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He did not look at her. He kept his eyes trained on the fields across the lane, that swept to the horizon.
“Thank you,” she said, with all the feeling she’d tried to hide from Jeremy. And even from Sharon.
“I did not do anything that requires thanks,” Tariq said stiffly. Bitterly.
“You did not ruin a little boy’s life, when you could have and have been well within your rights,” Jessa said quietly. “I’ll thank you for that for the rest of my life.”
“I have no rights, as you have been at great pains to advise me.”
“I am sorry,” she said. She stepped closer to him, forcing him to look at her. His eyes seemed so sad that it made her want to weep. Without thinking, she reached out and grabbed hold of his hand. “I am so sorry.”
“So am I,” he said quietly, almost letting the wind snatch it away. He looked down at their joined hands. “More than I can say.”
She would not cry for him, not now, not when he held himself so aloof. She knew what that must mean—it was inevitable, really, after what they’d just been through. Jessa took a deep breath and forced herself to smile as she let go of him. She wanted to hold him and kiss him until the remoteness left him and he was once again alive and wild in her arms. She wanted to share the pain of leaving Jeremy behind, and make it easier, somehow, for both of them to bear. Oh, the things she wanted!
But she had always known that she could not have this man. Not for good. And she knew that he had lost something of far greater significance today than her. She could let him go just as she had let Jeremy go. It was the only way she knew how to love them both.
“You should return to Nur as you planned,” she said, proud that her voice was even, and showed none of her inner turmoil. She could let him go. She could. “Your country needs you.”
So do I! something inside of her screamed, but she bit it back, forced it down. He had never been hers to keep. She had known that from the start.
He seemed to look at her from very far away. He blinked, and some of the darkness receded, letting the green back in. Jessa felt a hard knot ease slightly inside her chest.
“And what about you?” he asked, something she couldn’t read passing across his face.
Jessa shrugged, shoving her hands into her pockets so that the fists she’d made could not betray her. “I’ll return to York, of course,” she said.
The wind surged between them, cold and fierce. Jessa met his gaze and hoped hers was calm. She could do this. And if she broke down later, when she was alone, who would have to know?
“Is this your revenge, then?” he asked, his voice soft though there was a hardness around his eyes. “You wait until I am bleeding and then you turn the knife? Is this what I deserve for what you think I did to you five years ago?”
“No!” she gasped, as stunned as if he’d hit her. Her head reeled. “We are both to blame for what happened five years ago!”
“I am the one who left,” Tariq said bitterly.
“You had no choice,” Jessa replied. “And I was the one so silly she ran away for days. I left first.” She shook her head. “And how can we regret it? We made a beautiful child, a perfect child.”
“He is happy here.” Tariq said it as if it were fact, a statement, but Jessa could see the pain and uncertainty in the dark sheen of his gaze.
“He is,” she whispered fiercely. “I promise you, he is.”
She didn’t know what to do with the ache inside of her, the agony of feeling so apart from him. She was not the desperate, deeply depressed girl she had been when she had given Jeremy up. She was stronger now, and she knew that the way she loved Tariq was not like the infatuation of her youth. It was tempered with the suffering she’d endured, the way she had come to know him now, as the man she had always imagined him to be.
It might be that she could not bear to make this sacrifice after all.
He is not for you, she told herself fiercely. Don’t make this harder than it already is!
“Come,” Tariq said. He nodded toward the car. “I cannot be here any longer.”
Jessa looked back at the cottage, so cozy and inviting against the bleakness of the autumn fields, and yet a place she would always associate with this particular mourning—the kind she imagined might fade and change but would never entirely disappear. She pulled her coat tighter around her. Then she put her arm through Tariq’s and let him walk her to the car.
Jessa sat beside him in the plush backseat, feeling his grief as keenly as her own, as sharp as the wind still ripping down from the moors. Tariq did not speak for some time, his attention focused out the window, watching as fields gave way to villages, and villages to towns, as they made their way back through the country toward the city of York. Next to him, Jessa knew that his mind and his heart were still back at her sister’s cottage, held tight in Jeremy’s sticky little hands. She knew because hers were and, to some extent, always would be.
