Chapter Eight #3
Esme couldn’t seem to get that out of her head.
They flew back to Bellaza and she told herself that her spirits should have been lifted as they descended down into the kingdom.
The valley was bursting with wildflowers, all preening beneath that bright spring sun overhead.
The lakes and the fields glittered with light and color, and the mountains that ringed the small country were whitecapped and gleaming.
A perfect picture, she thought. Too bad that there’s nothing real beneath it.
At the palace, she felt out of sorts and waved off the hovering staff as she took herself out into the gardens.
The palace gardens were nothing like hers had been at the manor house. They were deliberately and ruthlessly orderly. They stayed in their straight lines and even the happy colors of the spring flowers were very carefully arranged and controlled so that no exuberance could infect the grounds.
Walking out along the tidy paths made her feel as if her ribs were closing in on her. As if she was being pressed to death on all sides.
Like these gardens were a prison. She felt as if she couldn’t breathe.
Esme made her way down to the lake at the far edge of the gardens.
It was full and deeply blue now that March was coming to an end, gleaming beneath a sun that seemed to think it was already summer.
On the far side of the lake, she could see the city skyline, all those lovely old houses mixed in with newer buildings, all of them arranged along the lakefront.
It wouldn’t be long now before there were boats out on the water.
Landscape photographers would spend days trying to get the perfect shot to capture the lake and careful gardens with the palace above.
It was part of the kingdom’s allure. This fairy-tale palace.
Stacked above a high mountain lake with its beautiful gardens spread out beneath an endlessly blue sky.
She didn’t know why the very idea of that perfect image made her want to cry today.
“You were supposed to be in my office a half hour ago to conduct a postmortem on that wedding and any conversations that came out of it,” came Tadeo’s voice from behind her, jolting her out of whatever daydream had claimed her.
She’d moved along the lakefront, she realized, and had wandered her way out onto one of the docks.
It was clear that he must have done the same, though she hadn’t heard his footfall on the wooden planks.
“As you can see, I have missed that appointment,” was all she said in reply.
What she wanted to say was that she found it rich that when women reported what they’d said and heard at a party it was considered gossip, yet when a man did it, it was intel. But she suspected he would find that churlish. And emotional.
She was both, but she wasn’t sure she had it in her to fence words the way they usually did.
“Are you all right?” he asked again, the way he had last night, sounding…
She wouldn’t say worried. Or even concerned.
That was all far too emotional for Tadeo, who liked all the images of his kingdom and his marriage to be aspirational and lovely and had no intention whatsoever of putting the work in on the other side.
“I’m not all right.” She turned to look at him. “I’m tired of your rules, Tadeo. I know why you felt you had to set them up, but it’s just one more way of distancing ourselves from what was actually going on here. What’s been going on here forever.”
He frowned. “The rules are the rules.”
“If only you were a king, who could make any law he liked on a whim.” She laughed, though there was very little mirth in the sound. “Not that that would matter, as we are not talking about the kingdom just now. We’re talking about us. You and me.”
“I have no desire to talk about you and me.” In another mood, she might have found his tone funny. It was quite close to panicked, though Tadeo would never allow himself to panic.
Still. It was close.
“This is a love story,” she told him, looking right at him. “It always has been. And you are trying to treat it like a Royal Proclamation.”
“I told you almost a decade ago that love stories are not something I am built for,” he growled.
But she remembered it differently. They had started telling each other that they loved each other early on. They’d said it all the time. When he’d come back from that fateful summer and had ended things with her, he’d denied he ever meant it.
The last time she’d told him she loved him she’d been sobbing, on the floor of his town house, and he’d told her he couldn’t help that. That it would fade.
It had not faded.
And more importantly, he was a liar.
She had decided that he’d gaslit her at will during that hideous breakup scene. That was the story she’d told herself all throughout the next couple of years. That and he was emotionally stunted. But she’d always ended up on the fact that he was a liar.
Because she had been there.
She knew what they’d had.
She knew what he’d said.
She decided that if he was lying, he was lying to himself first.
And the past seven years proved that. The night of his father’s funeral proved that. Everything that had happened since he’d learned about the pregnancy proved it.
It was never that she’d somehow gotten the wrong idea about him, or made him up in her head. She’d been right about him every step of the way.
Maybe, she thought, it was time he understood that.
“Do you know what’s funny?” Esme smiled as she said that.
She came close to laughing, even. “I know you so well, Tadeo. I know that if I say anything about love you will immediately balk, even though everything that’s happened between us since you found out I was pregnant has showed me, time and again, that you’re as in love with me now as ever. ”
He looked as if she’d struck him with an ax, but she didn’t let that stop her.
“That, in fact, the reason you keep coming up with all these walls to put between us is because you’re still afraid of that love.
But I realized recently that while I know you well enough that I can predict any response you might have and act accordingly in advance—and I do—you don’t know me at all. ”
For a moment, he looked like she really had smashed something heavy and sharp into the side of his head.
“Of course I know you,” he managed to get out after a few tense moments, when she was sure she could hear the sound of his heart. Beating too fast and too hard—or perhaps that was hers. “I don’t know what this outburst is about, Esme, but it is the antithesis of our agreement.”
She shook her head. “What agreement is that? I don’t recall agreeing to anything. I went along with you. That’s not the same thing.”
“It is the same thing,” he shot back at her. “I knew this was a mistake. I knew I shouldn’t have let you into my bed again. The reality is that you can’t handle it.”
Esme did laugh then, directly at him. “Yes, of course. My bad. I am the one who can’t handle it.”
She could see his temper mounting. There was that thunderstorm in his blue eyes, that furious muscle in his jaw. “Do you think I don’t know you?” he gritted out. “I know this. Any time there is intimacy between us, this is what happens. You start talking about love and it makes you impossible.”
“You don’t know me at all,” Esme corrected him with what she hoped was a calm tone that rankled. Deeply. “For example, did you know that I don’t know how to swim?”
“What?” He blinked, as if he was trying to keep up. “What does that have to do with anything? Are you quite well, Esme?”
Meaning, Have you had a mental break?
Because, naturally, he would think so.
“I never learned,” she told him blithely. “I suppose that should have been a part of my unconventional education. What a tragedy that it was not.”
Esme didn’t think through what she was doing. Because she knew she was going to do it anyway, whether she thought it through or not. She turned back toward the water and then took off running down what was left of the dock, those last few feet.
Then she launched herself into the air and hit the water, plummeting down beneath the surface of the lake.
And sank.