“I will take the sun out of the sky. I’ll figure it out. I’ll do whatever I need to do.”
“Why?”
“Because I—”
“Why?” she says, moving nearer to me. “Is it because you feel guilty about what happened with Colette?”
“Yes,” I say, because I know that’s the right answer to give to make her leave.
This whole thing has been a study in living contradictions, in being torn apart. I’ve wanted to draw her close and push her away by turns so many times over these past months.
She has bewitched me, body and soul.
She is my secret garden.
She is my sparrow.
She looks at me, and I know she doesn’t believe me. “Why?” she asks again.
“You foolish girl. You deserve better than this. More than this. You deserve to live your life on your own terms. You certainly don’t deserve to be trapped with a man who doesn’t understand the first thing about love. You have all this time left ahead of you, and you deserve to live unencumbered.”
“Do I deserve to live without the love of my life?”
“You deserve a different love.”
“I don’t want it,” she says.
“You don’t know what you want.”
“You said once that I was very smart. Clever. Do you not believe that anymore?”
“Of course I do. But you are good with science—that doesn’t mean that you understand this. It doesn’t mean that this is the right thing.”
“I deserve to be part of the decision-making. You cannot save everyone. Even Colette, she made her choice, Lucian, and you have to accept it. Your parents made their choice, you have to accept it. You do not hold the world together, and you do not hold people to you, or apart from you. You did it. You gave me freedom, you gave me the means to live without you. And I’m choosing to live with you.”
“You need to go to school.”
“I need to know that I have you. And whatever else I choose to do on top of that, that’s just the way that I choose to live life. It’s different than choosing who I share my life with. It’s different than choosing that fundamental piece of who I am. I love you. That is essential to me. Nonnegotiable to me. I’m your wife. I’m the Queen of Alabria. You are my new dream. And I deserve the respect that I know myself well enough to know what I’m choosing.”
“But it cannot possibly be me.”
I am broken. I am cold and difficult, I have never known connection to another person until her. And it feels too good to be true that I might have found it now.
That one day, my dream walked into my throne room, broke into my isolation.
That she found me.
How can this be?
It is beyond miraculous and it seems a foolish thing to believe—a fairy-tale thing.
She takes a step toward me, and another. Until she has closed all the distance between us. Until she stops and puts her hand on my face. “Lucian, do you remember what I told you about my dreams? About the way that I was too afraid to have them? I think you’re afraid. And I believe, I do believe that you want to do what’s best for me, but I believe that you are truly scared of you being my choice because it means you need to hope. It means you need to love. And do it in a way that doesn’t allow you to have absolute control.”
“But…”
And I break apart. Because I realize what she’s saying is true. Because I fell in love with her from the moment she walked in. And everything that I’ve tried to do since then has been about maintaining a level of control while allowing myself to have her, and when I realized that I couldn’t do it anymore, I let her go completely. And all of this has been about keeping myself safe. All of this has been about running from the pain in my life.
I have known loss. Endless, horrible loss. I’ve known the cruelty of humanity and so rarely have I known the joy in it.
