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Because I don’t know if I can answer “yes” to the only question that matters.Am I willing to be as honest with her as she is with me?
“You have to understand,” Cee starts, her eyes scanning the room distractedly. “After the two of you disappeared, he was my only source of comfort. He never made me feel like a burden.”
I put my hand on Celine’s lap. “You know that if you’d come with us, Dad and I would have taken care of you, right?”
She nods. “I know that. Of course I do. But as good as your intentions might have been, the truth is that neither one of you had the resources to take care of me at that point. He did. He did everything under the sun, Tay. He helped me breathe and sit up and walk and run and read again. He held my hand through it all.”
It’s a strange feeling brewing in my gut. I’m proud that Ilarion stepped up the way he did. I’m grateful, too.
But the small, petty, shallow part of myself that I’ve always hated…that part is jealous.
Celine runs her perfectly manicured fingers through her hair. “But…it wasn’t perfect. There were points during my recovery when I would lean in a little too close and he would lean away from me. If I moved to kiss him, he would make sure that I got his cheek, not his lips. He never initiated contact that was too intimate. He was so integral to my therapy that I didn’t even notice he was keeping me at arm’s length.” She stops long enough to exhale slowly. “I guess I just assumed that he was giving me time to recover fully before we were…intimate…with one another.”
I wasn’t really sure I wanted to hear this part. But I asked for her story. It’s not up to me to tell her how to tell it.
“And then one day, he walked into my room and told me that he couldn’t marry me. That he wasn’t in love with me, and he never would be.”
“Well…shit.”
She shrugs and I can tell from that one small gesture how heavy her load has been to carry. “Of course, I left; I moved out. I had to. I loved him, but I had my pride. He told me he wanted me to stay. He was confident that I wouldn’t interfere with his life. But it seemed insane to me to continue to live in this house. So I moved back in with Vanessa and I tried to figure out how I had managed to lose my family and my fiancé in less than a year. And then our apartment was hit. Thanks, Benedict.”
It feels wrong to have a conversation so heartbreaking in a space this blank and sterile. This is a messy talk. A teary talk. But we don’t always get to choose where we end up when important things happen, I guess. I know that as well as anyone.
The most important moment of my life happened while I crossed the street.
“I identified Vanessa’s body,” she admits. It’s the first time since she started talking that she’s made eye contact with me. Hers are filled with tears. “It was one of the worst moments of my life. I went to pieces right there in the coroner’s office. And the only person who was there to pick the pieces was—"
“Ilarion,” I say before she can finish.
Celine nods. “He brought me back to his place and put me back in my room. And I realized that somehow, over the course of the last few months, his home had become mine. I guess it made me feel like I had nothing left. No family, no friends, no fiancé. I thought so hard that I thought myself into a hole.” She looks down at her wrists for a moment, and for once, she doesn’t try to hide the scars from me. “I wasn’t thinking straight. I was on a bunch of pills for pain. I hadn’t eaten in days. I was deep in my depression. It was a split-second decision. At the time, it made so much sense.”
“Cee,” I whisper, gripping her hand tightly.
“He saved me again,” she tells me with the saddest smile I’ve ever seen. “Sometimes, it feels like I’m the great, unwelcome burden of his life. The dead weight he was saddled with.”
“Don’t say that.”
She pulls her hand out from under mine. “It’s true. But I suppose I’ve come to accept it.”
“But you don’t have tokeepaccepting it, Cee,” I point out. “Not if it’s not what you want anymore.”
“‘What I want’?” she repeats as though it’s an alien concept. “What I want has changed so often over the years that I can barely keep track myself.” She looks past me. “Can you hand me a cocktail? I need some liquid courage.”
“Um…these are mocktails,” I say apologetically as I pass her one. “Sorry.”
She laughs humorlessly. “Figures. Still—I’m glad you made me talk. It’s weirdly cathartic, I have to say.” She takes a sip that turns into a long drag. By the time she puts the glass down, it’s almost empty. “Ilarion was with me a lot in the days after my suicide attempt. But I could tell that it had changed nothing for him. He took care of me because he felt he had to. But he was never reallywithme. He always belonged to someone else. Probably even before I met him.”
I wonder if she notices the way I stiffen, terrified that she’s seconds away from unmasking me. But I hold my tongue and let her speak.
“It got to the point where I started to accept the distance. It became easier to be around him knowing that he had nothing to offer me other than friendship. I guess I started to feel like friendship was enough. And then—"
“Benedict again?”
Celine’s face twists with anger. “Benedict fucking Bellasio. The man was relentless. I guess he assumed that killing me would be the perfect revenge. All he did was light a fuel under Ilarion. He went ballistic and weeded out all the men who so much as whispered Benedict’s name. Then he spread the word: anyone who touched a hair on my head would be given the most painful death imaginable. Ilarion would see to it himself. A few weeks later, we announced our engagement.”
“Shit.”
“In some ways, it was almost romantic. Just without any of the romance.”
