Chapter Twenty-Nine
MAXIMO LEFT BEFORE she woke because morning hadn't made him any braver.
He told himself he'd fix it that night, rehearsing it between meetings he didn't hear.
The apology, the truth, the whole ugly shape of what he'd done.
There would be Mary, all of it, the alley and the file and the six thousand miles.
There would be the confession that he'd been drowning and had grabbed the nearest cruel thing to hold himself under, and the smaller one about a necklace he'd lost his nerve to give.
He had all day to build the speech, and he built it well, and he drove home that night half believing he'd get to say it.
The apartment told him the truth before he had his coat off.
No lights. No television. No terrible pop song bleeding out from under a door. He walked through his own home calling a name that didn't live there anymore, and he knew before he reached her room, he knew, but he opened the door anyway.
Empty.
The bed stripped and squared. The closet standing open and bare. Two small suitcases' worth of an enormous life, gone, and where all of it used to be there was a single envelope propped against the pillow with his name on it in her round, hopeful handwriting.
He opened it standing up. He didn't sit down, not even for this.
Thank you for protecting me.
I'm sorry I forgot whose heart this really is.
That was all. No blame. No fury. Not one line of the thousand furious things she had every right on earth to write. Only gratitude, and an apology, from the girl he had spent an entire night teaching that her own heartbeat was a debt.
Maximo lowered himself to the floor of the empty room, into the exact spot where she used to drop those ridiculous suitcases, and understood, far too late to be any use to either of them, what he had actually done.
He'd told her she existed because Mary died. And she had believed him. Thanked him, even. Then taken herself out of his life so she'd stop stealing one she had been made to think was never hers.
BY THE TIME THESEUS let himself in, the study looked like the inside of a man coming apart at every seam.
The desk was swept clean, everything that had been on it now on the floor.
A glass had gone into the fireplace and stayed there in pieces.
Maximo stood at the black window with his hands braced on the sill and his shoulders working like a man hauling something up out of deep water, and he did not turn around.
"You haven't been taking my calls."
The other man still didn't say anything, but truthfully, he didn't have to. Ever since Theseus had learned about Jassy having Mary's heart, the writing was on the wall. And now...
"Mary would never have asked you to stop living. You and I both know that."
Maximo slowly turned to face him, and the expression on his face was one Theseus had never seen before. Not even on the day Mary had died.
"I lost my mind, Theseus," Maximo said rawly. "I love her. Jassy. I know that now. But I lost my mind, and all I could think of at that time was...hurting her."