He exhaled. “No situation should justify telling a falsehood, even if it might be convenient or helpful to do so. I was wrong to do what I did. And so were you.”
A tear slid down my cheek, no longer hidden by the rainfall. Sorrow shone in his glassy blue eyes as we stared at each other in silence. “So, what happens now?”
“I go back to Trinity and hope that none of this follows me there,” he said.
“You’re going to leave just like that?”
He huffed a humorless laugh. “No, not just like that. But in a way in which I can protect myself. I’m not a toy, Rosalin, and neither is my heart, though we both find ourselves painfully at your mercy. I need to reconcile my truths and you need to do the same. Perhaps I was merely a diversion for you, after all, and none of this was real.”
“How can you say that?Everythingwas real,” I croaked, wondering if heartbreak was unendurable, because everything inside of me felt like it was splintering apart, without any hope of ever being repaired. His heavy words were like sledgehammers against the fragility of blood and bone. “You are wrong, Tarik. You know you’re wrong.”
“Am I?” His smile was sad. “My wish is for you to be happy someday, Lady Rosalin, and that you find whomever it is you were looking for.”
My tears rolled down my cheeks unimpeded at the formal address, as he distanced himself from me…from us. As though he were saying goodbye. I knew I had crossed lines, but surely everything he’d come to know about me might be enough to convince him that we were worth fighting for. ThatIwas worth fighting for.
But in the end, I wasn’t.
Standing there in the cold and the dark, I stared at him as he walked away from me forever, the answer to his wish glued to my tongue.
You…I was looking for you.
Chapter Eighteen
Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
—Isaac Newton
“You need to eat, Rosalin,” Ela cajoled, to which I ducked and buried my head beneath the counterpane, which smelled distinctly sour.
“And leave this bedchamber before it starts stinking of bed piss like a sick room,” Zia added, wrinkling her nose as if the odor was more pervasive than just on my bedding.
“Zia!” Ela chastised, which I also would have done if I had the will to care. Ela lifted a bowl of broth that one of the maids handed her, the smell of it making me feel instantly nauseated. “Please, Rosalin. Just a spoonful or two, and I promise we will leave you alone.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
“She hasn’t eaten a proper meal in days,” Anna said, her low voice missing its usual caustic edge. One would think she’d be furious now with my apathy, but she only sounded worried. “That’s why I sent the message to you.”
It had been a week or two—perhaps more—since the ill-fated ball that had ruined my life. I hadn’t taken to my bed in a fit of self-pity, but the despair I had felt had been unimaginable to bear. I wanted to sleep it away like Little Snow-White in the fairy tales Tarik so esteemed. But perhaps that was a bit melodramatic.
Admitting to my best friends that I had schemed and lied had felt unconscionable. After I’d done it, I hadn’t been able to look any of them in the eye. And so, I’d hidden like a coward and refused to see anyone, until Anna sounded the alarm.
“You need to wash, Rosalin,” Zia said. “You smell like ten-day-old stockings sitting upon a round of moldy cheese left in the sun.”
God, she was histrionic—and obsessed with old cheese and smelly stockings.
I seemed to recall an old duke suitor of hers whom she’d described similarly. Come to think of it, that also sounded exactly like my moldy old suitor, the Duke of Bentley. Did all old dukes smell like stockings and cheese? I bit back a ragged laugh. Wasthatnow in my future? I’d take the prepubescent nose-picker himself, Renton, over him in a heartbeat.
Too bad I didn’t want either of them.
When Zia cleared her throat expectantly, the slightest twinge of shame rolled through me. I honestly could not remember the last time I’d left the bed, much less to bathe properly. Ducking my head to my armpit, I sniffed cautiously and grimaced. She wasn’t wrong. Not exactly moldy cheese-stockings but not fresh roses either.
“Will you termagants leave if I promise to have a bath?” I muttered, peeking over the bedclothes with a shamefaced scowl.
“And eat a meal,” Ela added. “A full one, not just a nibble or two.”
I huffed a breath and regretted that, too. I’d have to give my teeth a good scrubbing as well. Nothing like falling apart on the inside to mirror it on the outside. “Fine.”
“And we will wait right here to make sure that you hold up your end of the bargain,” Zia said firmly. “We know all the tricks in the book.” She peered at my head. “And wash your hair! It looks like a deranged rodent made a nest on the top of your head. And no boy, I repeat,no boyis worth weeping over to the point that you have snot trails crusting your cheeks.”
