“Sorry for what?” His thumbs are moving slowly against the insides of my arms, like he’s not even aware he’s doing it.
Moonlight casts a sheen on the dark locks of his hair, and would you believe, it’s at this moment that a cool breeze teases our skins while a carriage runs behind us, the chop-chop of horse hooves on the cobbled streets adding to the background music, and oh, will you look at that?
It’s the middle of summer, and yet it actually starts to rain? And the guests still inside the ballroom, they see it, too, and their cheers reach us all the way here, and a part of me wants to laugh and cry.
Foxtown is just so picturesque at any angle, and even God’s gamely joined in with all these coincidences that aren’t actually coincidences, and it’s making me feel like the two of us are shooting a movie, and we’re both reading from a script instead of the broken pieces of our past.
The white velvet of my dress is already drinking the rain in, the hem heavy where it brushes my ankles, the sleeves clinging dark to my arms. I can’t bring myself to care.
“I d-didn’t get to say this a while ago, but I want to say it now. I n-need to say it now—”
“Because you want to give me a chance to change my mind?”
One whirlwind summer romance, and yet this man knows, even better than I do, that I really am the other half of his soul.
I try my best to smile, but my lips are trembling too hard to make it. “You need to know what you’re getting into—”
And because I feel like he’s going to tell me it’s fine, and I can’t risk having him convince me it’s so, since that’s only going to cause us to repeat the same old mistakes—
“You know all about Mom, right?” The words come tumbling out in a rush, and the moment I start speaking, floodgates to my heart seem to break open, and I suddenly can’t stop speaking. “Icelle told me it was why you...you d-didn’t want photos of us taken, and that’s why...that’s why I went crazy that night. I d-didn’t know it then. And so I t-thought you were ashamed of me, or that you d-didn’t want Mirabella to know—”
His gaze narrows, his hands going still at my elbows. “Who told you about her?”
“It doesn’t matter.” It really doesn’t. “The fact is, I overheard people talking about her, and they were talking about you not wanting to have photos taken, and so I just...snapped.”
SNAP.
I hear it in my mind, unseen fingers snapping, and it’s like another cue, and my tears finally start falling.
“I did what I see Mom doing all the time. I self-destructed. Self-sabotaged. Because that’s all I knew growing up. I never wanted to be like her, but that’s how...that’s still how I ended up being, and when I lost you, when you didn’t want to talk to me again—it had to happen because that was the only way for me to know...I wasn’t alright. I never was. And Mom...never was, too.”
I look at Arkane, and I know he’s beautiful and all, more so in his Regency-era jacket and breeches. A nobleman every inch, but more than that, from the moment we met, he was—and still is—a noble man, and it hurts so, so much—
“I k-know it’s no excuse,” I whisper brokenly, “but Mom...she started treatment for post-partum two years ago, and she’s changed. I also had help.” From God. “I needed people to help me process...” Painful truths like hurt people hurt, and it’s no less true even between mothers and daughters. “I’m j-just so s-sorry—”
“Tiara.”
His hand comes up to my chin, the lightest possible pressure, lifting my face so I can’t look anywhere but at him.
My name on his lips.
I don’t think I’ll ever take the sound of it for granted again—
“You know.”
A choked sob escapes me.
“Don’t you?”
God. Oh God.
My knees have started knocking against each other. Because he’s right. I do know, and the crushing weight of knowing what I know, it always makes me feel like I’m about to fall apart any moment—
Two years ago, I was crying in my dorm room, and in a moment of weakness, I had asked Icelle—
‘Why? Why can’t he just talk to me? I kissed another guy, but it’s not like—’
‘Did you ever wonder why he was late that time?’
