Chapter 30
Violet
I leapt away from Juan as if he’d stung me.
‘Henry,’ I said, unable to disguise my shock.
‘Violet,’ he replied coolly, from the end of the alleyway.
He looked smarter than usual, in a fitted shirt and pale jeans, his dark hair falling over his eyes. For a moment, I saw Luke, but it was only a flash of similarity. The sullenness, perhaps? The distrust.
The woman standing next to him, who I knew now was Bo, folded her arms. There was a deliberate gap between them, I noted, and a small bubble of hope inflated inside my chest.
Juan stepped towards them, hands raised placatingly, and said a few words in Spanish that I missed. Bo glanced from him to me and rolled her eyes, while Henry watched on in silence, not saying anything until Bo turned and spoke to him. I caught the gist, picking up ‘esposa’, which meant ‘wife’, and ‘pelirroja’, the word for ‘redhead’. All three were talking as if I wasn’t there and, unsurprisingly, it rankled.
‘Hello,’ I said, loudly enough that Bo broke off mid-sentence. She looked more disappointed than cross, and as I drew closer, she retreated, unwilling to mirror my polite smile with one of her own. Putting a brief hand on Henry’s arm, she murmured a few words in a low hushed tone, before turning on her heel and striding briskly away.
Henry sighed, shaking his head as I went to speak.
‘Not now, Vee. I’m too tired. We’ll talk tomorrow.’
As he started to walk away, Juan reached across an arm, blocking my path.
‘Excuse me.’ I rounded on him. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘Come on, Violet.’ The way he drew my name out, lazily rolling his tongue over every vowel, made me seethe. ‘Let us go, have another drink.’
My voice, when I’d recovered it, sounded hoarse. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m grateful to you for finding out, you know, about Bo. But it doesn’t mean I want you to... That we are... Oh, for god’s sake,’ I moaned, losing patience with myself, with him, with the situation. ‘I just need to go.’
Juan didn’t try to stop me, nor did he give chase, but he did issue a parting comment.
‘Your marriage has ended, Violet. You must accept it. The sooner that you do, the better it will be for everybody.’
I didn’t see any point in bothering with a response.
Henry hadn’t said where he was going, but I guessed it would be towards La Casa Naranja, back to his cocoon, where we’d been happy until I’d sullied it; until the course of our lives had become mired by stress and trauma. I broke into a run, catching up with him a few yards from our front gate. The house was in darkness save for the turret window, which burned bright as a polestar against the blackness of night.
‘Wait,’ I said, hot and breathless. ‘What you saw, in the alleyway just now, it wasn’t anything.’
Henry turned, frowned.
‘Juan, he... I think he thought that I wanted him to... But I didn’t. I don’t.’
He was wearing aftershave, a new scent I didn’t recognise, and a dart poisoned with jealousy shot through me.
‘Who was that woman?’ I asked, a self-sabotaging part of me needing to hear it from him.
Henry hesitated for a moment before answering. ‘Her name is Bo. She works at La Residencia.’
‘Do they still have weddings there?’
I hadn’t meant to sound spiteful, but his expression told me I had.
‘I guess so,’ he said evenly. ‘Given that it’s Bo’s job to organise most of them.’
I waited for him to continue, swatting away a hovering mosquito in irritation. It had been Henry who taught me the difference between the males and females, the latter being the only one of the two that fed on blood. I felt like a bloodsucker now, the person responsible for draining all the gaiety from the man I cared for so deeply.
‘Are you in love with her?’
It was a bold question, and Henry’s response was a short bark of laughter.
‘What?’
‘Do you love her? It’s simple enough.’
In truth, of course, it was anything but – love being the stickiest, trickiest question of all.
Henry looked at me steadily. ‘No, Violet, I’m not in love with her. We’ve been on three dates, tonight being our last.’
I pictured the sour look on Bo’s face, the contemptible way she’d scrutinised me.
‘Last?’
‘I didn’t think it was fair to keep seeing her. I thought that I was ready to, you know, but as it turns out...’ He trailed off, hands splayed open in a ‘that’s that, then’ gesture.
‘That you’re not?’
‘So it would seem.’
‘Henry,’ I began, only to fall silent. I hadn’t known what I was going to say, only that I needed to say something, to show him that I understood because I felt the same way. The idea of being intimate with someone else – anyone else – was abhorrent to me, and I burned with shame as I recalled the way I’d allowed myself to bask in Juan’s attention only an hour ago.
‘Well, for what it’s worth, I’m glad,’ I admitted. ‘And I know that makes me a selfish, vile person, but it’s not as if you don’t know that about me already.’
Henry’s lips twitched, but he didn’t smile.
‘I saw the two of you together, you and Bo, not long after I arrived. I should’ve said something to you about it, I know, but I felt like it wasn’t my place. I didn’t want to annoy you any more than I already had, and then I mentioned it to Juan, and he said he’d do some digging for me, find out who she was and if you and she were serious.’
His gaze found mine then, sudden, sharp.
‘I know, I know.’ I shook my head, staring down at the ground. Weeds were sneaking through the cracks in our boundary wall, their roots leaving tiny pathways through the cement. Over time, water would get inside, and the foundations would start to crumble, the weight of the stones becoming too much for the structure to bear.
‘That’s why I was with him tonight,’ I went on. ‘I didn’t want to be, I felt like I had to be, I needed to know if you and her were... If you really had moved on.’
Henry went to rub his chin, only to flinch as his fingers came into contact with his scars. He was still learning how to live in this new body. I’d gone through a similar experience during and after pregnancy, though I knew the two were incomparable. I had chosen to have Luke; Henry had not volunteered to be mutilated.
‘I did like Bo,’ he said simply. ‘She never looked at me pityingly, the way you are now,’ he added. ‘I can take intrigue, shock, even disgust – but pity?’ He shook his head. ‘No, that’s not for me. It makes me feel weak.’
‘You could never be weak,’ I implored, my hands twisting together as I fought the urge to reach out to him. ‘You’re so strong, you always have been – I’m the weak one.’
‘Jesus, Vee – what’s this we’re doing now? Some sort of competition to discover which of us is the worst human being?’
‘We both know the answer to that one.’
Henry groaned. It was all he seemed to do when confronted with me.
‘We’ve both done bad things,’ he said. ‘Stupid things.’
‘Dangerous things.’
The word had slipped out thoughtlessly, and straight away I wanted to snatch it back. Instead of replying with a barb of his own, however, Henry merely took a long, deep breath.
‘That was it, wasn’t it?’ he said. ‘That was the moment, that day.’
I toyed with the idea of lying to him, but there was no point.
‘There were lots of moments,’ I said. ‘From both sides, but yes, I think that one was the worst. I tried to move past it, but I couldn’t. Not for ages.’
We fell into a brooding silence, each of us ushered back into a past we’d have done anything to erase. Henry looked haunted; stricken – and it was terrible to behold. We never had been able to share the pain of that day, and I wondered if now, at last, there might be a way.
‘Can I?’ I said, opening my arms. ‘For Christ’s sake, Henry, I just want to hold you, if only for a moment.’
He clenched his hands into fists and shook his head, refusing to look at me.
‘Please.’ I moved towards him, desperation funnelling courage. ‘It’s me. I’m still me.’
When he looked at me again, I saw doubt in his eyes. ‘Are you, Vee?’
‘I am.’ I nodded furiously. ‘I promise you, I am.’
Henry shoved both his hands into his pockets; the signal could not have been clearer.
‘What about all the secrets?’ he asked. ‘The stuff you’re refusing to tell me.’
Defeated, I allowed my arms to fall limply to my sides. It had grown darker in the time we’d been talking, our hushed tones muffled by the humid night air. I looked up towards the porthole window. It was still aglow, bright gold like a dropped penny, and if I could’ve wished on it, I would have. Everything I wanted was tied up in decisions I’d made in the past, things I did that I yearned to change, but Henry and I knew better than most that what is done cannot be undone. Altering the future was my only option, and for that to work, I had no choice but to tell the truth. I owed Henry that much, and yet my impulse was to delay. When his phone started to ring, its shrill tone cutting a swathe through the tense atmosphere, I was so relieved at the interruption that I almost wept.
He squinted at the screen for a long time before answering, his intrigue turning rapidly to shock, and disbelief.
‘What it is?’ I asked, my mind going automatically to Luke. But he was upstairs in his room, safely ensconced with Eliza. Wasn’t he?
‘Henry.’ I was insistent. ‘What’s happened? Tell me.’
He said nothing, just stared at the handset, his mouth drooping open, eyes wide.
‘You’re scaring me.’
He didn’t respond.
‘Henry, what’s going on?’ I demanded, grabbing his shoulders, shaking him, trying to bring him back to me. When he finally spoke, the words weren’t so much sounds as rasps, although one was unmistakeable.
Antonio.