I was naïve. So fucking naïve.
I had not yet learned the strong taste of hope when it rots, but today, today I know it only too well.
At the door, my ex-fiancée pauses. Mrs Vale seems to draw herself up, as if she believes he might just transform into my saviour after all.
“Be well, Miss Ratcliffe,” He says, so devoid of emotion. Like a tick box. A nice little generic passing to ease his own pathetic conscience.
The phrase goes through me like a needle in a doctor’s hand. It is neither blessing nor threat, it is closure sewn with an invisible stitch.
Some traitor in me wants to reach out. Not for him, God, no. But to snatch back the ring, the pen, the paper, something. Some human scrap that says I lived a different life than just this white sterile box.
But I don’t.
I keep my hands at my sides.
Pride holds me upright; pride puts its hand between my shoulder blades and says, steady now.
The weight that falls into the room once they are gone is extraordinary. The air returns all at once, and rushes into my lungs. The brightness of the ceilingstrip flares and then dims in a way I know is almost certainly a figment of my imagination.
I do not move. To move would be to confess how much I want to move, to throw the table at the wall, to slam my forehead into the door, to press my thumb into the indentation the ring has left until I bleed, and bleed, and bleed.
“No dramatics,” Mrs Vale says, in the same tone she would use to remind me to wipe a drip of milk from the lip of the glass.
I feel the corners of my mouth answer, a shape that is not a smile.
“Why would there be? It is merely a formality.” I say. My voice is steady. I think it might be the last steadiness in the room. I think my words might be the only truth spoken too, because we all know the deed was done. Our engagement was broken weeks ago. This paperwork is simply the final rubber stamp, the smashing of a champagne bottle over the hull of a new ship as it gets ready to leave the dock and go out into the world.
“You are fortunate,” she says, stepping into my space, invading it. Clearly, she is taking pleasure in being able to twist the knife a little more today “Lord Harrow arranged to attend personally. Some girls receive their notices on a screen.”
I do not look at her. If I look at her, I betray the exact place to strike. “How intimate,” I say.
She hums a little mocking tune and then looks at my hand where I’m absentmindedly already rubbing out the indent, as if I could scrub all the memories from my skin. “Leave the mark alone,” she says. “It will fade in a time.”
She turns to go, then pauses so casually I know it’s a ruse. “We’ll need measurements soon.” she says. “There is great interest in you already. Our Chapter Lord wants a detailed catalogue of your attributes. There will be photographs. Your teeth will be examined. Your body too. No one wants to take the risk you might be carrying something contagious.”
I swallow the fury I feel at that name being spoken out loud, but I can’t contain it. “Do they catalogue cows as carefully?”
“More,” she says. “Cattle can run.”
She leaves me with that little cruelty as a parting favour, or perhaps because she is as bored by all of this as I am.
The door shuts. The lock’s click is louder with fewer witnesses. The room recovers its hum and all I can hear is the scrape of my own blood in my ears, the tasting of my own name as a flavour I cannot spit out.
I am not crying. I will not cry.
I will not give them that satisfaction.
But all the while the camera watches, recording my composure for every one of those viewers to pick over.
On my finger, that pale circle still lingers where that ring used to sit. I press my other thumb against it until a crescent blooms, pink, then white again.
I do it again.
And again.
It’s a small rebellion, a small pain, a place to focus the thrum under my ribs. To scratch the itch that is perpetual boredom.
Mrs Vale waltzes in unannounced, and I know this is her way of reminding me that none of this space is mine. That privacy is not a thing I am permitted.
