Chapter 36 – Ariane – Shattered Things #3
I turn on my side and watch the door like it might move.
I tell myself I won’t go to him. Not tonight.
I can’t face him. What would I say to him?
I’m sorry my mother killed yours? How do you even say that?
I tell myself if he comes, I’ll send him away.
I tell myself a lot of things. I’m very good at telling.
In the morning, I’ll have to be a person again, and knock on Richard’s door with tea and say, “Walk?” I’ll call Penny back and let her swear on my behalf.
I’ll have to open my laptop and be a woman who can function in a world with HR portals and references.
I will have to own what I did, what I’m doing, what I want.
But right now, I let the ache exist without giving it instructions.
I let last night replay until the edges blur and the voices go underwater.
I close my eyes and see Finn’s face at the table, the terrifying calm of a man who chose to be the hurricane.
I am furious with him. But I am furious for him. My mother killed his mother.
How does that even feel? How do we talk about it? I’m so ashamed, I don’t think I could ever look him in the eyes again.
The house feels like it’s holding its breath. Every wall looks speckless, too polite, like it’s pretending not to remember last night. I’ve been pacing for ten minutes straight, trying to find a spot that doesn’t hum with leftover shouting. Spoiler: there isn’t one.
So, I decided to go to the garden, which is pretending to be harmless—white hydrangeas, clipped hedges, the lake doing its best impression of a postcard—but my stomach is still a knot, and I’m trying to remember how to breathe without counting.
I pick a leaf to death. It didn’t deserve it. Neither did I, technically, but here we are.
“Ariane.”
I don’t jump, which is progress or proof that I’m numb.
His voice finds me first, low and controlled, and then he does, footsteps on gravel, a shadow long and certain across the grass.
I keep my back to him because I don’t trust my face.
It’s probably doing something unflattering like crumpling and glowing red.
“Go away,” I say, very calmly, as if I’m a queen and this is a decree, not a plea.
He doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. Finn never met a boundary he didn’t want to lean on until it broke.
He steps into my periphery, sleeves shoved up, throat bare, that black shirt that looks like sin learned to tailor.
The bruise under his eyes from no sleep makes him look more dangerous, which feels rude.
“Don’t—” My voice cracks. I swallow and try again. “Don’t do the thing where you stand there and look like you understand me. You don’t.”
His head tilts, just a fraction. “I understand you better than anyone in the world.”
“Congratulations,” I snap, breath hitching. “You win the prize for Best Interpreter of Ariane, and the prize is, oh look, total devastation.”
He exhales through his nose, the ghost of a humorless laugh. “If you want to hit me, hit me. You’ll feel better.”
“Don’t you dare be generous.” I swipe a hand across my cheek, furious with the tears I told to behave. “You could’ve told me privately. You could’ve, God, Finn, you humiliated her. You humiliated me.”
His eyes go flat and bright at once, like knives catching light. “She killed my mother, Ariane. Did you want me to write her a eulogy instead?”
“That’s not what I…” I bite down on the rest because the words feel like I’m chewing broken glass. “You took a grenade to my family and then stood there to watch the pieces fly. You liked it.”
“I liked the truth,” he says evenly. “There’s a difference.”
“You don’t get to act like a savior when all you do is ruin things.” The heat in my chest breaks its banks. “You didn’t just expose her, you torched Richard… you torched me. You threw me on that table with her and lit the match.”
“And what would you have done with mercy?” he asks, infuriatingly quiet. “Slept with it? Worn it to dinner? Your mother hired someone to poison a woman and then came into this house and wore grief like jewelry. You want me to be polite about that?”
“Stop.” I step into him because I can’t help it, furious dog to a fence. “Stop explaining my mother like she’s a case study. Stop explaining me. You don’t get to narrate my life and then congratulate yourself for getting all the foreshadowing right.”
He holds my gaze. “I’m not narrating. I’m ending a story that should’ve ended years ago.”
“Oh my God,” I gasp, the truth finally getting ahold of me. “How do we recover from this, Finn?.”
A muscle jumps in his jaw. He steps closer, and everything in me does the stupid reflex where fear and want shake hands. “You’re shaking,” he says.
“Because I’m angry, not because I’m a wind chime.” I swipe at another tear and hate how my voice trembles. “ She can’t get away with this. She can’t cause an earthquake and act like everything’s okay.”
He takes his phone from his pocket and offers it like a weapon. “Look again. If doubt is going to make you bleed, at least bleed over the right blade.”
Something snaps. I snatch it and then—without thinking, without planning—I hurl it toward the grass. It spins once in a neat arc and thuds into the lawn, screen-down, like a little black fish that leapt wrong.
“Good,” I say, breathless. “Now we can talk without you handing me exhibits.”
He stares at a spot behind me, then back at me, and I realize, devastatingly, his eyes have welled up.
I want to kiss him. I want to hug him and make him forget everything. I want to do both in an order a therapist would frown at.
My throat closes. “She needs to suffer.”
“She’s your mother.”
The words are simple and they atomize me. I hate him for being right, and I hate him for using it like a key.
“She can’t just get away,” I say, quieter now, because shouting feels like I’m spending oxygen I can’t afford.
“she ruined you and Richard. She took from you so maybe I can take from her. I know she’s a selfish bitch…
” My laugh is ugly. I used the word bitch for my mother.
I know there’s no going back from this now.
“but she still loves me. Maybe if something happened to me… that would be the perfect revenge.”
He steps in. I step back.
“I will destroy the world if something happened to you.” he says, and his voice goes low enough I feel it in my bones, “I will make sure to tie you up and never untie if you say that ever again. It’s not your fault so, why would you punish yourself?”
“You saying it doesn’t make it better.”
“I’m warning you,” he says.
“I hate you.” It flies out before I can decide if I mean it. It lands between us and hisses like something alive.
He nods, like I’ve set a chess piece where he expected. “Okay.”
“Don’t you dare be calm about this.”
“I’m not calm,” he says. “If you want to hate me for loving you, then go right ahead.”
Loving you.
“You think that if you control the narrative you control the pain? How could I ever look you in the eye ever again? How could I ever make up for any of…”
“By being right here,” he says simply, and I feel it, damn him, in the softest part of me.
We stand there with the ruin of the night between us, the table, the slap, Richard’s eyes, and the green of the lawn trying to pretend everything grows back the same after a wildfire. The lake does its glass thing. A bird has the audacity to sing.
“I won’t apologize for telling the truth,” he sighs. “I can only apologize for hurting you with it.”
Why would you apologize? I don’t say anything. I don’t trust myself with words any longer.
I close my eyes because that is unfair and precise and exactly where I live. “I can’t do this anymore,” I whisper.
He steps back. It feels like a cliff edge moves with him. “I’ll give you time.”
“I don’t want your time,” I snap, because as soon as he offers it, I want to smash it. I don’t want to keep feeling the guilt I’m feeling every time I’m with him.
“You want me,” he says, and it shouldn’t sound like mercy.
I stare at him until my eyes sting. “I hate that you’re right.”
He nods again, like he’s shelving it. “Hate me, then. I can take it.”
“I know,” I say, and that’s the worst part.
He turns like he’s going to leave. I think he will.
I think I should let him. But my mouth, and honestly, at this point, who is in charge of my mouth, says, “If you ever use me to make a point again, I will take that anklet off and throw it into the lake and then I’ll jump in after it just to make sure it’s dead. ”
Something like a smile ghosts over his face and then dies, appropriately. “Noted.”
“Don’t you dare say ‘good girl.’”
He doesn’t. He just looks at me like he’s memorizing the shape of my anger and tucks his hands into his pockets so he won’t do something stupid, like touch me. “Dinner is at seven,” he says, absurdly practical. “Eat something before.”
“I’m not a fainting goat.”
“You’re a human with low blood sugar and terrible coping mechanisms,” he says. “Eat.”
I want to throw a hydrangea at him. I settle for rolling my eyes with such force I might sprain them. “Go away.”
He does, finally, the gravel crunching under his shoes like punctuation marks. I watch him until he vanishes around the hedges. The ache doesn’t go with him. It sits in my chest like a tenant who pays in drama.
I walk back to the house on legs that feel like someone else’s. Inside, the hall mirrors everyone but me. Lydia looks up from rubbing down the silver, reads my face, and decides to rub harder. The study door is shut again.
In my room, I close the door and lean against it, forehead to wood, heartbeat where the hinge can hear it.
The evening light slides across the floor, slow and honey-thick, and I stand in it like I’ll learn photosynthesis out of spite.
My cheek throbs in time with the clock. I touch it and think, absurdly, powder can only do so much.
His phone, the way he said my mother is dead… It all replays in my head on loop. I cross to the window and look at the lake until it looks back.
I press my palm to the anklet through my jeans. “I hate you, Mom,” I whisper into the room, into the glass, into the shadow.