Chapter Thirty-Three
“Ican’t believe she…” Rory started, but Arthur stopped him with a single hand in the air and a resigned glare. He didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to say anything bad about Maggie or listen to his brother defend him. “You didn’t deserve…”
“Ror, stop. I knew what I agreed to.” They had been circling the same thoughts for hours now, and Arthur was sick of it.
If there was one thing that was true, it was that Arthur deserved some of this.
He’d pushed Maggie too hard. He’d pushed her away, without even realizing it, for months before Beltane.
He’d ignored what she’d wanted at every turn.
He’d been so lost in his own head, in his own mess, that he had barely stopped to consider what this was like for her.
What going to the dean would mean for her.
Maggie, whose entire life had been upended by a man who was supposed to love her. He more than deserved her anger.
But he didn’t understand why she seemed to think their breakup was a foregone conclusion. And if she’d been so certain of it, why did she agree to go to dinner with him in the first place? His heart had soared with stupid hope when she’d suggested it, and look where he’d ended up.
Rory looked very much like he had more things that he wanted to say, but he took another swig of his beer and sat back on the sagging old couch.
Saturday’s trip to the beach, the baseball game, dinner, they all seemed so far away now.
After he left Maggie in their office, he had gone to the library to try to distract himself with work, though he failed spectacularly.
And when he finally returned to Atlantia, long after dark, he’d been grateful to find the bungalow empty except for Barry, asleep in his recliner.
He’d gone straight to his room, barely bothering to change his clothes, and tossed and turned in his tiny bed until sleep claimed him sometime in the early hours of the morning, when the sky was already starting to lighten.
He didn’t return to Hawthorn the next day, instead letting himself sleep until noon.
By then, Barry had already called Rory and told him to come straight over because there was something wrong with Arthur.
Rory was waiting for him at the kitchen table with a steaming cup of coffee, a bagel, and an overly concerned look that made Arthur want to turn around and go back to bed.
Rory had tiptoed around it all day, but after he put Simon to bed in his old room, he’d cracked open two cans of beer and demanded that Arthur tell him what happened.
“Fuck,” Rory huffed. That sentiment, at least, Arthur was on board with.
He hated this. He hated the pain in his chest, an agonizing ache that he couldn’t ignore.
He hated the man who had broken Maggie so thoroughly that she had ended things with Arthur before they had a chance to become something worth fighting for.
He hated himself for going to the dean, for ignoring what Maggie wanted.
Most of all, he hated himself for believing, like a fool, that he ever could have changed her mind.
“I fucked up, Ror, and I don’t think I can fix it.” He waited for Rory to tell him it wasn’t his fault, that he hadn’t really done anything wrong, but instead, Rory was pulling the soggy label off his beer bottle.
“Did you try?”
“The last time I tried to fix something, it backfired.”
“Did you try to fix it her way?” Arthur looked over at his brother. “Look, you’re used to people like that dean bending over backwards to keep you happy. You’re used to things going your way.”
Arthur felt a pang of shame at his brother’s words, knowing that his life had been easy in a way that Rory’s, that Maggie’s, hadn’t.
“I know you thought you did the right thing, made her life easier, but you didn’t,” Rory went on, delivering a hard truth the way only a brother can. “Did you even apologize?”
Had he? He’d been so certain he had. But when he thought back to their conversation, he knew he hadn’t.
He had been so afraid of what she was going to say, so upset that she was throwing away what they had, and so worried that she didn’t really feel the same way about him that he never even told her how sorry he was for ruining it all in the first place.
He tilted his head back and finished the rest of his beer. Rory gave him another. And then another. Until, eventually, it was enough to dull the pain.
—
It was only thanks to a piercing banshee screech that Maggie was finally able to persuade Dahlia to go home.
“I told you, I’m fine,” Maggie said again, and just like every other time before, Dahlia pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. “You can’t stay here forever.”
“Watch me.” Dahlia tucked a crocheted blanket under her chin, snuggling beneath its warmth.
She didn’t know it was the one that Maggie kept on the back of her couch because Arthur liked it best. Maggie wanted to fold it and tuck it into a dark corner of the linen closet so she didn’t have to look at it, but that wasn’t something a person claiming to be just fine would do.
“You’ve been here for two days,” Maggie went on.
“And you’ve locked your emotions away someplace where you can’t feel them,” Dahlia argued. “I would leave if you’d just process.” She waved her hands theatrically around the word process.
Maggie sighed. After Arthur had left their shared office, the ghost of their last kiss still on her lips, Maggie had swallowed her sobs and wiped away her tears until her cheeks burned.
She had done her best to reason away her sorrow, reminding herself—and later Dahlia—that this was always how the summer was going to end.
“You should go home before it gets dark,” Maggie said. “If I start processing, I promise I’ll call you.”
Another banshee’s cry echoed through the Wilds, and Dahlia looked out at the dusky sky. “You swear?” she asked, turning her worried expression back to Maggie.
“Cross my heart.” Maggie dramatically dragged her fingers over her chest in an X.
She only had to reassure Dahlia four more times before her friend finally left, but not before Dahlia gave her a long, squeezing hug that almost threatened to unwind Maggie’s grief.
When she was alone, every stupid little thing in her apartment reminded her of Arthur.
A Tarot Team mug he always chose because the handle was wide enough for his hand.
The blue ceramic plate she’d emptied for him to rest his watch and glasses on at night.
The stack of books he’d left on her dining room table thinking he’d be back.
His tweed jacket, hanging on a hook on the back of her door.
Their lives were never supposed to intertwine like this.
Their break was supposed to be the easy part, but instead he had set down roots around her, and she needed to dig them out.
She found a large cardboard box and began placing each item that reminded her of Arthur inside, starting with the blanket and ending with his jacket.
She left it by the door to take to campus in the morning.
Later, she was wrung out and exhausted, sleep just out of reach.
She longed to disappear into oblivion for a few hours, but instead she tossed and turned, her legs twisting in her sheets.
When she felt the first hint of an aching grief that she wasn’t ready to confront, she instead clung to her anger like a life raft.
It was easy enough to conjure the shame she’d felt in her office as Dean Clearwater interrogated her about how she had persuaded Arthur to part with his money to fund the grant.
It was easy to drag to the surface her frustration at Arthur and the way he always thought he knew what was best for her.
But as angry as she was at him, she was even angrier at herself.
She was supposed to know better. She could have put a stop to this in June and saved them both so much grief, but now it was mid-July, and she had broken both of their hearts.
Hours passed this way as she alternated between her anger and her resignation.
When she heard the first notes of birdsong announcing the coming dawn, she groaned and twisted again, burying her face in her pillow only to realize it smelled like Arthur’s shampoo.
She ripped the pillowcase off and rolled ungracefully out of bed, stomping out of her room to the washing machine in the hall.
She threw it in with all the force of her pent-up frustration and then slid down to the floor, her back against the cool metal. Gods below, she just wanted to sleep.
At first, she thought the strange undulation of the pool of moonlight at the end of the hall was a trick of her exhaustion.
It rippled and flashed a lavender color that she knew all too well, and suddenly Maggie was wide awake.
She scrambled to her feet and followed the light to the large windows in her living room that faced Hawthorn.
Above the line of trees that separated campus from her apartment property, she saw a hazy purple glow that must have come directly from Ilex Hall.
“What is that?” she said to no one, her fingers grazing the glass.
There was a low rumble, a brightening of the haze, and then the ground itself began to tremble.
Her blinds tapped against the window, and glasses in her cabinets clinked together.
Maggie had been in plenty of small earthquakes out west, and that was exactly what this felt like, but Galloway didn’t have earthquakes.
Maggie’s heartbeat quickened as she swore and lifted her window.
Immediately the smell of burnt ether was overwhelming, singeing her throat.
She sputtered and coughed before slamming the window back down, but it did nothing to dissipate the foul odor.
Whatever was happening at Ilex Hall, whatever was happening to the pall…
Above and below, they were all in danger.