Withdrawing her hand, it comes out empty, and she closes the cabinet door.
Then her shoulders rise and fall heavily, and still with her back to me she says, “Then what do you want, Victor?”
“Thank you, but I do not want anything,” I tell her kindly. “I could not eat or drink anything if—”
She turns, and looks at me from across the bar. “I mean, what do you want?”
Oh.
I sigh, and glance at a kitchen chair.
“May I sit?”
She nods.
“I will understand if you do not want to see me—”
“If I didn’t want to see you, Victor, I wouldn’t have opened the door and let you inside.”
She is waiting for something. An apology? I will gladly give it to her. I do not know how many times I told her I was sorry while she was in the hospital, but I will apologize every day for the rest of my life if that is what she needs. An explanation? I have been desperate to give her one of those as well, and I intended to do that also while she was hospitalized, but considering she would not talk to me, I did not feel it the right time.
I decide to go with something different, something she would likely never expect of me—something I never expected of myself.
“It would make me very happy if you would marry me, Izabel.”
She just stares at me, unblinking, and although the expression on her face has not changed much from the emotionless one, I see evidence of something different in her eyes. But I haven’t the faintest clue as to what it is.
I stand up. Because it feels right not to be sitting.
“I…I do not expect it soon,” I begin, nervously, “but I hope that someday you will be my wife, because I—”
“Stop, Victor.” She puts up a hand.
Maybe I should have stuck with the apologies and explanations.
“I am sorry,” I say.
“I said stop.”
She drops her hand at her side and comes toward me; I get the feeling I am about to be lectured in the calmest of ways.
Her hands touch my shoulders lightly, and the next thing I know, I am sitting down again. She pulls out the empty chair next to me and sits, drawing her legs up and crossing them with her feet tucked beneath her bare thighs; she rests her hands in her lap. I try so hard not to look at the still-healing four-inch-long scar running upward along the side of her throat; the many stitches, like a freakishly-large centipede with wiry black legs; the glistening medicated lubricant—I tear my eyes away, swallow hard, and look at her beautiful face instead. I feel the stiches across the palm of my hand, but mine are nothing compared to hers.
She hesitates, as if gathering the appropriate words, and then says, “I love you fiercely, Victor. I can’t control that, and I can’t change it. But unlike you”—she pauses, holding my gaze—“unlike you, I’m not trying to.”
I start to speak, but she is not finished.
“It’s all you’ve ever done,” she says. “Since you met me, you’ve tried to push me away, tried to control something no man or woman can ever control, instead of accepting it, and letting life happen—please look at me, Victor.”
I had not realized my eyes had strayed from hers. Out of shame. Out of regret. Out of knowing that everything she is saying is right.
“I can forgive a lot of things,” she goes on. “I can forgive and forget. But what you did—what you tried to do—with Niklas, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get past that.”
“Izabel—”
She leans forward a little, and begins to whisper harshly. “You tried to pass me off to your brother”—her hands squeeze into fists within her lap—“do you have any idea how that feels to me?”
“No,” I say. “I can never understand fully how you feel, but I do know how much I regret it, and if how much I regret it is any indication of how you might feel, then I know the intensity of the pain, at least. I cannot take it back, but I know I could never do anything like that again.”
“But you did it once,” she says, shaking her head. “You didn’t want me…”
I shake my head, too, more vigorously, in advance of hoping to get my point across. “That is the furthest thing from the truth,” I say. “Because I wanted you, because I love you, that is why I tried to push you away—it makes no sense, I know. It is why I tried to put you with the only person other than you in this world who I trust. It was a mistake, one I do not ever expect to be forgiven for, but one I hope you can at least understand.”
“I do understand,” she comes back. “I understand why you did it; I understand that what you did wasn’t bad—it was just wrong. So very wrong, Victor. But I’m right when I say you did it because you didn’t want me—please let me finish.”
I drop my hand and close my mouth.
“You were willing to give me up to somebody else,” she says. “That fact remains, and can’t be argued—no matter what your reasons were, you still wanted to give me up.”