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Alek
Closure––that’s what I needed. No explanations. No hashing out the ugly details. I texted back.
Fine. Tomorrow afternoon. I’ll come to you.
Alek’s hotel room was near the train station, in one of those hip and inexpensive chain of hotels. I exited out of the back of the clinic and caught the tram. Bear had been living in my pocket since I moved into the flat above the clinic and I didn’t need the complication of having him around.
When Alek opened the door to his room, the anticipation coupled with the brief flash of joy I caught on his face made me feel unbearably guilty. He didn’t deserve my wrath or distrust, even though I’d spent the last six years believing that he’d deserted me.
He wore jeans and a navy blazer with a crisp white shirt. His designer moccasins looked expensive. He seemed to be living a comfortable life. Alek had always been vain. He’d always spent more time on his appearance than I did on mine and today was no different. It was an aspect of him that never sat well with me, so I tended to ignore it.
“How did you find me?”
I entered the room, taking in the neatly made bed, the suitcase in the corner, all his toiletries lined up like little soldiers on the dresser. He was always so meticulous. Long forgotten memories hit me all at once, with them came a pang of nostalgia.
“It’s good to see you, too,” he replied, nothing in his voice pointed to anything other than mild amusement.
“Alek, I haven’t got time for this.” My impatience asserted itself. The wounded look on his face though, transformed it into guilt almost instantly. “I’m sorry. I…this has been a bit of a shock.”
“I understand.”
“How did you find me?” I reiterated.
“I’ve been looking for you for six and half years,” he said in a soft voice. I turned to search his face for the truth, to get a better read of his intentions, but he had always been good at hiding from me. That reminder shored up my resolve.
“You couldn’t have been looking too hard. For the first month you were gone doing God knows what, I was home being interrogated and harassed on a daily basis.”
Instinctively, my hand flew to the diamond cross. I fiddled with it as I tended to do when I was nervous, or irritated. Alek’s black irises followed the motion of my hand and came to rest on the diamonds.
“Did he give that to you?” I didn’t miss the bite in his voice, the possessiveness he had no right to. He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans and cocked his head.
“Who my husband? Yes, he gave it to me.”
“What about your mother’s cross? Was that not suitable for the wife of a billionaire?”
Fire shot though my veins, my blood boiling at the accusation. And yet he had just handed me a gift, granting me absolution from any guilt I may have felt for believing the worst of him. “He loves me unconditionally. My mother’s cross was lost when I was running from the police. I woke up weeks later in the hospital and it was gone.”
Chastened, Alek’s eye’s moved off. After nodding twice, he walked to the window. A freight train was pulling into the station in the near distance. The screech of its brakes however didn’t drown out Alek’s next words. “I wish…I wish it had been me to save you. I wish I could’ve given you gifts like that.”
“I don’t need saving, and I’ve never needed gifts––you knew that. I needed you. I needed your support. You denied me the one thing you had in your capacity to give––the one thing I needed.” I didn’t like the sound of my own voice. It reeked of resentment, as if he still had the power to hurt and disappointment me when, in fact, nothing could have been farther from the truth.
“I know,” he said, his brow furrowed, his wide mouth tight. “I’ve regretted leaving you every day for the past six years.”
He looked around, a little lost, disoriented. “I’m sorry I don’t have anything to offer you. Would you like to go to the bar in the lobby?”
“I won’t be staying that long.”
His head whipped around and his eyes slammed into mine. “I thought you drowned in a ferry crash. I thought you were dead.” His words were clipped, an implicit accusation in them as well as his eyes. The truth of his confession stared back at me, rooting me to the floor where I stood. “There wasn’t a trace of you to be found anywhere. Do you know what that was like for me? Do you have any idea what that did to me?”
Sympathy followed in the wake of the guilt stabbing me in the chest.
Walking towards me, the flash of heat in his eyes cooled and his expression grew aloof, distant. “And then I’m having coffee one morning, reading the paper as always, and a small article in the finance section catches my eye. A wealthy banker, a Swiss-American who inherited the oldest privately owned bank in Switzerland, had married an Albanian medical student. And in black and white, there it was––your name…imagine my surprise.” He began chuckling, the sound caustic. It scraped my already raw nerves.
