Chapter 4

Chapter 4

LINA 

The silence that followed my words was absolute.

Even the wind seemed to hold its breath. Damien stood completely still, the color still absent from his face, his jaw slack in a way I had never seen before. He looked, for the first time since I had known him, like a man who had been caught doing something he couldn't talk his way out of. Because he had. Because there was nothing left to say.

Adora stood slightly behind him, her handkerchief pressed to her mouth, her eyes darting between the two of us with an unreadable expression.

I didn't wait for his response. I turned back toward my parents' graves, my legs carrying me those twenty feet through the grass with a steadiness that surprised even me. I crouched down between the two headstones and laid the lilies against my mother's, pressing my palm flat against the cold stone the way I always did when I needed to feel something solid.

*Margaret Elaine Torres. Beloved wife, beloved mother. She gave everything.*

I heard footsteps behind me. Slow, uncertain. Damien's footsteps, which I had memorized the way you memorize the sound of weather you've learned to dread.

He stopped a few feet back. I could feel him standing there, hovering, the way a man hovers when he wants to speak but hasn't yet found the words. Part of me wanted to turn around and watch him struggle. Part of me was too tired even for that.

"Lina," he said.

His voice was different. Stripped of its usual authority, its easy coldness. Just my name, said carefully, like he was afraid of breaking something.

I didn't answer.

"I didn't know," he said. "I forgot that they were—" He stopped himself. "No. That's not good enough. I should have known. I should have remembered."

I pressed my fingers harder against the stone.

"I'm sorry," he said. "What I said to you was—"

"Damien."

Adora's voice cut through the quiet, and I heard him turn.

"Damien, I feel a little strange." Her voice had shifted to something breathy and soft, an edge of fragility in it that hadn't been there a moment ago. "My head feels—I think the heat might be—"

"Adora." His tone changed immediately, sharpened back into competence and concern. "What's wrong? Sit down—"

"I don't—I can't—" A soft sound, something between a gasp and a sigh.

Then a heavier sound. The sound of someone falling.

I turned despite myself.

Adora was crumpled on the grass, her black dress pooled around her, one hand raised weakly toward Damien, who had crossed the distance between them in seconds and was already crouching at her side, his hand at her back, his face tight with alarm.

"Adora. Adora, can you hear me?" He cupped her face, tilting it toward him. "Open your eyes. Look at me."

She complied slowly, her lashes fluttering, her expression hazy with what appeared to be disorientation. "I'm sorry," she murmured. "I don't know what happened. I just—"

"Don't talk." He was already pulling out his phone, already standing with the kind of decisive movement that meant a decision had been made. He swept her up from the ground, one arm beneath her knees and one behind her back, lifting her against his chest as though she weighed nothing. Her head fell against his shoulder, and her hand curled loosely in the lapel of his jacket.

I stood there watching.

The lilies were still in my other hand, still slightly crushed from where I had clutched them too tightly during our confrontation. My mother's headstone was cold beneath my palm. My husband was carrying another woman across a cemetery with the kind of urgency he had never once directed toward me in two years of marriage, not when I had the flu for a week and he stepped over me to get to the door, not when I had burned my hand on the stove at his company dinner and he'd quietly asked me to stop drawing attention to myself.

He reached me before he reached his car, and he stopped.

He looked at me over the top of Adora's head. Something moved across his face, something complicated and unfinished, like a sentence he didn't know how to complete.

"I'm taking her to the hospital," he said. "She might be dehydrated. Or her blood pressure—" He stopped. "She fainted."

"I can see that," I said.

He looked at me for another moment, that unresolved thing still moving behind his eyes. "Come home," he said. "I'll come home after. We'll—" He paused. "I'll come home, Lina. Wait for me."

I searched his face for something. I wasn't sure what. Sincerity, maybe. Or just evidence that the apology he had been attempting at my parents' graves had been real, that the version of him standing in front of me three minutes ago had been real, and that this version, the one who had pivoted so completely back into his old self the moment Adora needed him, was the aberration rather than the truth.

I couldn't tell.

"Go take care of her," I said.

"Lina—"

"Go."

He held my gaze for one more beat. Then he turned and walked toward his car, and I watched him settle Adora carefully into the passenger seat, watched him lean over her to fasten her seatbelt, watched him press two fingers briefly to her wrist to check her pulse before closing the door and moving around to the driver's side.

He didn't look back.

The car pulled out of the cemetery lane and disappeared through the iron gates, and then it was just me and the grass and the quiet and two headstones that had been listening to all of this without comment.

I turned back to my parents.

I sat down properly on the grass this time, heedless of what it would do to my clothes, and I set the lilies carefully against my mother's stone and my hand against my father's.