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‘You were. And you shouldn’t have. You knew what it would do to me and you did it anyway. For the first time since I met you, you truly lived up to the reputation you have clung to.’
The knife twisted in his gut, even as she thrust out her hands to give him the gift he did not deserve, had never deserved. Without taking his eyes from her, he retrieved the box and held it. ‘Maria, please—’
‘Open it.’
‘Don’t you think we have more important things to discuss right now?’
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Because I think that somewhere in that gift is the heart of exactly what is going on right now.’
Frowning, he pulled back the lid of the box and everything in him stopped. It was as if the sight of the contents had not only stalled his breath, but the thoughts in his mind, the blood in his veins. It took him a moment to compute what he was seeing—what he knew he should have been seeing and instead what was actually there.
The three beaten, hand-moulded, textured strands had been woven in a plait that seemed to have no beginning and no end, and though he didn’t want to, though he desperately tried to hide from what Maria had created, he could sense how she had wanted each strand to represent his mother, father and himself, and then shift and morph into her, him and their child... And it might have. If it hadn’t represented something to him already. Something dark and dangerous and devastating.
‘You shouldn’t have done this.’ Matthieu barely recognised his own voice, unable to even bring himself to look at her.
‘I... I thought that this would be something beautiful for you. A way to keep something of your family with you at all times.’
He could hear the confusion, the hurt, in her voice. Perhaps even a trace of fear.
‘You have no idea—’
‘Of course I don’t, Matthieu. Because you don’t talk to me! Don’t tell me what you’re thinking or what you’re feeling.’
‘You don’t want to know what I’m feeling right now,’ he warned her.
‘But I do, Matthieu. I do. I don’t just want the bits of you you deem fit for me to see. I want everything. Not the beast, not the carefully contained husband. I want you.’
‘You want to know me? You want to know what I’m feeling? What I’m feeling right now is sheer horror. Horror that you would take something so personal from me and change it into something completely different. That you would take the very reason my parents are dead—’ He cut himself off mid-sentence, desperately warring with himself to grip the fine strands of silver in his hands, or hurl it from him as far as he could. And it was her fault. He never would have been standing here, sharing this with her, had she not pushed, not demanded, not wanted.
‘Matthieu, I—’
‘The way my father looked at my mother when she gave him his present that night...so full of love, so full of life. They sent me to bed before I was able to get a good look at it, promising that I could see it in the morning, but...’
He shook his head at the memories. The childish frustration that he’d been sent to bed, the desperation to see more clearly what his mother had given his father.
‘I was too impatient. I sneaked from my room and found it downstairs in the dining room. My parents wasted precious time searching my room, the whole of the first floor, time that they could have used to leave the burning building had it not been for me. Had it not been for this—’ He held up the bracelet to punctuate his point.
‘—Or what this once was, my father could have made it out. He could have leapt from the window he pushed me out of. I remember the moment he looked at me and made his decision to go back for my mother. I remember the tears I saw in his eyes, how desperate he was to be with me and desperate he was to find her. I saw him there in the window, the words of love he sent me drowned out by the sounds of the fire raging through our home.’
‘I’m sorry!’ his father had yelled, the words barely reaching Matthieu staring up at him with horror and fear and pain.
‘Do you know what it’s like to feel responsible for your parents’ deaths? To wish your father had chosen you over your mother? Can you conceive of the guilt? That you would rather your mother have died alone than be alone yourself? Or, better yet, not have rescued me at all, but taken me with them?’
His voice broke on the last word. He’d never admitted that to anyone. He’d never even said it out loud.
The silence around them vibrated with thick emotion. Her warmth was the first indication he had that she had come up behind him. That she stood so close, he could feel it.
‘The fire was not your fault, Matthieu,’ she said, her voice breaking over the words, as if she hurt just as much as he did just then. ‘Their loss was not your fault.’
‘Really? You believe that? That I’m innocent of that loss, that I’m not the beast I proved to be tonight when I left you in the restaurant on purpose?’ he bit out, hating that his fear, that his pain was making him just as cruel as she accused him of being, but simply unable to stop. Because pushing her away was safer, for her and for him.
‘Don’t—’
‘Don’t what? Lift the veil of whatever fantasy you’ve woven around us? The same fantasy you wove around you and Tersi? The man you thought you loved the day we met.’
It was as if he had struck her. The flinch yanking her head back and the colour draining from already pale features.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
