Chapter 76 #2
“I can’t change what I’ve already done, Lo. We have no choice now but to move forward. I will visit London as often as I can. It will hurt but I will make it work. Just tell me what you need.”
I rubbed my temples, willing myself to stay calm. “I need you to talk in a straight line. You just said you were letting me go.”
“I changed my mind,” he said and I threw my hands up in exasperation.
“ Alfie —”
“I will fix this, Lo.” He sat forward in his seat, his hopeful determination spearing my chest. He didn’t understand yet.
It hadn’t truly sunk in for him. I slipped my feet out of my shoes and pressed them into the earth.
The grass and honeysuckle bed felt comforting under my feet.
I drew strength from it, knowing what had to be done.
“I can be better, I was getting better. I’m just…
everything gets so fucking loud, Lola, but then you come in and you fix every?—”
“It’s not my job to fix you!” I yelled, the words forcing themselves out of me.
I had never realised the truth of them until this moment and suddenly, I knew a part of myself with perfect clarity that before had always lain in shadow.
The same saviour complex that had led me to offer my home to an estranged sister and nephew, that had kept me with damaged Adam for so long, was the same complex that had intertwined me so deeply with Alfie.
I had failed to save my mum from drowning in that car.
It wasn’t my fault, I was only twelve years old, but the guilt had ridden me hard ever since.
Now I had made myself responsible for saving Alfie, but his damage wasn’t my fault either, and just as my twelve-year-old body didn’t have the power to save my mum, my lack of a psychiatric degree meant I didn’t have the power to save Alfie.
It was my job to care for him, to be his soft landing and to love him, but to fix him?
That wasn’t my responsibility, especially at the expense of myself.
“I need you, Lo.” His throat bobbed, a small sign of the frantic current under the ice. “I know you’re hurt about the pills?—”
“You think this is just about the pills? You’re a manipulative liar, Alfie.
You’ve said it yourself. You’re a selfish, ruthless liar.
Look at what you’ve done to me! Is anything you’ve done even real?
Spending time with my family, the red dress…
You isolated me from my whole world, you tried to come between me and Keira.
You controlled me and took advantage of my body.
You had me kneeling at your goddamned feet as you pulled my hair for lying, for betraying you, and all the while you were.
..” My words got stuck, emotion overwhelming me.
“Do you even want to marry me, Alfie? Or is this just another way to control me? In all ways. Even legally.” Looking at him was suddenly too much and my despair threatened to overwhelm me.
I stood and he followed me, prepared for the chase.
I turned away from him but couldn’t make my feet take a step further.
I closed my eyes and tried to stay calm, but I couldn’t. I never could.
I turned back to him, my soul missing the sight of him. He stood there, towering over me, watchful, waiting.
“Look at what you do to me.” I held out my trembling hands for him to see and in one move he took them and stilled them with his own.
I ached to lean into him. Everything hurt.
His eyes bore into mine, a silent plea. “You aren’t good for me, Alfie.
” The words tasted like acid on my tongue, my body rebelling as I forced it to do something that felt so unnatural.
“Don’t give up on me.” His voice cracked as he spoke and I cracked too.
He wielded his words like a knife and sunk it deep, twisting it.
I forced myself to take a step back, to pull my hands away.
There was one final thing I needed to know.
I looked up into those beautiful steel greys as I prepared the final killshot.
“Adam.” I said his name clearly and watched as recognition flickered.
He knows . “Are you responsible for his death?” The surreal question hung between us.
Alfie paused, the moment dragging out. I watched his beautiful mind turn over, working out how to play this, to play me.
“Alfie, please. If you say you had nothing to do with it, I’ll believe you.
But if you’ve done this, there’s no coming back from it.
Please, just tell me the truth. I can’t take any more manipulation.
It’ll break me.” I took a shuddering breath, needing an answer to a question I didn’t want to ask. “Are you responsible?”
Alfie studied me, eyes searching, but for what I didn’t know.
For once, I didn’t try to read him. I just stood there, like an innocent woman sentenced to die.
Alfie’s choices were always the same—manipulate and control, a way of life that he knew well, or do the good and honourable thing, a language in which he had never become fluent, though I knew he had tried so hard.
I stood there, with nothing in my hands but the hope that here, at the finish line, he could be the good man I had tried so hard to show him had always been there, resting inside of him, buried underneath layers of corrupt bullshit heaped on him by the world.
Finally, with a decisive lift of his chin, he answered me.
“Yes. I am responsible.” His voice was clear and somehow strong, but the knowledge that this was really over speared me.
Up until this moment, some miniscule part of me had held out hope that he hadn’t done this, that there would be some way, some day, that I could make my way back to him.
Now, that foolish illusion shattered into a billion pieces.
I can’t fix this.
I had no more questions left to ask, nothing left to say. The fight was over. I wrapped my arms around my torso, fighting the urge to crumble, to cry and beg and pound the precious earth for giving me something I needed so desperately and then snatching it away.
I hated everything.
I hated my father and mother for leaving me alone. I hated Alfie for his lies. I hated whoever had damaged him so deeply that they had left my soulmate so broken.
I hated myself for needing him. Even now, when I should despise him, all I wanted was his touch. I wanted him to take me home and wash my hair, to kiss me and hold me in our bed.
Alfie…
“You need to go, before I do something to make you stay.” He sounded numb. He stood there in the backdrop of our broken garden, an eidolon, a spirit-image, a phantom. He looked almost translucent, any life I had breathed into him, gone.
He was telling me to go? He was giving me permission to walk away from him? To my surprise, he gave me a pained smile.
“I meant it when I said I would endeavour to do better.” I curled my toes into the honeysuckle, but for once the earth didn’t soothe me. A sob escaped and I couldn’t stop the tears falling. This isn’t happening. I felt myself falling, off the edge and into insanity, alone.
“Don’t cry, Lo.” He pulled me into his arms and I let him, allowing myself his touch just one last time.
“Please, don’t cry. Not over me.” His arms wrapped around me, his nose buried in my hair as he breathed me in, his fingers tracing over the nape of my neck.
I inhaled his scent, committing it to memory.
I would never forget it. As long as I lived I would never, ever forget it. “I love?—”
“Don’t. Please don’t. You’ll kill me, Alfie,” I sobbed, my tears soaking his shirt. I could hear his heart beating slowly, barely there.
“You have to go, Lola.” His voice was gentle as he held me, but any strength I’d had had dissipated in the face of his decency. I hated my weakness, hated that the very person that had hurt me was the only thing that could take that pain away.
“I can’t.” My feet wouldn’t move. My hands wouldn’t unclench from his shirt. My body refused to separate itself from something it had come to need. With a shuddering breath, Alfie pulled back, his hands cupping my face, stroking my cheek, soothing me with the same hands that had broken me.
“It’s going to be okay. Breathe, baby.” His words came softly, whispered only for me. I let out a sob and leaned into his touch, soaking it in before it was gone forever.
I forced myself to look at him, to absorb every detail, from his dark hair, his stern brow, to those high cheekbones that could cut glass. The soft mouth and porcelain skin and that grey gaze that held so many secrets that I would never, ever know.
I turned my face down, kissing his palm, and when I opened my eyes, something snagged my attention, something so out of place. There, where the hem of one trouser leg had risen slightly above his shoe, I saw the hint of a blue sock so dark it was almost black, but it wasn’t. It was blue.
Alfie…
I whimpered and that was all I had time for before his lips found mine.
I sank into his kiss, which I was certain this time would kill me.
It was agony. Painful, bright, and I would do it all again.
Every single moment, even if it would always lead me back to this pain, I would do it all again. I would never regret him. Not ever.
I held onto him for dear life and I was grateful, so grateful he had the strength to pull away, because I didn’t. My showgirl’s shoes had broken. She had forgotten her lines and was crying alone on stage in an empty theatre. My lover pressed his forehead to mine, holding me for the last time.
I felt when it was time, when it was truly over. The cord between us pulled taut and finally snapped as he shifted back, his eyes finding mine as he committed me to memory.
“Go, O’Connell.” I couldn’t move. I couldn’t.
A strangled sob escaped me as I begged him silently to help me.
He understood what I needed. In so many ways, he had always known me better than I knew myself.
His hands dropped to my upper arms, and with all the strength he had, he gave me the gentlest push away from him. “Go.”
I closed my eyes first. I wouldn’t be able to turn away if I could still see him. With the final image of him imprinted on my brain, I turned away, grabbed my clutch from the table, and I ran.
I couldn’t feel my legs and I don’t know how they held me up. I ran in my bare feet, through the grass, up the broken steps and towards Harrington House. All the while every cell in my body screamed at me to turn back.
Alfie…
I had let him go. This broken man that I couldn’t save, this twisted soul that would have done so much damage to me had I kept him.
My Alfie.
I ran away from him into the night and towards my future—a future I had dreamed of my whole life.
A future that, one day, I would be excited for, but for tonight I was breaking.
The tears never stopped as my feet pounded the earth.
My soul split down the middle as I left its mate behind, leaving me holding tears, broken dreams, and the shattered remains of my own bleeding heart.