Well, that was a dark realization he needed to put to the side for right now. Iris wasn’t done with her story.
He wrapped his hand around hers even more tightly, in encouragement. “So you didn’t try to leave.”
“So I didn’t try to leave. You can get away with a lot as long as you don’t try to do that. I was the town pariah, but I was still part of the town. I learned how to drive, and I had a truck so I could deliver furniture orders, so I went to Polis every chance I got. I went to secondhand shops and bought ....”
To his surprise, she laughed.
“I boughteverything. Basically every spare cent I had went to buyinganything, just as long as it was something you wouldn’t find in the village. Let’s see: neon spandex leggings, superhero movies, stuffed animals, Danielle Steel novels, thisStar Trek-themed cookbook .... Eventually, I started learning what I actually liked, so I could focus on that.”
Keith loved the curiosity and fortitude and exuberance of Iris digging through mountains of human culture to expand her world by any means necessary.
He smiled. “How were thoseStar Trekrecipes?”
“You know, some of them were actually pretty good. I kept the cookbook.”
She leaned against his shoulder, the weight of her warm and lovely.
“I didn’t want to hurt anybody,” Iris said finally. “I just wanted to find out more about the world. But Ididhurt people. The first guy the Council found for Seraphina—he rejected her because of me, because he didn’t want to be tainted by having me as a sister-in-law.”
Keith itched to track this unknown guy down and punch him in the face. “What an absolute asshole. He’s the one who hurt her, not you.”
“It felt like it was me. And it felt like that to her, too, because she asked me to tone it down until she could get married. She was worried that if anyone else rejected her, the Council would stop trying to find her a match.”
They might have, too. In a better, fairer world, that wouldn’t have mattered, because Seraphina Lightfoot could have just gone on to find herownmatch, and she could have picked someone who wouldn’t act like her sister had the plague. But in Purity, you either married who the Council told you to marry or you didn’t get married at all.
Yeah, this was a cult.
“But your sister’s married now,” Keith said.
Iris nodded. “I played it safe for a while. I never wanted to get in her way. But after she found Blake—” She sighed. “I fell back into old habits.”
“You didn’t want to spend your entire life being miserable,” Keith said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. This place tried to force you into a box, and you didn’t let it. If you ask me, that’s brave.”
“Believe me, no one else felt that way. Everybody was pretty clear on the fact that I was the problem. If I was the only one who wasn’t happy here, then there was something wrong with me.”
Keith dared to brush his hand gently over her cheek, wiping away a stray tear.
“You can’t have been the only one who was miserable. I think you were just the only one who managed to really do something about it. Nothing makes people angrier than that.”
“Well, I’m sure Blake didn’t think it was all that brave or impressive when I probably got in the way of him getting a seat on the Council. A seat opened up last year, and he should have been a shoo-in for it—but they couldn’t appoint him because of me.”
“There’s no way they told you that.” The Silver Council wasn’t big on explaining their reasoning to people.
“No, but everybody knew anyway.”
“Sometimes the things everybody knows aren’t actually true.”
“If the Council didn’t appoint Blake because of me, I know that’s unfair,” Iris said. “I know that’s not really my fault. But I knew what he wanted out of life, and I chose not to think about it, even though I could wind up hurting him. And that’s not really fair either.”
Keith didn’t think those two things were remotely the same, but he could see why Iris would feel guilty. He guessed he would have too, in her shoes.
“The hell of it is,” Iris said, her voice catching a little, “if that spot had just opened up a little bit later, it might have been fine. Because last May, I got into an accident.”
She gestured at the scars on her face.
“I was driving back from the hardware store in Polis. I had this plan—it seems silly now—to make a bunch of whirligigs and weathervanes, things that were a little bit functional but mostly decorative. I was keeping my fingers crossed that people would be interested. I got what I needed, and I stopped at a Dairy Queen and got an ice cream cone.”
There was a sad sparkle in her eyes, a kind of wistfulness Keith could see through her unshed tears.
