The truth forced its way out. “I wouldn’t marry her.”
“I shouldn’t have answered,” her voice cracked.
I pressed my eyes shut, the sting building behind them. “You shouldn’t have answered,” I repeated.
For a second, I stayed there, listening to her breathe until I hung up.
My mind snaps back to the present, her voice pulling me out of it as she finishes her story. Her eyes shine with tears.
“I was so dumb back then,” she says. “I hope you can forgive me.”
I lift my hand to her cheek, my thumb brushing just beneath her eye. “There’s nothing to forgive, Kitten. We just didn’t have the right words then.” I hold her gaze. “We do now.”
She nods, a soft laugh slipping out of her. “I think I’ve had a crush on you forever.”
I let out a low chuckle. “I know.”
Ialwaysdid.
It just wasn’tthe righttime.
Eighteen
AURELIA
Two days have passed, and Nathaniel keeps coming and going from the house. He says he has business to take care of, but I notice that business keeps pulling him into the basement for far too long.
There is a difference between remembering a person and starting to remember who that person really was. The more I remember, the more I see what I’ve missed, and it hurts.
The part of me that didn’t know before had no idea what it really meant to be stuck. All this time, I thought I loved Daniel. I thought that, in some way, I couldn’t leave because maybe he would change, maybe he would love me again, and somewhere inside that hope, I lost whatever love I had left for him. But the part of me that remembers now knows the truth. I was afraidto leave. Somehow, I always believed that if I did, something horrible would happen and I would end up completely alone.
It’s hard to understand how someone ends up in a life like that, because it’s never something you want and never something that just happens all at once. You keep taking it until something inside you breaks. You grow numb to everything around you, while a quiet part of you still hopes for something better. I used to dream of a better life. I used to dream that one day someone would come, and I would finally be able to leave. I just needed to feel safe enough to do it.
Nathaniel gave me that safety.
Even when he was kilometers away, in another city, living another life, he still gave me that hope to hold onto when everything else was slipping through my hands. I think that is the part of me that remembers who he truly is.
I know some of my memories of him, or the way other people saw him, were different. But people wear different masks for different crowds and still keep the truest parts of themselves hidden underneath. He is proof of that. To everyone else, he was a bad man. To me, he was the best one.
And that is the strange part, because Daniel was the complete opposite. If anything, that is proof that you never really know a person until you live with them under the same roof.
I shift on the bed. We moved all of my things into the master bedroom, and the room is no longer buried beneath white cotton sheets. It feels real. And for the first time in what feels like forever, I am enjoying my time with him. Time stops when I’m here. The rest of the world fades so easily that sometimes I forget anyone else exists. After weeks of tears, I catch myself smiling again.
I haven’t been reading much of Lilibeth’s diary lately, but I still want to know her. Not because she was his wife. Because I need to see Nathaniel through someone else’s eyes, not just mine.
I open the page and read.
I gasp and snap the diary shut. My heart pounds so hard as I leave it on the bed and step out onto the balcony, chasing a breath from what I just read. My hands press against the cold stone railing as I look down.
I see him placing something into his red cabriolet, and my brows pull together. The car feels familiar. I brush it off when he looks up and smiles at me.
“Where are you going?” I shout down to him.
“We’re going to town,” he calls back. “It’s Wednesday.”
A smile tugs at my lips. “So I’m allowed to leave the house, Mr. Rosewood?”
He nods, opening the car door and leaning against it. He pulls a cigarette from his pocket and lights it. He inhales, then exhales a smoke that starts curling into the air around him.
