23. “The Heart Wants What It Wants” - Selena Gomez
“The Heart Wants What It Wants” - Selena Gomez
How to get over someone . There are more than eight billion search results for this simple query. I estimate it would take me roughly six months to get through them all, and by then I should be sufficiently over this heartbreak.
But I can think of anything better to do with my time, and after reading about how self-love can help heal the heart for the fourth time, I’m ready for some different advice.
Adelaide is in the kitchen when I arrive at Englewood Manor. She’s wearing a red-and-white-striped apron and swaying her hips to Nina Simone.
“What are we cooking?” I say, giving her a peck on the cheek.
She could afford to hire a personal chef, but she chooses to make her own food.
She could afford a full live-in staff for that matter, but she resents the idea that wealth means you don’t do anything for yourself anymore.
And I suspect she also cherishes her privacy too much to have all those people in the house.
“Cullen skink.” She tosses me an apron. “You can chop the leeks.”
I take my place at the cutting board, and we work in companionable silence for several minutes. She directs me to sauté the leeks and onions in butter, and when they’re soft, she adds a bowl of diced potatoes.
“Poach the haddock in the milk and cream,” she instructs. “But be careful you don’t burn it.”
To date, my experience in the kitchen has been minimal. My mother didn’t consider cooking a necessary pillar of education for the future bride of the crown prince, and she didn’t have a backup plan in the event said match didn’t work out. I can, however, make a mean piece of toast.
Adelaide keeps an eye on me and my pan of fish and eventually directs me to gently break the fillets apart.
“You want these in with the potatoes and leeks?” I ask.
She nods and holds the lid while I pour the two mixtures together. After giving everything a quick stir, she says, “We can talk while this simmers.”
As Nina crows about feeling good, Adelaide and I perch on two wooden stools near the stove. The soup smells like the sea. My stomach burbles in anticipation.
I scratch at a small scuff on the counter. “How do you get over someone?” The words tumble out. Preambles are overrated anyway.
She waits a beat, until the silence becomes nice and uncomfortable, then says, “Darling, I could tell you a million things to try, but the only one that actually works is time.”
“Time.” That’s as bad as self-love.
“Breakups require a grieving process, just like any other kind of loss. Nothing will speed it up.”
“How much time are we talking?”
“Every relationship is different. The stronger it was, the longer it takes.”
I feel myself deflating. “It’s been weeks. I was hoping I’d feel better by now.”
“You have a hard time letting people in. When you eventually do, your attachment is strong, which in turn makes letting go that much harder.”
“There’s got to be a way to speed things up.”
“Well, you could always consider taking a new lover.”
I laugh abruptly. “You make it sound like shopping for a new pair of shoes.”
“But even more fun.” Adelaide winks. “There is an exceptionally enticing option living right under your nose. He might be just the ticket.”
It takes me a second before it finally clicks into place that she means Henry. My disdain for preambles has landed me in this situation. Right now, I hold the status of giant ass. “I, um, I wasn’t— Well, I wasn’t referring to Beck.” I mumble this to the countertop, as though it can somehow help me.
She takes this in, and there’s no way she isn’t shocked by it, because who in their right mind wouldn’t be? But she keeps her face an expressionless mask, because this is Adelaide, and I love her for it. “If not Beck, then who?”
I wince at this. Who isn’t relevant to the conversation, and I’d rather avoid getting into it. My expression tells her all she needs to know, however.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh.”
I don’t like that intonation.
“I suppose it was to be expected,” she adds.
“Hardly.”
“After all, you are married—”
“In name only.”
“—and you’re living together—”
“Along with five hundred staff!”
“—and he really is a delicious specimen.”
“Are you done yet?”
Adelaide attempts to hide her smile, but she doesn’t try hard enough. “I’m sorry, poppet. It really is an unfortunate circumstance.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” I mutter.
She gets up to stir the soup. “Why don’t you explain the whole thing to me?”
“Do I have to?”
“If I’m to give advice, I need to know the particulars of the situation. Besides, I’m not in the grave yet. Let an old lady live vicariously through your relationships.”
“You’re not old,” I say.
“Of course I’m not.” She waves the wooden spoon in the air. “Now out with it.”
I give her the CliffsNotes version of my very short-lived, very injudicious fling with Henry.
“He’s a scoundrel,” she says when I’m done.
“Not exactly breaking news.”
“Damn. Why are the good-looking ones always evil bastards?” Grabbing two handmade ceramic bowls from a cupboard, she begins rummaging around for spoons.
“What about Eduardo? You’ve told me plenty of times how dreamy he was.”
Her expression placid, she makes a noise that sounds remarkably like a snort. “He was an evil bastard.”
I feel the features on my face extend: my eyes widen, my jaw slackens, my mouth parts. “I thought you loved him madly.”
“I did. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a horrible husband.”
I’ve always idolized their marriage, although I never had the opportunity to meet Eduardo. He died eight years before Adelaide and I met. Everything I know—or thought I knew—about him comes from Adelaide’s stories.
“You lied to me.”
“I didn’t lie. I strategically withheld information.” She nonchalantly ladles soup into the bowls, as if shaking the bedrock of our relationship is something she does every day.
I can’t stop gaping at her.
She finally notices when she hands me my steaming bowl. “Close your mouth, poppet. There are worse things than letting you believe I had a fairy-tale marriage.”
“But— I—”
She holds up her hand. “I will explain, if you promise to hold your tongue until I’m finished.”
I nod and take a mouthful of soup. It’s delicious. Maybe the real reason Adelaide doesn’t employ a chef is because she can out-cook them all.
“Eduardo and I loved each other. Madly. Passionately. But it wasn’t easy.
Not by a long shot. They were the best and worst twenty years of my life.
I’ve never loved another person like I loved him.
” Her eyes take on a far-off glow. “We fought all the time, like cats and dogs. Mostly when I’d find out he was cheating again. ”
My heart twangs at this information, and I badly want to ask a question. Her sixth sense picks up on this, and she cocks her brow. I obediently take another bite of soup.
“I know you’re wondering how I could stay with him.
I didn’t always. Sometimes I’d leave for a night, a weekend.
Once I left for a month. But I always came back.
” She shrugs her bony shoulders. “He was my best friend. I didn’t know how to be without him.
I knew I’d never find what we had with anyone else. So we made it work.”
What she’s describing sounds like the kind of toxic relationship Colleen Hoover would dream up.
“Don’t think I was a victim in all of this,” Adelaide says, giving me a sharp look.
“He had to put up with a lot, too. I wasn’t always faithful, either.
Sometimes I just wanted something bloody normal.
But normal sickened me, and so I always ended up going back.
God, the making up afterwards was always worth it. He would—”
“Please stop there.” I hold my hand up. “Unlike you, I’m not looking to vicariously live your love life.”
She smiles and clasps her hands together on the counter. Her soup sits forgotten in front of her. “Do you hate me now, love?”
“Of course not.” I take a minute to untangle my thoughts. They resemble a mess of Christmas lights no one took the time to put away properly. “I’m just confused. What you’re describing sounds awful. Don’t you think if you had been in a less . . . volatile relationship, you would’ve been happier?”
“I never told you I was married before Eduardo?”
God, will the surprises ever stop?
“It only lasted three years. He was as calm as a glass of milk. Nothing fazed him. Sometimes I would do things just to see if he’d react, but he’d just look at me like he couldn’t understand who I was.
There was no fire, no passion. Eventually, we just drifted apart, until divorce felt like the next step.
I’m not proud of it, but it did help me to figure out exactly what I wanted from my next relationship. ”
“At least he wasn’t breaking your heart.”
“With great love comes great risk. Those we love the most have the most power to hurt us.”
“I don’t see how they’re worth it.”
“I have no regrets,” Adelaide says. “If I could bring him back, even with all of his flaws, I would.”
I consider this. “It just seems unhealthy to love someone that much.”
“Henry made you feel more in a month than Beck did in two years.”
The truth of that statement strikes home. “And look at me. I’m a mess.”
“Would you trade it? Give up every moment to avoid the pain?”
I don’t know how to answer that. A lifetime of memories with Henry flit through my mind.
Sitting curled together in an armchair, alternately reading pages from Harry Potter aloud.
Sneaking snacks from the kitchen while the chef pretended not to see us.
Building a tiny hut in the forest with scraps we salvaged from the grounds—no proper tools allowed.
Tricking Beatrice into using salt rather than sugar in her tea. Kissing him. Falling in love.
“It doesn’t matter,” I finally say. “He made it clear we can’t be together, so I need to find a way to move on.”
“In that case, try distraction. Nothing helps you get over a man like getting under a new one.”
I close my eyes and take a deep breath. “Thank you for the soup. I should go before you make me regret coming here.”
Adelaide guffaws. “You’d die of boredom without me.”
As scandalized as I pretended to be by Adelaide’s gauche suggestion, it reminds me that I still haven’t given Beck an answer.
I suppose if I were less practical, I’d be ashamed of having feelings for two men at the same time.
But love is complicated, and what I feel for one is so completely different from the other, they can hardly be compared.
And she’s right: I need a distraction in the worst way.
Because you can’t just approach the king at breakfast and ask for a private word, we do that pretentious thing where my people (Maisie) talk to his people to arrange an official meeting.
That’s how I find myself in William’s office several days later.
He’s staring at me with the same stoic expression as always, save for a tiny glint of amusement in his eyes, because I’ve just asked him how one sneaks a lover into the palace.
I almost didn’t come. I still can’t look at him without remembering what he did to Henry, and right now I’m curling my hands into fists at my sides so I don’t do something idiotic like launch myself across his massive wooden desk and rake my nails down that hard face.
As if reading my thoughts, William reaches up and scratches his chin himself, albeit less violently than I would have—there’s no blood. “It’s not as difficult as you’d think.”
For a second I think he’s talking about my wanting to attack him, but then I remember my question. “I’d prefer to keep the whole thing . . . discreet,” I say.
He grunts and moves some papers around his desk as if he’s looking for something. “There are several ways to go about it. He can enter like any other visitor, or an apartment can be arranged.”
“An apartment?”
He looks up from the mess of documents his shuffling has only intensified. “There are plenty of empty ones. You can have one commissioned for him.”
“And he would just . . . what? Live here?”
“More or less.”
I blink. “Like for meals and everything?”
“He’d probably be more comfortable taking those in his rooms.”
Nothing can prepare you for a conversation like this with your father-in-law, and if I could transport myself into a room full of fighting cats right now, I’d do it. “Right. Okay. This has all been . . . very informative. Thank you.”
A snuffling whine draws my attention to the floor, and for the first time, I realize we’re not alone. Argos is curled up on a plush dog bed next to the desk. He fixes me with a mournful gaze but doesn’t lift his head.
I kneel down and stroke his chocolate fur. “Hey, boy. How are you?”
“Not great,” William says.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Cancer.”
“Are there treatments?”
“Not for this.”
A different kind of hammer chips away at what remains of my heart. Isn’t it enough that humans get cancer? Do animals have to as well? “You’re going to be alright, boy,” I lie, and press a kiss between his eyes. He just blinks at me.
I stand and move toward the door, but right before reaching it, I turn back. “Why are you helping me?”
William’s attention has already shifted to the thick file he’s holding, but he glances up. “Because without you, my son will bodge this whole bloody thing up.”