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‘And to ensure I was docile and submissive I was given something to drink every night—something like roofies, I suppose. It turned everything into a kind of fog and I was so, so grateful. Because it blurred everything...everything that was going on...everything that was done to me...’
Her voice changed, he could hear it, and her gaze now followed the long, dark tunnel leading back into her past.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I had to wait. In a courtyard, on a terrace or a rooftop. I don’t remember too well.’ Her face furrowed. ‘I just remember that it was cold, and I was given some kind of wrap. And I used to look up and see stars. Stars that were very far away. I liked that. I liked that they were so far away...so far away from everything that I was doing...’
She stopped, and yet again her voice changed, becoming a kind of harsh whisper.
‘I wanted to be part of the heavens. I wanted to be taken up there—away from everything down here on the earth, away from everything that was happening to me. I wanted to be amongst the stars—as far away as they were. Because I could not bear what was happening.’
She swallowed. ‘Except it was happening...and I had to let it happen...or else my mother would die without seeing again the one place in the world where she had been happy, without getting to the one place in the world where she wanted to die—’
She stopped again, and this time she did not continue.
Rafael reached his hands down to her, taking both of hers so that her handbag fell to the floor, unregarded. He drew her up, still holding her hands.
‘I want you to understand something,’ he said. ‘Something that is very, very important for you to understand.’ He spoke carefully, because what he said now was the most important thing he would say in all his life. ‘We are judged, Celeste, not only by our acts, but by our reasons for those acts. It is the deed and the intent for that deed. Do you understand me? Do you understand?’
His voice was shaking with the immensity of what he had to get across, what he had to make her comprehend, even though she was looking at him with a deadened blankness in her eyes that was like a knife in his body.
‘It is because you did what you did not for yourself but for your dying mother that it is entirely and totally different! You forced yourself to do something that repelled you so much it traumatised you for years! It shut you in a prison of celibacy, cut you off from all normal relationships! That isn’t the reaction of someone who has no regrets because they don’t consider they did anything they didn’t want to do!’
He took a ragged breath, clasped his hands around the cusps of her shoulders. ‘To think that you stood here and compared yourself to Madeline! Insisted you were exactly the same! God Almighty—if you had only told me that night what you’ve told me now—what I had to find out for myself once my imbecilic brain had finally worked out what the hell was going on in your head! What had gone on in your life. Because if you had...’
His voice changed. Now it had a timbre in it that found its way into her nerveless body as she stood like a limp rag, scarcely able to keep standing without his hold on her.
‘If you had, then I would have done what I will do now, my most precious Celeste,’ he said.
And now his eyes were changing, too. The blaze of anger in them—anger at her silence, at his own unforgivable stupidity and blindness—was gone now, and in its place was not a fire, but a glow...a glow as warm as the palms of his hands curved over her shoulders.
‘I would have begged your forgiveness for not trusting you, not trusting everything I knew about you, not trusting everything we had together. I would have begged you, implored you, to come back to me.’
