“But ... what will you tell Caroline?”
“I have a feeling she knows what coming here would lead to,” he said.
“Why? I find it ... peculiar, especially since she knows we have a history.”
“I agree. I can’t reconcile her insane jealousy over youandher willingness to bring us together over a rapacious desire for a painting. I mean, I know she’s materialistic, but she knows how in love with you I was. Maybe this was her plan all along.”
“Wasin love?”
“Amin love.”
She grinned. “Whatever her reason, I owe her big time.”
He kissed her head. “Say you’ll stay with me at least a few more days, then I’ll fly you home on the charter with the painting.”
“I’ll stay for as long as you want to be together.”
“Then, that’s forever, and it’s still not long enough.”
Quiet settled in again, and his finger went back to drawing lazy circles along her clavicle, the curves of her breasts, and the flat plane of her stomach.
“I don’t want you to tell your sister about us,” he finally said.
She nodded.
“I can’t risk her tearing you from my life again over her envy of you,” he added.
Her eyes welled with tears. “I won’t let her this time. I think she’s realizing that I’m not so easily swayed by her anymore and that she’s losing control over me. My sister has been becoming more unstable in her desperation to be relevant.”
“I saw that at the wedding when I asked you to dance.”
“It hit me then—the control, the entitlement, the manipulation. How had I missed the increased severity? I should have seen it.”
“Mom suspected the truth. I think I always knew the power your sister had over you back then, but I want you to know something ...” He took a deep breath. “There’s no delicate way to say this, but it’s what I felt. I was deeply hurt that you didn’t have true faith in meandyourself. I was prepared to give it all up to spend a lifetime beside you because I believed in us, and I planned on proposing to you that Valentine’s Day.”
That hurt deeper than anything. She’d lost it all, and his truth-telling over Jane’s jealousy was spot on. There was no delicate way to say she’d missed her sister’s gaslighting manipulation and patterns—two things she once claimed she knew how to deal with. “You’re right. I lost sight of everything, especially what authentic love is. That I doubted you, what I said, when I said it, all of it was ... incredibly immature and misguided. Here, I had thought I was being rational about our future, but in the end, our feelings were more important. I realized my mistake shortly after, but it was too late.”
“If you only had talked to me.” He rested his cheek against the top of her head. “It pisses me off when I think how we could have been loving each other, raising a family, and painting the world together—all lost dreams.”
“Not lost, just redirected.”
Turning to her side, she looked up at him, a tear trickling down her cheek. “I tried to call and text you.” She wiped a cheek and sniffled. “But your phone just rang. Your doorman even let me camp out at your apartment door for two days, but ... you never came home, and then I called you when I got to school. I wanted to share with you all the incredible things and ask you to join me, but again ... and then I called you when I heard about Anne’s death. I did try, William. I missed you so much and will die regretting how I hurt you and the time we lost.”
“I didn’t ghost you. I wouldn’t have because I wanted you to come back, but I was so angry with you and everyone calling to lecture me about my drinking that I tossed my phone. I wasn’t even available for my mother when she needed me.”
Ah, the added guilt about Anne.
“Had you just gone down to Donovan’s, you would have found me there.” Wiping her tears with his thumb, he said, “I tried to banish, even drown, the man who loved you, but he was always inside, yearning for you, yet terrified of getting hurt again.”
“I’ll never hurt you again.” She sighed deeply, voicing the truth about her sister for the first time. “I’ve carried the Jane situation for far too long. I’m so exhausted from walking on eggshells around her instability. Not even my moving out of the apartment to Brooklyn helped. I hate that I allowed her controlling mess to rewrite the future we had planned together.”
“Me, too. My heart aches that I wasn’t there for you.As I had with my mother, I failedyouand my promise regarding your sister.”
“Oh, William, you didn’t fail either of us. Please don’t take on the responsibility for your mother’s desire to protect you, or for my detestable judgment and willingness to let the cycle of abuse continue. I should have realized Jane’s arrival in NewYork did not mean she had gone no contact with our mother. She just needed someone to freeload off.”
“Did leaving for Paris at least help?”
“In some ways. It was wonderfully liberating but lonely at times, a self-imposed prison, knowing how I hurt you. And then Anne died. I nearly suffocated from the grief of having lost the two most incredible people I’ve ever known and my not being in New York to help either of you.”
