Page 17 of The Tyranny of our Longing

“And if I do not mind?” he asked. “If I would rather you did so?”

The strangeness of his questions made her pause, and when she looked up to meet his gaze, she found herself trapped by its swirling beauty. She wondered what ingredients she would need to mix that exact shade of green, how many layers it would take to create that precise play of light and shadow. What skill it would demand to create something that could capture attention and never let it go.

“Why?” she asked, her voice falling feather-light into the space between them.

“Because,” he said, “I have been alone with my thoughts for far too long. So long, in fact, that I fear I may convince myself of anything and everything, just so they may not drive me to complete madness. So I would be more than pleased—indebted even—to have someone… check me.”

She had not caught the exact moment his tone had changed, when his expression had shifted into something much more fragile, but the words he had spoken suddenly felt different, leaden with a meaning so very similar but not quite the same. As if he would be asking something without truly asking, the intention conveyed through every other medium but words, and she wondered what exactly it was. Whether it even mattered. Because for a terrifying heartbeat, she felt she would do anything he asked.

And yet, as she waited for the awakening signs of apprehension to creep over her skin, they would not come. No numbing fear of being alone with a man she barely knew, isolated and at his mercy on grounds separated from the rest of the world by distance and nature. Despite the tightening of her muscles and the rapid flutter of her pulse, she felt… at ease.

She saw his lips move before hearing his words, and realized she had been staring. She straightened in her chair, urging her wayward thoughts back into order.

“The guilt I felt—that I still feel today—is a simple thing, really,” he said. “It comes from the sole circumstance that I could leave while she could not. Even if my departure had not been my own choice and had pained me deeply at the time, I did eventually come to see it as anything but a punishment. But Ana was not as fortunate.” His thumb grazed over the spine of the journal, almost reverent. “I could have taken her with me. In the latter years, when both of us had grown. We would have had the means, and I doubt our parents would have objected to it. If they would have even cared. But I was so… taken by the freedom and carelessness of my life as a student, that I became entirely self-absorbed in my own well-being.

“I learned to manage my condition, and there were even times when I felt I was thriving despite of it. So whenever my sister’s letters would reach me,” his lips pulled apart in a pained smile, his misery palpable in every word, “they no longer felt a comfort, but rather the dreaded reminder of my failings. Of things I tried very hard not to acknowledge, and the home I was no longer welcome in. Even if I no longer wished to return.” He sighed. “And now I am here, left to wonder that had I done her the barest of kindness, this may not have happened.”

Phaedra swallowed against the knot in her throat, the grief of his words, alive and writhing, twisting around them in a tight coil. The urge to reach for his hand, to diminish the distance aching between them was near unbearable.

“It was an accident,” she breathed, her words so soft he might not have heard them. But he had, his eyes snapping to hers with an expression that almost made her recoil in her seat. The weight of it drove into her bones, welding her into place, and when she could finally speak, the words came out choked. “Was it not?”

“That is what I intend to find out.”

CHAPTER 10

Phaedra could not speak, her bewilderment a dark, hungry thing looming out behind her. She knew it to be wrong, this macabre curiosity sinking its claws into her, yearning to understand—to know—things it had no business knowing with a ferocity that sent a shudder through her frame.

Nathaniel watched her process his words, his eyes intent on her face, as if noting each minute shift of her carefully guarded expression. And when he finally spoke, his voice felt uncertain. Tense.

“I feel I must assure you once more that I am, in fact, not mad.” His tight smile was almost a grimace. “I do realize that my… suspicions seem rather ludicrous. But I can assure you, I have my reasons. However…” He straightened, his eyes straying from hers as if he did not wish to see the effect of his next words. “It is within your right to withdraw from the contract, should you wish to do so. It is at your liberty.”

Phaedra stared at him, the surprise of his words pulling her breath to a halt. Withdraw?

How had he managed to come to such an absurd conclusion? Had there been something in her expression that had made him think this was something she wished to do? Or was it quite the opposite, and what he had seen in her face had made him want to reconsider?

The notion slashed through her with a jagged edge, the pain as intense as it was surprising. Her heart fluttered as she asked, her voice low and careful, “And if I do not?”

He smiled at her then, and the rigidness of her body gave, like ice thawing at the first sign of spring sun, her thoughts breaking free of the frost once more. She dared imagine that this relief was not only her own, and she searched for it in the slackening of his shoulders and the way the tilt of his lips softened his eyes. Her fingers unclenched from around the charcoal painting them black.

“Then,” he said, his voice dipping into a murmur. “I shall be pleased to have you as my companion in determining the soundness of my delusions.”

She bit back her own smile. “And how shall we attempt this feat?”

Nathaniel leaned back, the amusement slipping from his face as he regarded the brittle cover of the book in his lap. “My sister kept this journal the year leading up to the tragedy. It was found at the site of the wreckage, beneath what used to be her window.” He paused, his fingers whispering over the soft velvet of the armrest, before he pulled them back against his palm. “I believe she may have thrown it to salvage it from the flames. To ensure that some kind of account would survive to tell the truth of what happened here.”

He opened the journal, and carefully leafed through the fragile pages.

“Unfortunately, much of it was damaged. Some pages are mere tatters, the entries reduced to bits and pieces. But there are a few that are better preserved. I…”

He trailed off, and as Phaedra’s gaze followed the curve of his brow over his eyes now cast in shadow, clarity dawned on her, the thrill of a mystery solved shooting like lightning through her limbs.

“You wish to see what happened to them.”

“Yes,” he said, and this time she did not need to imagine the relief moving through his body like a silent wave.

She nodded, her pulse hammering against her skin. “Then read me the first.”

CHAPTER 11