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Sure enough, his eyes blazed as he pinned her there beneath him with all that green.But if you leave now, you can never return, Amalia. This is not a safe space for you.
She’d sat up gingerly, as if she expected something to hurt, though nothing ever did. Maybe she wished it would. If it hurt, then maybe it would mean something after all. At the very least, maybe it would teach her a lesson she desperately needed to learn.
Thank you, she’d said, because it didn’t hurt at all. Sensation swirled inside of her, the way it always did. She wanted him all over again, the way she feared she always would.That has been perfectly clear for some time now.
The next day, she expected him to intervene once again. To use her body against her, simply because he could, but he didn’t. She woke alone in that bed beneath the high tide line to find her things packed. And even though that really did hurt, and the hurting was not better, she had decided to take that message at face value.
He really had called her a boat. She had taken it to Barcelona.
Once again, while leaving him and Cap Morat, she had not looked back. There was no need—she doubted she would ever get all the images of what she’d done there out of her head. And she already knew she took the ghost of him wherever she went.
Why bother looking back?
It had been simple enough to hire a plane once she reached Barcelona and fly herself to Kansas. Simple, but not easy. Because she had spent too long indulging her every whim on that island. She felt addicted to Joaquin, strung out on his touch, and it was worse this time. It had been bad enough after that first summer. But at least then she had been filled with purpose when she’d left him. She’d had her work to throw herself into, her role in the kingdom, a place in history. A future to work toward, like it or not.
Now all she had was the slender hope oflove, of all things, from a woman she’d never really met—except as a newborn. In a place she would never have visited. As a stepping-stone to a future she still couldn’t quite envision.
Amalia really did want, so desperately, to feel some sense of belonging here. To feel tugged back into the embrace of this land that had made her, but she didn’t. She was grateful that Esme considered knowing how to drive a vehicle essential knowledge, because otherwise, she wasn’t sure how she would have gone about hiring herself a car and drivers so far out in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere. Even so, driving felt treacherous out here where the flat land went on forever, so that the horizon seemed both impossibly far away and on top of her at the same time. The sky was too large here. The fields too secretive, somehow—though she suspected that was only because she couldn’t identify all the crops she saw.
She eased the little hired car down the lane, wincing every time the dirt track gave way and the tires dropped down with a tooth-rattling jolt. But she’d checked and rechecked, and this was the address Catherine had given her.
Amalia had seen images like this her whole life. It was impossible to grow up anywhere, she imagined, without some notion of the American heartland stamped into her brain. Green stalks of corn. Golden wheat. Whatever the other crops she’d seen were, all in neat lines, rolling on forever. But it was one thing to watch a show. It was something else to find herself in the middle of it.
When she got to the end of the lane she was confronted with an actual American farmhouse to one side, an honest-to-God red barn straight ahead, and the fields of corn all around—hemming her in a bit, she thought. She hadn’t really expected the corn to feel like a living wall. But Amalia blew out a breath and told herself that she was no coward.
Even if, at that exact moment, she felt the surely cowardly urge to turn the car around and drive away. As fast as possible.
She pushed open the car door, forced herself to climb out, then stood there, waiting for a sense of homecoming to sweep over her now that she’d arrived at the actual family home where she should have spent her childhood. To make it clear that she had made the right choice. To make all of this feel right.
But instead, she felt profoundly alone. There was only her beneath an endless blue sky above and the corn, watching her as she stood there, trying not to feel dizzy.
Despite herself, she missed Joaquin.
And Amalia hated herself for that weakness. How could she miss a man who didn’t really want her? Or wanted her, but not in the way she needed him to? And yet even as she thought that, her body knew she was thinking about him and shivered with that same unutterable delight it always did.
Even here, a world apart from him after she’d left himagain, she couldn’t even work up a decent temper. She couldn’t force herself to fall out of love with him, or want less from him, or stop feeling all of these things that would get her absolutely nowhere.
She just wanted him the way she always had. The way she supposed she always would.
And maybe someday, that would feel like less of a life sentence.
Because at the moment, she would have given anything to press her face into the crook of his neck, say nothing at all, and let herself believe that the way he held her could mean anything she wanted it to. That she was precious to him. That he would hold her forever. That what they were to each other meant more to him than a story he could tell over dinner one night.
Amalia jumped guiltily when she heard a noise. She turned to see an older woman step out from inside the farmhouse, letting the screen door slam shut behind her.
And she knew.
Maybe because there was no reason for any other woman to be staring at her like this, but she thought it was a little bit deeper than that. A little bit more.
This woman was her actual mother. And Amalia knew it. On sight.
After so much nothing, she had to admit that it felt likesomething.
She moved, jerkily, around the front of the car. Then she made herself walk across the yard toward the stranger. The stranger who was her mother.
Amalia hadn’t known how a person was meant to dress to meet her mother for the first time. As an adult. She also hadn’t known what a person wore on a farm. So she’d gone ahead and winged it, going for jeans and trainers and what she hoped was the sort of T-shirt that everybody wore. Instead of it being the kind of T-shirt that only people like her wore while swanning about, trying to seemrelatable, which wasn’t at all the same thing. That she was a fish out of water in every respect would be all too noticeable, she feared—
And worrying about her attire was a lot easier than worrying about all the rest of it.
