CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER TEN
W HEN HE WOKE up the medical staff was ready to leave.
“It’s been forty-eight hours of observation,” the doctor said. “You are well, but there is still an issue with the optic nerve.”
“That’s why I can’t see?”
“Yes. I would rather not rush into brain surgery. Because the recovery can be punishing. I would rather see if it will resolve on its own.”
“How long will you give it?”
“A couple of weeks at least. At that point, we will take you in for further testing.”
“And in the meantime?”
“You are a billionaire. I assume you have the resources.”
He knew the doctor was being practical, and not dismissive, but Matias still found himself in rage.
“I am in the middle of a crisis of image.”
“You have bigger issues. You will have to physically recover.”
There were flashes of light in his vision at times, but he wasn’t entirely sure if he was hallucinating them or not. There was the occasional blurred edge. And again, he wasn’t certain if that was real or not. “Stay here,” the doctor said. “Your fiancée will take care of you.”
His fiancée...
“Auggie is here?”
“Yes. She has been pacing the halls and barely sleeping. She clearly cares about you a great deal.”
Well. Auggie had managed to convince the doctor that her feelings for him were real. If only he knew the truth. Auggie was here because it benefited her. Because the truth was, she couldn’t abandon him now. It was too late. Her reputation was already twined together with his. It was a self-sustaining problem at this point.
“You know I can be here in under twenty minutes if you have need.”
And with that, he was left to his own devices. Without the constant beeping of monitors. And without his vision.
He heard footsteps, though he could not figure out where they were coming from. He didn’t know this place well enough. That was the problem. If they were in his apartment in London, he would have a better sense of the direction of everything. Of course, if he was in London he would have to listen for the sounds of the city, and out here it was distressingly quiet.
“I overheard.”
Auggie. He thought of her sitting in the passenger seat, that bruise on her cheek. But then again, in his arms, naked. Beautiful. He held onto that image. He held onto it tightly.
“Then you know he thinks that I’ll be fine.”
“That isn’t quite what he said. But, yes.”
“You will have to take care of me,” he said. What a lowering realization.
“I will,” she said.
“I need you to tell me what the press is writing about me.”
“I don’t see how that’s going to help you.”
“Because I want to know.”
He was suddenly consumed with helplessness. He knew that there were many ways that people without sight navigated the world, but he didn’t know any of them. He knew that there were ways to use technology when you are visually impaired, but he had not learned how to do that. He had no skills for navigating this, and he had no idea what he was supposed to do.
He suddenly felt replete with rage and helplessness. If she chose not to show him, he wouldn’t be able to find it for himself.
“I need to be able to trust you,” he said.
“Can you trust me to tell you that you maybe don’t want to know?”
“No,” he said.
“Okay,” she said, cautious. “Well, you’re just going to have to deal with it.”
“Do not play with me,” he said.
“I’m not playing with you,” she responded. She sounded exasperated. He couldn’t know for sure. He couldn’t see her.
“I will not heal,” he said.
“You just thought that it wasn’t an option for you to remain like this.”
“But I will. Because this is what it was like for my sister. I’m certain. She slipped into darkness. Alone. And here I am, doomed to a life of darkness, and I will not even be granted the release of death to soften this.”
“Is that what you think? You think that death would be a release?”
“From this? What is the point of any of it. Perhaps this is what I have been avoiding all this time. To defeat my father is to defeat myself. Everything that I have done, everything is to try and avenge the death of my sister. But the truth is, in order to fully avenge her, I must take myself down as well. And now the world has done it for me.”
“Stop it,” she said. He could not see what she did, but he heard a clattering. “You are... You are offensive. Do you think that you’re being punished? You think that this accident was some sort of light brought upon you. You didn’t die when your brain swelled up, maybe you could be grateful for that.”
“I find it difficult to be grateful,” he said.
“Clearly,” she said. “Clearly you find it difficult to be grateful. But I find myself sorely lacking in sympathy for you. Let me ask you this question. Do you think that my mother deserved cancer?”
He frowned. “No. What does your mother have to do with this?”
“Your logic indicates that you think that people are struck down because they deserve it. You were spared. Perhaps you can focus on the fact that you didn’t die. Maybe you can figure out all the ways in which you deserve to live.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “I have dedicated my life to avenging my sister’s death.”
“So you’ve said.” He heard her voice soften slightly. She sat down. At least, he was fairly certain he recognized the sound of her sitting. “Tell me. From the beginning. Tell me how all of this was supposed to avenge her.”
He stared at nothing. He had no other choice. He was enveloped in darkness. He felt the wall that he had built up inside of himself erode, crumble. And all of the acrid, toxic emotions that he had been holding at bay for all these years poured out. Poured forth.
“I needed to do everything in my power to be different from him. Not simply to make myself a better person, I’m beyond redemption, and I am aware of that. I decided to prove to him that everything he had done was pointless. That allowing his daughter to die, alienating his son, and turning his wife into a ghost of a human being, all of those things were unnecessary to his success. I set out to do that by being the antithesis of everything that he was.”
“And that’s why your reputation for treating women well, for being good, that’s why that reputation matters. Not because you have an investment in being good.”
“I am not good. Have you not paid attention to anything that I’ve said? I am beyond help.”
“All right. What else then? What else have you done to try and avenge your sister.”
“All of this. Everything that I am. I intended to destroy his empire. Eclipse it with my own. I intended to... To be something he never could be. Which was loved by the public. Not because I... Not because I deserved it, not because I even wanted it. Because he said it couldn’t be done, and what better way to win, than by beating him while not playing his game at all?”
“Right. So, with this headline, you understand that everything you are is called into question.”
“I am aware,” he snarled.
“I’m not sure that it’s fixable.”
She might as well have dropped a boulder on his chest. He felt as if it had caved in. “And what is the point of anything?”
“You’re going to have to figure that out. I can’t tell you what the point of your life is. But you’re going to have to ask yourself a very serious question. What if you can’t win?”
“That isn’t an option,” he said, rejecting it instantly.
“I’m sorry, you can sit here and tell me that you deserve to be blinded for the rest of your life, deserve this accident, but you cannot take on board the fact that you might fail at your mission.”
“No,” he said. “It is my purpose.”
“It’s not your purpose. It is somebody else’s purpose. You don’t have a purpose. The only thing that you do is react. To the death of your sister, to the bastard behavior of your father. That’s it. To the headlines the paparazzi print about you, to all of these things. You shape your life around them.”
“You know nothing,” he said, wanting to turn and face her, not entirely certain where she was. “You know nothing. You are a child. You lost someone, and for that I am sorry. But it is nothing compared to what I went through.”
“Oh, are we doing that? Are we measuring trauma? The reason my trauma seems smaller than yours is because I’ve done something to deal with it rather than sitting in self-pity for the past several years.”
“Self-pity. Is that what you think this is? It is not self-pity that I have remade myself into an instrument of my father’s destruction. It is not self-pity. It is the only way that I can find a shred of sense in the fact that I draw breath still. And now... I know there is no sense to it whatsoever.”
He bent down and picked up something, he didn’t know what, and threw it as hard as he could. He heard the sound of cracking glass, and Auggie gasped.
“You are a child,” she shouted. “Sit in here by yourself then. I’ll come bring you food when I think you’re hungry.”
More of her making decisions for him.
“You cannot leave me,” he raged.
“I can and I will. Because you are a self-pitying fool. I put myself on the line trying to help you. And you might be unfixable, Matias Balcazar. Not because you’re blind, but because you can’t see a life that extends beyond playing this game with your father. This is where it got you. You are here because of you. Not because of fate, not because of God, not even because of your dad. You are here because you couldn’t handle sitting in your own discomfort without doing something. You had to react. And that’s what you’ve been doing all along.”
“You don’t know me. You can’t tell me what I’ve been doing for all these years when you weren’t even around until a couple of months ago.”
“I could leave you up here,” she said. “I could leave you up here to rot. And frankly, at this point, I wouldn’t even be sorry.”
Then he heard something clattered to the ground. Her ring, he realized. It was followed by angry footsteps and a slamming door. She had genuinely left him there.
He growled, to the empty space. And he wished she was there for him to growl at.
The anger came from somewhere deep inside of him, and he had not given voice to such darkness in more years than he could count. But he was the darkness now. Surrounded by it. It was outside of him, and within. It was... It was untenable.
He stood motionless, uncertain of which way to go. And then he began to slowly walk with his hands outstretched, trying to get a gauge for everything in the room. He ran into a side table, and he cursed. He felt for furniture, the smooth surface, down the sides. Then he moved and found the bed, his hands moving over the blankets. He decided that was good enough for now. He sat down on the edge of the mattress. He wanted alcohol, but he would need her to get it for him. He didn’t have his phone, and even if he did, he didn’t know how to use it in his present state.
It really did remind him of the day that Seraphina had died. Because even then he had felt helpless. Useless. Frozen.
And responsible all at the same time.
If he had said something different to her. If he had not said anything to her at all.
He had broken the one person that loved him.
The one person he had loved.
And now there was nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing but this void. But this black hole of need. He had tried to cover it all up. He had managed to find a facade that had... Let him live.
He might not have ever truly taken the joy in life that he pretended to, but it had been better than this.
There had been noise. Distraction. And it might not have ever penetrated down to his soul, but it kept him moving.
The stillness... He despised it.
And right now, he despised Augusta Fremont. A convenient target for his rage. For refusing to do his bidding.
The personification of how the world had turned against him, rather than bending to his will.
He sat there in the darkness, and he understood. Profoundly, the urge to take a substance that might remove you from your reality. Remove you from everything.
If it had been in his hands, he might’ve done so.
It was a rock bottom he had never faced down before. Because he had always had something to do. He’d always had a mission.
And now that mission was gone.