I could tell she wanted to lie, just for the sake of winning this argument, but she couldn't do it, she was too righteously furious for that. "Of course not. Never. I would never have stood by and let you take the fall for something I had done."
My eyes were wild, screaming at her. "See?" I was shouting now. "This was why you didn't get the choice! I know you, and I knew what you would do. If you can't forgive me for that, I don't know what to do, but I still don't see that I had another way. I won't apologize for protecting you the only way I knew how."
She knew I didn't. I could see it in the resigned eyes she turned on me.
Even she, the mother of all grudge-holders, could only hold a grudge for so long.
"I'm tired of hating you," she said quietly, a world of regret in it. "When all my heart has ever needed is to love you." Those words were so very hard for her, I could tell, and the next ones were harder. "For helping me survive for so long, for going through hell with me and getting me, somehow, to the other side of it intact, I will learn to forgive you. Even with all of the ways you've destroyed me, I could never forget all of the ways you've saved me, Dante."
"You saved me, too. Never forget that, either."
"And destroyed you," she said the words lightly, but they held all the weight in the world. For both of us.
I smiled and it was so bittersweet that she had to look away. "Yes. Broken. Destroyed. But now saved again. It's enough for me. You are. You always were. I have many demons. But only one angel."
Now the problem, of course, was that she had to learn to forgive herself.
We both did.
It was later. We were in bed and she was tucked securely against my chest.
When I spoke, it was a quiet whisper into the night. "You learn more about someone when you're fighting them than you do loving them. Things you can only learn from war. We know each other in ways we wouldn't have. Maybe it wasn't all in vain. I love you in more complex ways than I did before. I understand you more intimately."
"You're a fool," she said forlornly into my chest.
"I know, tiger. Believe me, I know."
"I love you for it."
"I know, angel. That, too."
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
"Terror made me cruel."
~Emily Bront?
PAST
SCARLETT
It was almost nonsense to me—what he was saying. I only caught snippets, broken off sentences, half-phrases, but my numb brain slowly put it together. He was ending things.
The conversation only lasted minutes, mere minutes to take everything I held sacred and tear it open, rip out the insides, and smash them under his heel.
When he was finished, I felt diminished. Like I was nothing. Like I always had been.
I should have not been so surprised. I should not have been surprised at all, really.
The only real mystery here was that he'd ever tried to love me in the first place.
Even so, my pain was breathtaking.
I was inconsolable, and he did not even try to console me. He said his piece and hung up the phone.
It was devastating. Life changing. When you have felt like nothing with that much certainty, you never come back from it. Even if you manage to piece yourself up, a part of you stays in the gutter where you were left. Always.
It was a live or die moment. A get yourself off the ground or stay down and let this end you event. Walk away and leave him behind, or stay and let this kill you, kill yourself just to see if he'll bleed out with you.
I always thought I was too strong to be broken by anything. I always told myself that, at least.
But love changes you. No matter how strong you are, it makes you stronger. No matter how weak you are, it makes you weaker. No matter how hard you are to conquer, it will bring you to your knees.
A part of me held onto a small bit of denial. For days I held onto it. I couldn't get out of bed, but I held on. It couldn't be real.
It had been Dante's voice, but it hadn't been him. An imposter had broken me. Somehow Dante would make it right.
I was holding onto that delusion for dear life when I started receiving the texts. One after another. The first was only words, short and to the point.
This is Tiffany. Dante and I are getting married. Just thought you should know before it's announced publicly. He would like Gram's ring back.
I was still staring at that bit of evil when the next message came in.
Oh and I thought you should see these. Enjoy.
What followed was a furious flow of picture texts, one after the other, all showing roughly the same thing.
Him with her.
My God. Her? Tiffany?
Turns out it was right there in our foundation all along—the thing that would break us. Her?
The intimacy of it is what killed me.
He was supposed to be mine. Inarguably. Irrevocably. Every part of him, inside and out, belonged to me.
I'd never seen him so much as touch another girl's hand, and there he was, in picture after picture.
Sprawled on his back, being straddled, hands on her slender, naked hips.
That's what felt like the biggest betrayal, that he'd hidden it so thoroughly from me, this other side of him.
That his devotion to me could be nothing but a lie.