Chapter Ten #2
“I don’t have to do anything,” he told her, and there was a terrible note of finality in his voice.
She remembered that, too.
But he was still talking. And it kept getting worse. “It was a terrible idea to bring you into the palace. I will be removing you immediately. You can go back to the manor house, and you will stay there. You will only emerge to perform your official duties.”
“Are you putting me in jail, Tadeo?” she asked him, though her throat felt tight. “Again?”
If he heard her, he gave no sign. “When the child is born, he will stay there and make it his primary residence until he’s old enough to have his own room in the palace.
We will never divorce. You can wander the palace grounds, flinging yourself into lakes and violating the walls of the historic buildings you encounter to your heart’s content.
You can scream into the wind. You can dance in the rain.
I don’t care. But Esme.” And his blue eyes seemed to tear into her. “You will not do it with me.”
“Tadeo,” Esme whispered, her heart pounding, something like a headache starting at her temples.
But he was already moving. Across the room and to the door, flinging it open to bark orders down the hall.
And he was the king. What he said happened, immediately.
It was Arturo who collected Esme, apologizing profusely and politely while he herded her back out the family entrance she’d used the day she’d come here to live, and into a waiting car.
“Her Majesty’s belongings will follow later today,” he assured her.
Esme paused, half in and half out of the car, and caught the loyal old retainer’s gaze.
“I hope you take care of him,” she said quietly. Intently. “Because you know no one else will.”
Arturo inclined his head. “Madam,” he said in the same tone, “that is my raison d’etre. You may depend upon it.”
Then he closed the car door behind her and tapped on the roof to let the driver know she was ready.
Esme wanted to cry out—scream, maybe—that she was anything but ready. Instead, she let herself sit back. She stared out the window, though she saw nothing but that look on Tadeo’s face.
The drive back to the manor house was painful.
But not as painful as when they dropped her off in the drive in front of the house, and she found herself staring at the facade of the building. First because she didn’t see it. Then because she did.
“What did you expect?” she asked herself fiercely, her voice a rough scrape that the breeze stole away.
She didn’t know what she expected. That it would be left as a monument? That they would simply leave her paints be?
It shouldn’t feel like a slap that they hadn’t. That the manor house now looked precisely the way she’d first seen it. Elegant, austere.
A jail. The same jail she’d been sent to on her wedding night. This was like being caught in a time loop. Would it be another seven years before he touched her again?
Could she bear it?
She walked inside, and saw that they had redone the interior, too. It even smelled like fresh paint.
Everything was muted again. All her bright colors were gone, covered up, erased.
She felt her pulse begin to get rapid, a lot like she was having a panic attack, and so she forced herself to take deep breaths as she walked down the long, main hall toward the back of the house.
So she could see what they’d done to the gardens.
That wasn’t a surprise either. But she found herself sobbing all the same, because they’d cut down all her flowers. They’d mulched up her wildflower beds. They hadn’t let spring do with this private, unseen, unvisited garden what it would.
Because it didn’t send the right message.
Esme stood on the terrace and she let the tears come. She held her belly tight, and as she bowed her head, she cried.
It was as if she could see it all spool out, how the years would pass.
He would keep her here. Over time, she would stop…
being herself, because there would be no point.
He would take her child and call it duty.
Responsibility. He was very unlikely to have another one with her, even though it was something they had promised each other when they’d signed their wedding documents.
Not because a winter masquerading as a man really wanted children, but because of the dynastic implications and thrones in play.
But either way, if they did have a second child, she imagined he would take that child, too, and teach them to be little versions of him. Snow and ice and nothing nice, that was what her children would be made of, and the very idea made her feel sick.
She would be left here. To paint the walls or perhaps creep around them, peeling off the wallpaper, like the book she’d read again and again in college.
A book about a woman driven mad by a world—and a husband—that wanted her to conform, not live.
And all the while Esme would know that if she’d just done as he’d asked and had never gone looking for him after his father’s funeral, she would have been free of all this by now.
But even as she thought that, everything in her revolted at the idea.
She cried a bit more, and then wiped at her eyes, because she couldn’t quite countenance this level of self-pity.
Despite what Tadeo thought, there was a fine line between feeling her own feelings and theatrical productions of them.
She wiped at her face again, then smoothed her hands over her belly.
“I would rather have you than be done with all this,” she told her baby, fiercely. “I would pick you, over and over again.”
She felt a quick series of kicks at that and it made her smile right there on that empty terrace, with her destroyed garden in front of her.
And she knew, with a deep down, bedrock certainty, that she was going to be okay.
That no matter what happened and no matter what Tadeo thought he was going to do, Esme was going to be just fine. She would make certain that her baby was too.
This meant that she had no intention whatsoever of allowing Tadeo to raise their child to follow in his chilly footsteps. Duty and responsibility were all very well, and even necessary given the family business, but they weren’t everything.
Her child was not going to grow up frozen solid from the inside out.
She took a deep breath and blew it out again. Then she turned and walked back into the manor house, now fully restored to its historic glory, and pale because of it.
Esme had no intention of becoming a series of elegant, empty rooms that were pretty enough to walk through yet left nothing of themselves behind.
She would not stop fighting. She would not succumb to despair.
Not this time.
He could only toss her aside if she let him. Because despite everything, she still knew the truth. She still knew not only who she was, but who he was, too. She had always known. She hadn’t fallen in love with herself in Boston. She hadn’t made up what happened between them.
There was no possibility that she could have loved him this long if he was truly as inaccessible as he wished he was.
The only way for love to fail, she thought, was for it to be given up on.
Until then, it was simply a matter of time.
Esme had a lifetime.
And she intended to start using it.