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Twenty-Four
Emilia triedto escape the hot sensation burning up her skin, Blaine’s stare pinning her with an unspoken challenge to answer the question.
Why are you in Harlow? And what are you running from?
How did he know? Did she make her fear and caution so obvious? Of course she did. She’d warned him about her having secrets, hadn’t she? Though maybe she could laugh his question off. Deflect and pretend she didn’t know what he was talking about.
Maybe she could straight-up suggest he was way off base, that she merely wished to leave the city and indulge in country life for a while. She wouldn’t be the first.
Then again, she was the one still very much married, even though she’d flipped out at Blaine over Sarah. Maybe she could be forgiven for her intended deception. Chances were better than great that Blaine and Sarah had a relationship far closer to a functional marriage than she and Anthony did.
She released a pent-up breath and loosened her posture, deciding she had too much respect for Blaine to lie. He’d saved her life, forgiven her mistakes, been more compassionate toward her than anyone else besides her own mother. And he was right, he’d answered her questions, so maybe it was time to answer his.
How much worse could talking to him make her existence, anyway?
“I couldn’t live that life anymore.” A raw and brittle voice escaped her mouth, one she barely recognized; but she forced herself to go on with the truth, claiming a morsel of ownership over what had happened to her. “Everything looked so beautiful from the outside, perfect even, but my spirit had died years ago, and most days, I felt like I was on some kind of life support. The people around me had drained any spark I’d once had. I’d wake each morning just wishing I could be somewhere else, that I could have some kind of control over my life. I had to get away because if I didn’t, the other options running through my mind terrified the hell out of me. Day by day, my thoughts got darker, and then the anxiety-induced fainting started. If I didn’t leave, I’d end up doing something drastic.”
Blaine’s hard glare melted, and he gave a slow, incredulous shake of his head. “But you got out, and you did it alone.”
“Sure.” A tight laugh pushed past her lips. “And I wouldn’t have had to do anything alone if my dad and Anthony had just butted out and not driven you way.”
The glare returned. “So that’s who you’re running from? Your dad and Anthony? That guy is still meddling in your life?”
Her gaze fell. Each new bit of information she offered only fueled more questions, but did she want to go into so much detail about Anthony? Not just the threat of him finding her, but the stuff that truly hurt, the stuff that seared her with pain and shame at every single reminder or mention of his name.
She could barely fathom telling Blaine she’d married Anthony, much less any of the other stuff, so she pinched her lips together and shook her head, aiming for a vague reply instead. “I wish things had turned out differently, that’s all.”
Blaine pulled his jaw shut tight, nostrils flaring, while his stare drove into her, hard and unforgiving. “You didn’t answer my question, Emilia. Is Anthony still in your life?”
Her chin trembled, and her throat swelled while she gave a quick shake of her head. “Not anymore.”
Not a complete lie, but not the total truth, either.
“Emilia…” Her name was a growled warning, and his momentary pause hurt more than when he spoke. “Talk.”
“Blaine…” She whispered his name, a last-ditch plea before she slammed her eyes shut, not wanting to see his face when she told him. “Anthony is my husband.”
Air rushed into her lungs, and she recoiled at the admission; she wanted to be sick. But the prolonged silence said more about how much pain she’d inflicted on Blaine.
“Why him?” His deflated tone made her stomach twist and her eyes sting, the roiling crush of shame worked its way through her body. She wanted his anger more than she wanted his disappointment. “Of all people, why him?”
She opened her eyes to find his cheeks sunken and pale—like the truth sucker-punched him in the gut—though the shifting ache in her belly suggested maybe she’d been the one to take the hit.
“What was I supposed to do?” She didn’t like any of this. She didn’t like it one bit. Her loud, hard voice built the emotional wall she needed to get through this conversation. Better for Blaine to hate her. “You were gone, and I had no way of making it out of there on my own, I was ju—”
“So you married him?” Blaine’s words lashed back, his eyes flinty, his sunken cheeks now locked with tension.
“My dad controlled my education, my money, my entire life. I did what he wanted because I had nowhere else to turn.”
“You could have said no, Emilia! You could have said no and gotten the hell out of there.”
“I was seventeen when you left, remember?” Her voice rose, throat constricting around her argument. Now she really did want to cry. How dare he judge her. How dare he assume to know what it was like. To be a girl in that scenario. The support and scope for who she wanted to become so stupidly limited.
Not everyone had a Frank and Maureen to run to when things went bad. Not everyone lived in a culture where something as arbitrary as gender didn’t have to determine how competent one was to make it in the world.
She’d felt so helpless at the time, raised to leave anything that pertained to “the real world” for the men to handle, and her helplessness had only gotten worse with each year. Her life had been a socially engineered prison so few women in her community ever escaped. It had taken her years just to see what was happening.
“Did you expect I’d hightail it out of there to live on the streets until I turned eighteen and finally had some legal right over my life?” She swallowed back her tears, refusing to shed them. “And unlike you, I had no other family or connections to support me.”
