She shook her head. “How was I to know that you really loved me? That you didn’t wake up in the morning and regret everything?”
He raised a full glass to his lips and finished half of it in one long swallow. The whiskey spilled down his chin. He wiped his jaw on his sleeve—a vulgar gesture that he never would even contemplate otherwise, but he was beyond caring. “That is not what I’m talking about. You deliberately withheld your identity from me. And you never came to me because you knew precisely how you would be received were you to tell the truth.”
She blinked. “And how would I have been received?”
“As you were today,” he said coldly. “I believe I’ve shown you the door already.”
“Because I was Bertie’s cook? I told you that I was a nobody.”
“No, I was a nobody. You were known far and wide. The only British domestic servant more infamous was the queen’s Scotsman.”
“Really?” she said, her eyes downcast. “I didn’t know my notoriety reached quite that extent.”
“Believe me, it did.” He downed what remained in his glass. “It did. Even people who didn’t know Bertie from the Duke of Wellington thought you must be the best fuck since the invention of the mattress.”
She blanched at his language.
“Ten years I squandered on you, ten years of faithful devotion. I spent money I swore I’d never touch on three sets of detectives, looking for you. I could have married. I could have had children. I needed not to have worshipped your sham idol. But I did, because you never had the decency to let me go. You let me cling to false memories and false hopes.”
She had been leaning toward him, but now she leaned away, as if trying to accommodate the size of his anger. “I thought you would regret your offer in the morning,” she said, her eyes sincere. “I thought you wouldn’t want anything to do with me once the sun rose.”
“You were right. I wouldn’t have—if only I knew. And that was why you hid it from me, wasn’t it? You wanted to preserve an illusion. You knew I wouldn’t touch Verity Durant with a ten-foot pole, so you didn’t give me a chance to repudiate her. Then you took that illusion home and left me to pick up the pieces.”
“That’s not true. I never meant to—”
“It doesn’t matter what you meant or did not mean to do. I’m sure you concocted all sorts of lovely and noble excuses and I’m sure you wholeheartedly believe in each one of them. But this is what you did—you took that illusion home and left me to pick up the pieces.”
“I’m sorry!”
“You are sorry? Ten years I waited for you to come back. I revered your galoshes as if they were splinters of the One True Cross. I dropped good money into every church coffer I ever came across on the off chance that there is a God and that he could be bribed into protecting you. And when I finally moved on, you had the gall to come and make me fall in love with you again, knowing perfectly well that there was never any other possible outcome except more misery!”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
He didn’t know what happened. But suddenly the whiskey glass was no longer in his hand. It hurtled across the room and shattered against the mantel. She flinched at the sound, her face as colorless as skimmed milk.
He dragged in a harsh breath. “If you didn’t mean to, you’d have left right after Bertie’s funeral. If you didn’t mean to, you’d have shown yourself. If you didn’t mean to, you wouldn’t have in the end. Now please leave. And go far away.”
“Stuart—”
“I don’t recall ever giving you permission to use my Christian name. Refrain from such liberties.”
She gazed at him a long time, with stubborn hope. And then that hope began to die little by little, until he could stand it no more. He turned away. “Go.”
She moved, then paused by the door, still waiting for him to change his mind. He did not look her way. She let herself out of the study. Her footfalls in the corridor were agonizingly slow, as if she were the Little Mermaid emerged from the sea, and every step was walking on knives.
At long last the front door opened and closed. He shut his eyes. He’d always associated her return with an extravagant happiness, the kind promised by fairy tales to keep children from despairing before life’s indiscriminate hardships. But he’d believed it, moon-dust and starlight and all.
It was not to be.
They did not live happily ever after.
The end.