Chapter 31 Lord Edward
At breakfast, Dr. Rush gives me my “use as directed” dose, pulling the pill bottle from the inside pocket of his tweedy jacket, held next to his heart for safekeeping.
I shiver through a cold plunge and sweat in the sauna.
Before lunch I sneak back to my room—ostensibly to use the bathroom—and grab another pill from my stash, crunching it between my teeth while Dr. Rush waits for me in the next room for today’s chat therapy.
I put another pill in my pocket in case I need it later. Then another. And another.
“Why do you dress like that?” I ask as I sit across from the man who locked me inside. I stretch my leg out in front of me.
“Like what?” Dr. Rush asks.
“Like my father.” Does he think it will make me feel more at home? I could tell him that dressing like my father is hardly going to set me at ease.
My father doesn’t believe in ease. If I so much as slouched at the dinner table, I’d be sent to my room. The walls in my childhood home—the home in London where my father, Anne, and her family now live—are thick and ancient, but somehow my father always heard if I cried.
The Duke of Exeter wears a suit every day.
In London, pinstriped, single-breasted jackets and pants in various shades of gray over crisp button-downs and ties, his collars held up by starch, so tight around his neck that when I was little I thought he might be choking.
For the countryside, there are houndstooth and tweed, pants tucked into tall boots, unflattering hats to match.
In the evening, we’re meant to dress for dinner: tuxedos and cocktail dresses.
I’ve never seen my father wear jeans, though I imagine if he ever did, his tailor would surely create a denim three-piece suit.
People like my family are anachronisms, but Anne acts as though we’re saviors, holding up traditions and rituals—a way of life, she calls it—that would be lost if not for us.
I ask for a glass of water. When Dr. Rush’s back is turned, I pull two pills from my pocket, slide them between my lips. Dr. Rush hands me the glass, and I swallow hard.
“So you’re saying that your father’s formal nature created distance between you?” he asks.
I shake my head. I didn’t say that. I was thinking about my father’s clothes, not pouring my heart out. Certainly not to Dr. Rush, jailer disguised as therapist.
Besides, I never said Dad was formal. Sure, he dresses the part, but I’ve seen him disheveled. The way the vein on his neck looks fit to burst when he shouts. The sweat shimmering on his neck when he grabs me, shakes me.
I feel as though I’m sinking into the couch beneath me, like the soft white cushions will swallow me whole.
“Did he do that often, grabbing you roughly?”
Did I say that aloud? No, I would never.
Was Dad rough? Certainly, he was never tender.
He never hugged me or kissed the top of my head.
He said I had no mother, so I had no reason to behave like a Mama’s boy.
He was quick to remind me that she left me without looking back.
It was years before I understood that my mother hadn’t been given much choice in the matter.
“And how did that make you feel? He belittled the impact your mother’s absence may have had on you.”
I shake my head. I mean to be shaking my head. Am I shaking my head? I stand, wobbly, but Dr. Rush doesn’t question it. It’d be more suspicious if I were steady, all things considered. I go back to my room, into the bathroom, and run the water, splashing my face.
How did it make me feel? How do you fucking think, Doctor? My mother left and I wasn’t allowed to act as though it meant anything to me.
I pull a pill from my pocket. I place it on the bathroom counter, white on white on white.
I take the tumbler that’s meant to be filled with water for brushing my teeth and crush the pill into powder.
I’ve never done this before, but it seems simple enough.
I bend over, pressing one nostril shut. I inhale so quickly that it makes me cough.
Holy shit. Why haven’t I been doing this all along?
“You all right in there?” Dr. Rush calls from the other side of the door.
“Be right out,” I shout back, hurrying to brush the remaining powder into my hand, into my mouth. I run the water, wipe my nose, blink my eyes open and shut.
I limp back into the living room and pat my belly.
“Something must’ve disagreed with me.” So polite, so genteel.
I sit down, my posture stick straight. One may slouch only when one is leaning in to share a secret.
Then, curl one’s body into a C so the other person will know they’re being confided in.
It makes them feel special, Anne told me once. When she cut the deal with Harper’s parents, she rounded her back like a snake, her voice lowered to a whisper.
He’ll go to rehab as soon as he’s strong enough to travel. Tears in her eyes, silently reminding them that their daughter wasn’t the only one who’d been hurt; her tortured, troubled little brother was suffering, too.
Eventually, the Steeles were convinced that Anne deeply cared about getting me help.
It didn’t hurt, of course, that Anne promised them more for keeping quiet than a judge would award them if they’d sued me publicly in civil court.
Privately, Anne rolled her eyes at their naivete.
She’d played into the Steeles’ Americanness, their puritan certainty that I needed rehab rather than a stiff drink and a good kick in the head.
I don’t think he’d survive a trial, Anne said mournfully. He’s already lost so much.
My father likes to say that Anne will make an excellent duchess. Each time he says it, I know that he isn’t talking about Anne at all, but about Mum, about me—how we’d failed by comparison.
What does it matter, Dad said, when Anne announced the terms of her deal with the Steeles. It’s not as though you could have married that girl.
I couldn’t have married her because I’m meant to marry an appropriate woman and play respectful in the public eye.
Appropriate is code for wealthy, like something out of another century.
My appropriate marriage will help finance our estates, since our income is no longer enough to maintain our properties.
I picture the house in Scotland, the wallpaper peeling from the walls, the pots and pans the servants put out to protect the carpets when it rains.
“That sounds like an enormous responsibility to place on your shoulders,” Dr. Rush says, all sympathy, like he’s not working for Anne, like he isn’t counting on my family to write an enormous check at the end of my stay.
What does Dr. Rush know? No, really: What does he know? I must have said something out loud, but I already can’t remember what. My tongue feels like it weighs a million pounds.
Even if I brought in a million pounds, Anne and Dad would demand more.
“Good work today,” Dr. Rush says.