his ears turned hot, and he fought the urge to squirm, to reassure Candy that he wasn’t actually twee as fuck.
Her expression remained soft. Affectionate. Sure of him in a way he was equally sure he hadn’t earned.
“But she knew she was loved,” she said.
“Whatever my faults, she knew she was loved.” For all his shame, he was suddenly certain of that. “In part because I kept quotingHamletto her.”
Candy’s head tilted, and she blinked at him for a minute. “Hamlet? Of all Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, why would you—”
Then she paused. Nodded.
“Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love.”
Her clear, smooth recitation of those familiar lines washed over him. He could still hear himself saying them to Marianne on their honeymoon in Provence, lying together on a picnic blanket amidst sunlit fields of lavender, her head tucked beneath his chin, her breath sweet and precious on his neck. One of so many intimate, loving moments in their marriage.
It hurt.
But it didn’t hurt nearly as much as it had months ago. Hours ago, even.
This hard, painful conversation with Candy had soothed something within him too. Through reassuring her, he’d inadvertently reassured himself.
Marianne had died by his side, in their warm, soft marriage bed, knowing he loved her in the marrow of her bones.
There was no way she couldn’t have known.
“It’s a lovely passage.” A smile flirted with the corners of Candy’s mouth. “However, I don’t primarily associateHamletwith romance.Get thee to a nunnerysomewhat undercuts the swooniness of it all. And that’s setting aside the whole drowning issue.”
He had to laugh. “Marianne said exactly the same thing.For God’s sake, at least choose a damnsonnet, Griffin. I’d tell her I already gave at the office.”
Again, the familiar agony didn’t appear. Not at the mention of his wife’s name. Not at the invocation of another precious memory.
