2. #3
Another long sigh from Ash. His eyes squeezed shut, stayed that way as he spoke.
“He cheated on you. The whole time you were together. People at the office, girls he met at the bar. Half of those meetings he was always taking on the weekends were bullshit.” Blood dripped from his nose; he thumbed it away.
“I guess he did love you. Enough to not want this for you, anyway. But it’s not the kind of love that seems absolving. He felt guilty. Just like I do.”
Even now, prepared as she was for feeling, she was numb.
Her body wasn’t used to this; her mind wasn’t, either.
A movie of late nights on the backs of her eyes, times when he’d text and say he was running behind, needed to stay over at the office, was too swamped to be home on time.
Saturdays when there was a surprise board meeting or business lunch.
And she’d suspected, sure, but she’d never let herself get beyond the suspicion stage.
Because what was the point? She knew she wasn’t going anywhere.
He knew it, too. Claire had found her safety net, and she wasn’t leaving, an animal raised in captivity who wouldn’t lunge toward an open door.
When she made a sound, finally, it was the huff of a laugh. “Figures,” she muttered. “Fucking figures.”
Silence, for a moment. “You deserved better,” Ash repeated, vehement.
“He was swiping on Tinder while you were scrambling to make your half of the mortgage, when he could easily have afforded it all. He was out fucking someone else while you made him a birthday dinner. God, it made me feel awful, seeing it, because at least if I’d gone to get you, I could’ve made sure the time before wasn’t a goddamn farce. ”
“How do you know all that, Ash?” The question came quiet, since she already knew the answer, Glacier Freeze headlights and a creeping feeling, the BMW they’d tried to escape in. Such a simple conclusion, the final piece slotting into place.
The pervasive feeling of being watched had faded after she met Elias.
But her watcher had still been around, he’d just changed subjects.
Ash had watched her, and then, once she was caught in the Ashbury current, he’d watched Elias.
Even when he tried to fight out of the tangled net his family made, he was pulled right back in.
Ash tensed but didn’t look at her. Echoed her own thought. “You know.”
Her lips were numb. All this time, she’d thought she was nuts, thought her mind was playing tricks on her. Even the night Elias died, when she’d seen the car, part of her had thought it was a mental break, memories of an accident brought on by stress. “Why?”
“I was trying to keep you… safe, I guess.” He rubbed at his cheekbone, now the florid purple of an iris in bloom. Violence made slow marks on both of them as they sat here, time-stamping horror. “I was trying to make it better.”
“Great job,” Claire deadpanned. “Was the hit-and-run three years ago part of that plan?”
The bloodstained line of his jaw went taut.
“Elias had told Wellington to send the Four Stations invitation the next day. Said you could get married on the island. But you couldn’t come if you were incapacitated in some way—things hadn’t deteriorated so much, they were still following the rules.
So I hit you. And I guess your time recovering made him change his mind, wait it out a little longer. ”
The accident had heralded a new phase in their relationship, Claire remembered.
Elias had been distant, before, so much so that Claire was afraid he was about to break up with her—she should be breaking up with him, but she wouldn’t, and they both knew it.
After her hospital stay, though, he’d been kinder.
Softer. The outbursts of anger had abated.
He took her out more. He asked her to marry him.
Before, she’d seen the proposal as the crowning achievement of that time; now, she knew it was a concession to his god.
Ash had saved her when he hit her with that car. For three more years, at least. Even if the ring she’d gotten out of it had been a shackle.
She still wore it, gleaming on her finger, blood in the setting. Slowly, Claire pulled the ring off, placed it on the floor.
Wincing, Ash waved a hand at the gleaming submarine. “Seemed like a good time to confess, I guess,” he muttered.
Confess. Even the word made her shoulders hunch toward her ears, her gut lurch toward her throat. Claire leaned forward into her knees.
Confess.
There was a reason she was here. A reason the god wanted her instead of Theo or Dierdre. It’d lurked in the back of her head, a memory she wanted to drown, a waterlogged body pulled closer and closer to the surface. Maybe that’s why she was so hard on Ash about his guilt: She carried her own.
“I did something.” Her confession came out small, barely words at all. “That day. With the accident on the boat, on my birthday. I did something.”
Ash stayed quiet. Like Dr. Lark did, almost. Waiting for her to take the next step, refusing to fill the silence she left gaping open.
She’d never done it, in that office, smelling Christmas and seeing Dr. Lark’s shelf of curated relatability. Here was the blockage, here was the fork in the road that Claire never took, remaining at the crossroads, never willing to step over.
But she was pretty sure she was going to die here soon, or something worse. If she was ever going to let this final shoe drop, now was the time. If she was ever going to approach that reason why hollow was better, why she could never quite heal, this was the moment.
Her eyes squeezed shut. “The radio. On Dad’s boat. I messed it up. I’m the reason the boat sank.” She swallowed. “And I made it a promise.”