Chapter Fifty Julia
Chapter Fifty
Julia
“Claire, I’m going ahead to check the east fences,” Camila called out in Spanish, a dozen yards down the trail. “Do you mind getting a look at the river? We could take the tour group for a swim tomorrow if the current isn’t too strong.”
“Of course!” Julia tugged at the reins of her horse, a sturdy gelding named JB. Though she suspected the JB stood for something in Spanish, she liked to think it was short for James Barrie. There was something Peter Pan-ish about this horse, the way his ears pricked forward, the bounce in his step.
She had only been on the estancia for a few months, but already it felt strange to remember her life in New York.
The things she had worried about—the money she’d spent on Ala?a dresses and coordinated heels, the effort and worry she had poured into looking the part, into proving she was worthy—it all felt distant now, like a faded memory.
Or a bad dream. Here, she was expected to be nothing but herself.
Or more accurately, to be Claire Smith, an American trying to find her footing after a bad relationship.
That terrible night in the storm, when Julia had found Harry in bed with his sister-in-law, she’d asked Percy to get her off the island. To her relief, he’d found a way.
When he’d hugged her outside the Atlanta airport and handed her a small bag, Julia had been startled to find that it included a new passport, with a credit card under the same name.
Did she really have to travel under a false identity?
She’d figured she couldn’t use the credit card linked to her joint account, because it would be easy for Harry to track the charges, but did the Ellenes have access to TSA flight records, too?
She’d held her breath when border control scanned the passport, but the machine had beeped green, and the bored-looking agent had waved her through.
Julia was touched that Percy had remembered her mother’s name. Touched—and slightly alarmed that he had a guy for last-minute falsified documents. Rich people really were different in all ways. Perhaps it was a good thing that she hadn’t become one of them.
The sky overhead was a brilliant robin’s-egg blue, the air crisp and bracing.
Julia had seen some beautiful places during her years working at Elysian Cruise Line: the Blue Grotto of Capri, the islands of Bali.
But Patagonia was something else. Sun-drenched valleys of swishing golden grass swept into jagged cliffs, then up to snow-topped mountains.
She felt like she could wander the estancia for weeks without seeing a fraction of it.
She hadn’t had much of a plan when she’d marched up to the ticket counter in the Atlanta airport, carrying nothing but a tote bag with a single change of clothes and her new travel documents.
None of the domestic flights were making it out, not that she had any desire to go to New York, anyway.
The only planes taking off in this weather were the big international jets.
She scanned the departures board, her eyes traveling over Madrid, Montreal, London—and then she paused.
There was a nonstop Delta flight leaving for Santiago in one hour.
Her Spanish was rusty, and she knew next to nothing about Chile, but that felt like a bonus. The Ellenes would never think to look for her there.
Thirty minutes later, she was in an economy-class seat, ordering a double bloody Mary and taking a long sip.
“You traveling on business or pleasure?” the woman next to her had asked conversationally. “I’m guessing business, and one you aren’t looking forward to, from the way you’re drinking that on a six a.m. flight.”
“Traveling to escape,” Julia confessed, surprised by her own honesty. “I just went through a bad breakup with my fiancé and need to get away.” It was as much of the truth as she was willing to give.
It turned out that Lorena, a middle-aged woman with crinkly laugh lines around her eyes, managed a ranch along the Argentinian cordillera, near the Chilean border. “You can come escape at my ranch,” Lorena had offered. “It’s a great place to get your head on straight.”
“That sounds lovely, but I need to find work.” Julia wasn’t sure what the limit was on the credit card Percy had given her, but she didn’t want to push it.
“Then come work for me. I have so many American tourists who visit, some for a few days, others for longer,” Lorena explained. “I’m in dire need of a translator. Do you speak Spanish? Do you ride?”
“Some Spanish, no riding experience.”
“Perfect,” Lorena had declared. “We’ll teach you.”
And they did. Julia settled gratefully into her new routine: waking up early to tend to the horses, brushing their coats, coaxing pebbles from their hooves.
You’re a natural! exclaimed the ranch hands, bright-eyed young men and women who spoke to her in rapid Spanish.
But Julia knew all credit was due to the horses.
They were patient with her, because they had grown up here—safe, surrounded by love.
They trusted her because no one had ever given them a reason not to trust. It made Julia want to cry, thinking of how she had once been that blindly trusting.
And sometimes when she was mucking out stalls in the dawn light, raking horse shit into neat little piles, she thought of what Tara Ellene would say if she saw her now. It gave her the strangest urge to burst out laughing.
Tara was easy to think about. Harry, not so much.
Julia felt like she was walking around with a bullet wound in her chest, a hole so great that she didn’t dare look at it too closely.
She had loved Harry so much. And though she hated to admit it, a part of her still loved him.
All these weeks later, her anger at his betrayal roared up like a fire—yet she still woke in the middle of the night touching herself, flushed from dreams of him.
Sometimes she let herself wonder where he was now. What had he thought, when he’d woken the next day and realized she was missing?
He’d probably been confused, and surprised, but had gone back to New York and resumed his life without her.
She suspected that was what they’d all done.
They would be back at their jobs, Harry and Valentine still sneaking around, Hector still oblivious, because that was how people like that behaved.
They made messes and left them for someone else to clean up.
It was a good thing, Julia told herself, that she’d learned of Harry’s affair before she’d married him.
Abby knew where she was, of course. So did her aunt and uncle.
Julia hadn’t shared all the details with them—just that she and Harry had decided at the last minute not to go through with the wedding, and that she’d left the country for some much-needed space.
She’d emailed Lucy at the gallery, too, a brief email that apologized and offered her resignation.
Lucy had sent a rambling, paragraphs-long response that effectively said, No chance I’m hiring anyone else, I’m holding this job for you in case you decide to come back. Also, I hope you’re okay.
Finally, Julia had sent a postcard to Percy from the Santiago airport once she’d landed. She hadn’t signed it, but Percy would know who it was from.
She was partway down the path to the river—relaxed by the sunshine and JB’s swaying gait and the way everything looked so glittering and bright, as if seen through a magnifying glass—when she was jolted by the sound of her name. Her real name.
“Julia! Julia!”
She twisted in the saddle and saw him, galloping down the trail with reckless speed. A knot arose in her throat, a mixture of resentment and sadness and, yes, yearning. She drew JB to a halt, patting his neck reassuringly as Harry slowed alongside her.
“Julia!” Harry exclaimed. He wasn’t the slightest bit out of breath, even after running his horse at full speed, at this altitude.
She noted angrily that he was mounted on Santos, a dappled gray who was one of the more spirited horses in the stable.
Had Lorena realized she was helping Julia’s ex-fiancé?
“You found me,” she said flatly.
“Look, I know you have no desire to see me, but we need to talk,” Harry asked. “Just for a couple of minutes.”
“I don’t really have anything to say to you.”
“Please,” he begged. “Just hear me out, and if you still want me to go, I swear that I’ll leave you in peace, and you’ll never hear from me again.”
Julia knew she would say yes. No matter what he’d done, this was still Harry. She still loved him, no matter how great a fool it made her.
If she didn’t at least listen to whatever he wanted to say, she would spend the rest of her life wondering.
“I was headed to the river,” she said curtly. “You can come with me.”
They descended the slope in silence, the horses’ hooves knocking pebbles loose. They could hear the roar of the water farther down, but here, the river was just a fast-running brook, only several inches deep.
At the bank, JB lowered his head. Julia dismounted in a smooth motion, leaning against her horse’s side as he drank.
“I didn’t know you could ride like this.” Harry sounded impressed.
“I couldn’t, until now. You learn a lot of things when you’re forced to start over,” Julia said tersely.
She knelt to refill her bottle from the river, its water the pristine clear of glaciers. It reminded her of that night Harry had taken her camping in the Catskills: the cold shock of the waterfall, the heat of Harry’s skin on hers. Julia shook her head angrily, trying to dispel the memories.
Harry drew in a breath. “I want to explain what happened the night before our wedding. And then, if you still hate me, you can forget this whole conversation. You’ll go back to what you thought before, that I’m a cheating asshole.”
“But you are a cheating asshole.”
“Julia, I thought it was you in my bed!”
She faltered at the sheer agony, the earnestness, of his tone. What was he saying, that he’d been so blacked out that he didn’t even recognize Valentine? But he’d hardly had anything to drink that night.
“What do you mean?” she asked warily.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this sooner. I tried once, that night we went camping in the Catskills, but then you fell asleep….” Harry shook his head, started again. “What I’m about to say will sound impossible, but I’m begging you to listen. My family…we aren’t like other people.”
“Funny enough, I noticed that myself,” Julia said dryly. “You have too much money and not enough morals.”
“We are gods,” Harry replied.
Julia looked over at him. He was still standing next to his horse, his expression completely serious.
“Gods,” she repeated, waiting for the punch line of the joke.
“We are gods. We live among humans, but we are not mortal.” He kept talking, using names she had studied for her art history thesis—Athena, Zeus, Hermes—explaining that she had met them all, but that they went by different names in the mortal world.
Julia could barely keep up. Harry thought he was a god? He must be delusional. Perhaps he was a megalomaniac, and having an episode, and she needed to get him help.
And yet…
She thought of all the times that she’d been with Harry and reality seemed to shift slightly around her. All the times she had prickled with an awareness that there was something more going on, something beyond the reach of her senses. Something she didn’t fully understand.
“You’re saying you’re a god,” she repeated, shaking her head. “As in, you think people should be praying to you?”
“As in, one of the gods from the Greek pottery you wrote your thesis about.”
It made no sense. And at the same time, it made sense of everything.
Julia recalled the way he’d calmed her racing heartbeat with a brush of his bare hands.
All the moments he’d appeared with objects she needed as if he’d conjured them from thin air.
The water that had heated around them, when they were wrapped around each other in that river in the Catskills, as if they were in a hot tub.
The time he’d saved her life by flying.
Perhaps deep down, some part of Julia wanted this ludicrous, impossible, unbelievable explanation to be true, because she crossed her arms over her chest and stared at him.
“Prove it to me.”
“Prove it?” Harry repeated.
“Yes. If you’re a god, like you claim to be, then do something godly.”
Harry looped the reins around Santos’s neck. Julia started to tell him what a stupid idea that was; he couldn’t leave a horse untethered like that—but then she heard Harry whicker and neigh, sounding exactly like a horse. Santos and JB both nodded at him in clear gestures of understanding.
“Did you just talk to the horses?” she demanded, her voice shrill.
“It’s one of my powers. Not all animals, just horses and dogs,” Harry explained, as if that made it any more reasonable. “I wanted to assure them that they shouldn’t be afraid of what I’m going to do next.”
Harry waded into the river. As he walked, the water skirted around his ankles, parting like the Red Sea each time he took a step, so that he was walking on the smooth river rocks instead of getting wet.
He crossed to the other side of the stream, where an enormous granite boulder stood, easily the size of a truck.
As Julia watched, Harry bent down to lift the boulder into his arms, then hurled it several dozen yards forward.
The resounding crash should have spooked the horses, but they just stood there, watching him with curious eyes.
Julia swallowed. All the things she had just seen him do—they were real. And there was undoubtedly more.
“Harry,” she breathed, but he shook his head.
“Ares. My real name is Ares.”
“Ares,” Julia repeated, the syllables rolling around her mouth strangely. She let out a breath. “I think it’s about time you told me everything. From the beginning.”