12. Maximillian
— ? —
Maximillian
By the time I turn onto the private road to Elle’s house, I’ve stopped rehearsing what I want to say.
Every version ends with me asking for something.
Another conversation. A chance to come back.
What am I expecting her to do with another apology?
I keep trying to find a way to begin that doesn’t leave her responsible for making me feel better.
My phone sits in the console, showing the message Deus sent this morning.
She’ll meet you outside at four. Don’t expect an invitation inside.
I’d called him yesterday evening, after Giselle left. Elle had asked me not to come, and I couldn’t arrive at her door and insist that sending her sister away entitled me to be heard. I asked Deus whether she would consider one conversation. He said he’d ask her.
This morning, the answer came back.
The della Rovere house appears around the final bend, its ochre shutters open to the afternoon light.
Elle inherited it from her father. She used to tell me about summers here, which paths led to the best riding and which window let her see who was coming up the drive.
I find myself looking toward the upstairs windows, hoping she is watching for me.
I park near the front steps and turn off the engine. The clock says ten minutes to four. I’m early because I couldn’t make myself drive any slower, and now I have to sit here with my hands on the wheel, trying to remember how to breathe.
The front door opens. Deus walks out alone, crossing the gravel toward my car with his hands in his pockets. I’ve known him for years from family gatherings and horse sales, but I’ve never seen him look at me the way he’s looking now. Measuring something he hasn’t decided about yet.
I get out of the car and leave my bag in the back seat. I don’t know if I’ll need it.
“She’s in the garden.” Deus stops a few feet away. “I’ll take you around.”
“Thank you.” I want to say more, something about how grateful I am that he answered the phone yesterday, that he’s been there for her these past weeks. But he’s already turning toward the side of the house, and I follow without adding words he probably doesn’t want to hear.
The garden is walled, sheltered from the wind, filled with lavender and rosemary that scent the cooling air. At the far end, near a bench beneath an old olive tree, Elle is standing with her back to us.
Her hair is pinned loosely, long strands escaping down her back. She’s dressed simply, dark trousers and a white shirt, and she’s looking out at something beyond the garden wall. The hills, maybe. Or nothing at all.
Deus stops at the gate. “I’ll be inside.”
Then he’s gone, and I’m walking toward my wife on a gravel path that seems to stretch longer with every step.
Elle turns when she hears me. Her face is composed, her eyes steady. I try to read something welcoming in them and find only her attention, held on me while she waits for me to stop walking.
“You came.” She doesn’t move toward me or away.
“You said you’d hear me.” I stop several feet from her, giving her space. “Thank you for that.”
“I said one conversation.” She folds her arms across her chest, and I notice her bare left hand, the finger where her ring used to be. “I didn’t promise anything else.”
“I’m not asking for promises.” My own ring is still on my hand. Hers is in my pocket, where it’s been since I found it on the table at the championship. “I’m asking for a chance to say what I should have said before you left.”
Elle looks at me for a long moment. Then she walks to the bench and sits down, leaving room beside her that I don’t take. “Say it, then.”
I stay standing. That space beside her is familiar enough that I have to stop myself from moving into it.
“The lessons stopped when you left.” It’s not what I planned to start with, but she needs to know. “The morning after. I told Giselle to go home, that there wouldn’t be any more training. Yesterday she came to collect her things. She expected everything to resume once you’d calmed down.”
Elle’s expression flickers, something sharp moving behind her eyes. “And?”
“I told her there would be nothing to resume. No lessons, no riding together, no contact with my household.” I make myself hold her gaze. “She can’t come back. I should have made that clear from the beginning, and I didn’t, and that’s on me.”
“You let her fill my place.” Elle uncrosses her arms and rests her hands on the bench, one on either side of her. “For months. While I was in the house.”
“Yes.” There’s no point in defending it. “I told myself I was keeping traditions alive, giving you space to heal, not pressuring you. I had reasons that made sense to me. None of them were the real one.”
“Which was?” She has stopped looking at the garden. I have her full attention now, and none of the words I used to make this easier for myself will survive it.
The question hangs in the air between us. I think about all the mornings I left for the arena early, all the evenings I came home tired and certain I’d done something useful with my day. Elle was upstairs, or in the garden, or somewhere I didn’t have to look at her and see what I couldn’t fix.
“I didn’t know how to help you.” I look at her bare hand before making myself meet her eyes.
“With the riding, with the fear, with any of it. I’d watch you freeze up near the stables, and I didn’t know what to do, and it scared me.
So I went somewhere I could feel competent.
I could correct Giselle’s hands, adjust her seat, watch her improve because of something I taught her.
That was easier than standing next to you and not knowing how to make things better. ”
Elle shifts on the bench, drawing her hands into her lap. “You think I needed you to fix me?”
“No.” I shake my head. “That’s what I got wrong.
You weren’t asking me to fix anything. You were asking me to be there.
To include you, to ask your opinion, to treat you like my partner instead of someone I was protecting from hard things.
” I think about the evening she told me about the gray horse, how I’d passed her advice to Marco without ever suggesting she come down to the stables herself.
“You gave me good advice. I took it. And then I kept acting like you couldn’t handle being part of the conversation. ”
“I was never incompetent.” Her fingers press into the fabric over her knees. “I was scared. I could still tell when a horse was off, or when someone was avoiding a conversation. You let me advise you about the gray, and then somehow I still wasn’t someone you needed to ask about Sovrano.”
“You trusted me with him.” I think of telling Marco to prepare Sovrano for the exhibition, how little time the decision took. “I acted as though not riding him meant you’d handed every other decision to me. You hadn’t.”
Elle stands up from the bench. I step back to let her pass, but she stays in front of me. “It’s too late to explain it away, Max. I’ve already asked a lawyer to end our marriage.”
The ring in my pocket feels suddenly heavy. I want to ask whether she might wait, whether she could give me a little more time before the next letter arrives. I have asked her to wait enough. “I know you have. I’m not going to interfere with that.”
“Then what do you actually think you can do here?” She looks past me toward the drive. “That you couldn’t do at home? You still have the same work waiting for you. The same reasons you never had time.”
“I left the yard with my head groom.” I hear how ordinary that sounds, how easily I could have said it months ago. “The horses are being looked after. Nobody needed me there every minute. I liked being needed, and I let that become an excuse to keep going back.”
“And now?” Her attention comes back to me, but she hasn’t moved away from the path to the house.
“Now I’m asking if you’ll let me stay.” I take a breath. “Not in the house. I know I haven’t earned that. But somewhere nearby. Somewhere I can show you that I’m not going to make promises and then go back to my life when you don’t forgive me quickly enough.”
Elle looks toward the house, then at me. “You want to stay.”
“Yes.” I hold her gaze. “I want to be here. To do whatever needs doing. To prove that I can listen instead of decide.”
She’s quiet for a long moment, and I can see her thinking, weighing what I’ve said against everything that’s happened between us. The silence stretches, and I don’t try to fill it.
“Deus.” She raises her voice slightly. Footsteps on the gravel behind me, and then her cousin is there, standing at the garden gate.
“He wants to stay.” Elle waits until Deus has come through the gate. “What do you think?”
Deus looks at me, then at her. “Your house. Your decision.”
“I’m asking what you think.” She raises an eyebrow at him, and for a moment I recognize the expression she used to give me when I avoided a question.
“There’s a cot in the hayloft.” Deus looks at me before returning his attention to her. “If you want him nearby, he can sleep there. I can find him enough work to keep him out of your kitchen.”
Elle turns back to me. I can see her making a decision, something settling in her expression.
“The hayloft.” Elle looks toward the stable roof beyond the wall before meeting my eyes again. “Not the house. When I ask for space, you give it. If I tell you this isn’t working, you leave. I’m not agreeing to stop the divorce.”
“I understand.” Something loosens in my chest, though I know better than to call it relief. “Whatever you need.”
She nods once, sharply, and then she’s walking past me toward the house. She doesn’t look back. Deus watches her go, then turns to me.
“There’s a cot up there. Bedding’s clean. Bathroom’s at the end of the stable aisle.” He waits until I meet his eyes. “Don’t make me regret letting you through the gate.”
“I won’t.” I go back for my bag, carrying it toward the stables instead of the front steps I had imagined climbing with her.
***
I don’t sleep well.
The cot is narrow and the loft smells like hay and old wood, but that’s not what keeps me awake.
Every time I close my eyes, I see Elle’s face in the garden, the careful control that couldn’t quite hide how much I’ve hurt her.
She let me stay, but she didn’t forgive me. I need to remember the difference.
When gray light seeps through the loft window, I’m already dressed. I come down the stairs and find Deus in the aisle, checking something on one of the stall doors.
“First three are ready to clean.” Deus points toward the wheelbarrow and tools. “Those horses are out. The drinker in the third box is leaking, so leave me room to work on it.”
I reach for the pitchfork before he has to tell me anything else. He watches me wheel the barrow into place, then returns to the cupboard where the spare fittings are kept.
The work is familiar. I haven’t done it regularly since I was young, but the rhythm comes back easily enough.
Strip the wet bedding, fork the dirty straw into the wheelbarrow, check the floor for anything that needs repair.
Deus moves between his own tasks at the far end of the aisle, not watching me constantly but present, keeping an eye on things the way you do with someone who hasn’t proven themselves yet.
I’m finishing the second stall when Elle appears in the stable entrance.
She’s dressed for the day, her hair pulled back properly now, and she stops when she sees me standing in the stall with the pitchfork.
“You’re up early.” She walks down the aisle toward me, and I step out of the box to give her room.
“Couldn’t sleep.” I lean the fork against the wall. “Deus found me something useful to do.”
“Deus has been looking for someone to help with that drinker.” She glances toward the third stall. “Hold it level while he tightens it. Otherwise it pulls away from the wall again.”
“I will.” I look at the tools Deus has set out beside the door. “He’s finding the part now.”
Elle is quiet for a moment, looking past me toward Sovrano’s stall at the end of the row. His head is visible over the half-door, ears pricked forward, watching us.
“He knows you’re here.” She keeps her eyes on Sovrano as she says it, and I follow her gaze instead of trying to catch it. “He kept looking toward the loft last night.”
“He’s a good horse.” I look at Sovrano, remembering all the mornings I watched Elle ride him before the accident, the partnership they had that I took for granted. “I’m sorry I put him in that exhibition without asking you. That was wrong.”
Elle doesn’t respond. She just stands there for a moment, looking at her horse, and I see something pass across her face that I can’t quite read. Grief, maybe. Or longing. Or something more complicated than either.
“I’m going in for breakfast.” She turns away from the stall. “Finish the row. Deus can show you where things go.”
She walks out of the stable without looking back, and I stand in the aisle watching her go. The morning light catches her hair as she crosses the courtyard, and I remember all the mornings I could have watched her like this but didn’t.
Deus appears at my elbow. “That fitting isn’t going to hold itself.”
“Show me where you need me.” I move the wheelbarrow out of his way and follow him into the third box.
I brace the drinker while Deus replaces the worn fitting. It is awkward to hold level, and he has to ask me to lift my side twice before the connection sits properly. Neither of us says anything about Elle. When he turns the water back on, we wait together to see whether it leaks.
I keep looking toward the courtyard, though I know she has gone inside. For years I could follow her into a room without wondering whether I would be welcome. Now I have to stop myself from treating a few ordinary words in the stable as an invitation to sit beside her at breakfast.
The joint stays dry. Deus checks it once more, then takes his tools away, leaving me to finish the bedding.
I spread clean straw across the floor and straighten the edges with the fork.
Through the open stable doors I can see one upstairs window, but I don’t know which room she is using, or whether she is anywhere near it.
Yesterday she said it was too late. This morning she told me how to help fix a drinker. I want to make that mean something more than she offered, and I know how unfair it would be to ask her to reassure me just because she spoke to me.
I move the barrow toward the yard, where the morning is warming the stone beneath my boots. There is work left to do, and I know where I am supposed to be. For now I can manage that much without going to the house to ask what happens next.
I miss being someone she was glad to find here.