And the moment I think it, the moment I let myself feel the pull of him even that much?—
Oh no.
Because my heart is aching again, the real one, the broken muscle of it picking up that wrong stumbling rhythm, and it hurts, it hurts so much, a deep wrong squeezing under my ribs that has nothing to do with poetry and everything to do with the thing that put me in this bed. I breathe. Four in. Six out. I have done it ten thousand times and I do it now, willing the green sound to my left to keep its patient count, willing the squeezing thing to ease.
“I’m sorry, Camilla.”
Three words. That’s all. And they do what the collapse and the ambulance and the needle could not, because I know that voice, I know every note it owns, and this is one I have never heard him use with me. Soft. Careful. The voice you use on something broken.
And I understand, with a clarity that is worse than any pain, what it means. He’s sorry. My husband, who has never apologized for a single thing in the whole time I’ve known him because apology requires you to believe you owe someone something, is standing at my bedside speaking to me gently, andthe only thing on this earth that could have made him gentle is the thing I cannot survive.
Pity.
He knows about my heart now. Someone told him, at the ball, after I fell. And so the cold man has been made to feel sorry for his inconvenient little wife, the breakable one, the bad investment, and he has come to be kind to me because you are kind to the dying and the damaged, and somewhere underneath the kindness he is surely already doing the arithmetic on what it costs him to be saddled with a wife whose heart might stop if he raises his voice.
I would rather he hated me. I want to tell him that. I would rather he stood there cold and untouchable and cruel the way he’s been for two months than have him look at me like this, because cold I had learned to live inside of, but this gentleness is going to take the last of me apart, and I have so little left.
“Please just go,” I choke out.
“Don’t cry.”
And that undoes something, because I hadn’t known I was. I put the back of my free hand against my cheek and it comes away wet, and the humiliation of it, of crying in front of him when I swore on my father’s grave I never would again, sets the green sound climbing.
“Then just go,” I tell him.
He swallows hard, and for a moment the careful gentleness slips and I see something underneath it I don’t have the strength to name, something that looks almost like a man in pain. “Alright. I’ll go. But at least listen to me?—”
The squeezing under my ribs turns vicious, and my hand goes to my chest before I can stop it, pressing hard over the place where it hurts, and I see him stop. I see the words die. I see the pain cross his features, plain and raw and immediate, and a part of me I have no use for files it away to torture myself withlater, the memory of Trey Flint looking at me like my hurt was happening to him.
When he speaks again his voice has gone rough all the way through, stripped of the careful thing, stripped of everything.
“Alright. I’ll go. Just don’t cry.”
I don’t answer him. I haven’t the words and I haven’t the air, and more than either of those, I haven’t the safety, because if I open my mouth one more time something true is going to come out of it and true things are exactly what the doctor warned me will stop my heart. So I do the only thing left to me. I turn my face to the window and I look at nothing, at the dark glass and the city smeared across it, and I keep my eyes there and I wait, and I listen, until at last I hear the soft heavy sound of the door easing shut behind him.
And then I promptly break my promise.
It comes up out of me all at once, everything I held still while he was in the room, two months of it, the photographs and the heir and the separation and the red dress and his back turned to me on a dance floor in my father’s ballroom, and I cry the way I have not let myself cry in front of anyone since I was a child, great wracking helpless sobs that I cannot stop and do not try to, and the green sound to my left stops being patient. It climbs and climbs and then it isn’t counting anymore, it’s screaming, a hard shrilling alarm filling the room, and the door bangs open and there are hands and voices, a nurse, two nurses, someone calling numbers to someone else.
What happened?
What’s wrong, Camilla, can you hear me, what’s wrong?
And I can’t answer them. I cannot get a single word past the crying. They want to know what’s wrong, these kind strangers with their cool hands and their racing eyes, and there is an answer, there is one true and simple answer to their question and it is sitting right there behind my teeth, and I would notsay it even if I could, because I understand now with my whole ruined heart that this is the one thing the doctor was warning me about. This is the trouble I’m not allowed. Not the ball, not the dress, not even him.
Just the truth.
My husband doesn’t love me.
That’s all. That’s the whole of it. And if I ever once let myself say it out loud, if I ever let it all the way out of the dark where I’ve kept it, the painful truth of it will finish what the ballroom started, and it will kill me for good.
Chapter Thirteen
There’s a price for everything. It’s the first thing my father taught me that turned out to be true, taught me with his fists and his absences and the particular silence he kept at the dinner table, and I built a life on it, the way other men build lives on luck or charm or the love of a good woman. Everything has a price. Find it, pay it, take the thing. I have never in my adult life wanted something I could not eventually afford.
I want to see my wife. I cannot afford it. They have finally found the one thing I have no currency for, and the joke of it, the thing that would make me laugh if I were still a man who laughed, is that the price isn’t money. The price is that I be someone other than the man who put her in here.
I stand on the wrong side of a closed door on the cardiac floor and I do not go in, because I have learned what happens when I go in.
