‘Next week. Did … something happen?’
Ava exhaled a deep sigh through her lips. ‘I’ve done something,’ she said quietly. ‘Something Iknowis the right thing. And yet …’ She broke off, frowning, her gaze tracking to the small table beside the settee – the book that sat upon it.
‘And yet … it feels awful?’ Oliver offered.
‘Yes,’ she breathed, her gaze snapping to his. ‘But it shouldn’t, should it?’
Her brother’s gaze was heavy upon her. ‘Life isn’t neat like that,’ he said. ‘Doing the wrong thing can feel incredible. Like you are Icarus, and you are soaring in the sky. And doing the right thing is that moment when your wings catch fire, when you can smell them burning, and you know the next moment you will plummet – a cloud of ash – to the ground.’ He frowned a little then, his expression clouding as he swallowed. ‘But wasn’t it worth it? To fly so close to the sun even for a moment? To have that weightlessness? Wouldn’t it be worth it?’
Ava tilted her head to one side. For kissing Damien had felt a little like that – like she was flying too close to the sun. And hearing him tell her he had to leave had felt like plummeting to the ground. She sighed, her gaze flicking back to the book on the side table. She turned it so that she could see the cover.
‘Melmoth the Wanderer? And here I thought you only read shopping lists and recipe books.’
A thin laugh spilled from Oliver’s lips. ‘Jem gave it to me. You can borrow it, if you’d like. I’m trying to spend every hour I can practising.’
She creaked the cover open – and saw someone had scribbled a line onto the first page.
I have gazed on you ‘till my soul has become yours – ‘till my own being has vanished.
And her breath stilled in her throat.
‘Jem gave this to you?’ She asked.
‘Ijustsaid that.’ Oliver’s brows furrowed. ‘I’m making you a sandwich, Ava.’ He turned back towards the kitchen. ‘You look awful.’
Ava stared down at the book in her hands. At the words that’d been underlined – and she thought of them cramminginto the stifling, stuffy room that sat above Foster’s Apothecary. Of the roast slowly cooking in the oven, and the dribbles of warm, red wine sliding down their glasses. The way it had splashed onto the tablecloth as Jem had proposed, her grip stuttering on the stem. The look on her brother’s face.
‘Don’t mind him,’ Jem had said to her, afterwards. ‘He’s just worried that we’ll grow up, and leave him out.’
And that had made sense to Ava. Because it was what she had always feared with the two of them, that they would leave her behind. And so, she had brushed over her brother’s reaction.
But then the engagement had ended — as suddenly as it had begun, when Jem had stood before her, deep shadows beneath his eyes, and said:I’m sorry, Ava. I can’t.
And when her brother had shared in her anger, in her hurt, it had felt just. It had felt righteous.
But then time had passed, and her brother’s ire had not dampened – and shestillhadn’t understood.
But now she thought that perhaps she did.
She understood why Jem’s gaze always followed Oliver, like a sunflower follows the sun.
Why Oliver had always been so protective of him.
And there was only one answer to the question echoing around her mind, the one that’d whispered at her ever since she’d found Oliver in a heap upon their doorstep.
The answer had been right before her, all along.
Oliver loved Jem.
And that is why he had been so incensed at the proposal.
And Jem loved Oliver.
And that is why he had ended it.
And that meant that it had never been the three of them, together. As she’d wanted. As she’d hoped. It’d had only ever been them – the two of them – and she had existed in the space between.
She looked down at the book, the words blurring a little now as she thought of what her brother had said, that day in the kitchen. How he’d said it was easier to pretend.
