Billy was still there. Standing by the window. Waiting.
Zia walked in, and the expression on her face was the one Alexei knew best, the one she wore when she was about to do something difficult with kindness. The expression of a woman who could not be cruel even when cruelty would have been easier.
“Billy.” Her voice was gentle. Firm but gentle. “I need you to hear me.”
The boy turned. Hope written across his face so plainly it was almost obscene.
“You’re wrong about Alexei,” she said. “He didn’t forbid me from talking to you. He doesn’t control me. He doesn’t keep me here.” She took a breath. “He loves me. And I love him back.”
Billy’s face went white.
“I’m so sorry.” Her voice was shaking now, and her eyes were bright, and she was not composed, not delivering a speech, just a girl trying to be kind in the hardest moment she knew how to be kind in. “I’m sorry that you came all the way here, and I’m sorry about what happened with the score, and I’m sorry yourmom had to go through all of that because of...” She faltered. Swallowed. “We were never...I’m sorry. It’s too late. I love Alexei. I always will.”
Billy stood there. His hands at his sides. His face drained of everything.
“But Billy...” She took a step toward him. “I forgive you. For all of it. The secrecy, the text, the score. Everything. I need you to know that. And I need you to go live your life, okay? Find someone who makes you brave. You deserve that.”
He opened his mouth, closed it, and then he nodded, once, slowly, and walked out of the living room without another word.
Zia watched him go. Then she wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, and she stood in the empty living room, and the expression on her face was not relief.
It was love.
Love for the man she’d married. Love she was about to come and tell him. Love that was waiting for him in the living room with the loveliest smile when he came home and told herthere’s been a mistake.
Alexei did not hear any of it.
He was staring at the screen, and the screen was showing him a woman who loved him, who had always loved him, who had been trying to figure out how to let down a boy gently because she was incapable of cruelty even toward the person who had broken her heart.
And he had just offered her a divorce.
The thing that had been humming for her, the deep signal that meantsettled, content, home,was screaming now, and the sound it made was not contentment.
It was anguish.
He had done the one thing he had promised never to do.
I am not that boy. I will never hurt you.
His face, reflected in the dark screen, was hollow.
What have I done?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I DIDN’T GO BACK TOhim.
I said “excuse me for a moment” and I walked down the hallway, and instead of stopping at the library or the bedroom or the bathroom or any of the places where a woman might go to collect herself before returning to have a conversation about the end of her marriage, I walked straight to the garage.
I took the first car. I didn’t check whose it was. I got in and I started driving and I didn’t look back, because if I looked back I would see the fortress, and if I saw the fortress I would think about the piano and the library and the espresso machine I named Mariano and the couch where he hummed with his arm around me, and I would break.
I can’t break.
Not yet. Not here. Not on a private road in the Rocky Mountains with my hands shaking on the steering wheel and my vision blurring and the wordswould you prefer a divorce or an annulmentplaying on a loop in my head like a song I can’t turn off.
A divorce or an annulment.
Like those were equal options. Like choosing between the method of destruction made the destruction itself more bearable. Like a woman whose husband just told her their compatibility was a mistake should be able to calmly select the paperwork she prefers.
