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Lost in herself, she traps me with her in the timeless space of whatever memories that painting stirs, and I’m annoyed when one of my men appears in the door and breaks the moment.
“Everything all right in here?” he asks.
Lina jumps a little. Her mask falls back in place, and she turns away from the sacred painting and the bird shit that runs like dripping candlewax down the wall.
“Who’s going to attack us?” I snap. “The devil?”
“Just checking, sir.”
“We’re ready to go.”
“Yes, sir.”
I extend a hand to Lina. She hugs herself as she walks to me but unwraps her arms to accept my hand. Walking back to the car with our fingers intertwined, she’s with me, and she’s not. A part of her is still wherever she’d been in the church. She’s too many pieces I can’t puzzle together. Too many things don’t make sense. I know the weight of her breasts in my palms. I know the husky little sound she makes at the first stroke of my cock inside her. I know her triggers and her thresholds. I know how to break her with rough ecstasy and make her whole with my kisses, but I don’t know everything. The value of six lost years equals the weight of a clinical file. A report written on a few meager pages.
“Why did you bring me here, Damian?”
“I wanted to see if the old church still looked the same.”
“You lived here?” She looks around as if she finds the notion impossible.
“Two blocks from here.”
“Where?”
I point toward the ruins of the metal factory. “Right there. Next to that building.”
“Don’t you want to visit it, too?”
“I don’t have to. I know it doesn’t look the same.”
I just kind of hoped the church would be an exception, would somehow have defied the sad, downward slide of the norm. Even devils like me need to believe in miracles, sometimes.
“What about your parents?” she asks. “Where are they now?”
I clench my jaw. “Dead.”
A soft gasp falls from her lips. “How long ago did they pass away?”
I contemplate not telling her, but she is my wife. She has a right to know my family history. “My father died during my second year in prison. Tuberculosis. My mother followed the year after. Her system was too weak to fight a bad bout of flu.” That’s what happens when you’re worn out from a life of too much work, and you can’t afford a private medical aid that ensures proper healthcare.
“Damian,” she exclaims, walking faster to keep up with my quickening steps. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s not as if they gave a fuck about me or my siblings.”
“You have brothers or sisters?”
“Two brothers and a sister.”
“What about them? Do they still live around here?”
“Don’t know. My brothers are both older. They left home when I was still in school. Never heard from them again. The last I heard, my sister met a foreigner who whisked her off to Europe.”
“Don’t you want to get in touch?”
“What for? They made their choices. If they wanted to know how I am, they would’ve kept contact.”
“But—”
“Not all families are happy, Lina, and not all children and pampered. Let it go.”
“I’m sorry you weren’t there for your parents, you know, when they…”
“Died.”
“I’m sorry you were in prison instead of with them.”
The apology strikes a cord, a deep-seated regret I’ll never be able to make peace with. My voice is harsher than she deserves when I ask with sardonic humor, “Seen enough of the other side of the tracks?”
Tugging on my hand, she stops. “That’s not what I meant when I asked why you brought me here. I meant why did you bring me here to see Harold?”
Facing her, I cup her jaw and flick my thumb over the spot where her cheek will so prettily indent when she’s happy. “To show you there are worse fates than being my prisoner.”
Lina
Since the garden incident, Zane avoids me even more than before. Damian keeps him busy, mostly running errands in town. Anne is looking for a job, which means circling newspaper ads on a deckchair next to the pool. Getting a job is a luxury she’s allowed, a freedom. Why doesn’t she grab it with both hands?
Russell is being Russell, hot and cold, nice and standoffish. I never know where I stand with him, but I trust him. He takes his job seriously, and he always addresses me respectfully.
Jana is worried she’ll lose her job if I interfere with the cooking. To appease her, I stick to the tasks Damian assigned to me, which are menu planning and overseeing the transformation of the garden.
My universe is limited to this creaky old house with its Victorian towers and regular inhabitants. The staff from the cleaning service keep to themselves, rejecting my attempts at conversation. I can’t wait to start my exercise program, driving lessons, and secret job next week, but I first have to survive a dinner party at the house tonight. It’s business, and when Damian told me he invited his operations manager, I knew I was going to hate it. Fouché Ellis knows Harold from when I was in diapers. He may not know the gritty details of my history, but he knows what the world believes, namely that I married for money, drove my husband to suicide, and was locked up in a madhouse for bulimia, anorexia, and suicide tendencies. I can’t say I don’t care about what the rest of the world thinks of me, but they’re people I don’t know or have to face. Fouché is different. He’s dined at Harold’s house enough times to be considered as family, and the fact that I respect him makes it worse. I don’t want to stand in front of his judgment tonight, knowing I’m a disappointment.
