Fallen Rose by Amelia Wilde
Chapter Twenty-Two
Leo
Ilost her.
I lost her.
I lost her.
It’s the only thought that circles my mind as clouds cover the stars and the moon sets. As the weak winter sun rises over fresh snow. As I tell Daphne that Haley is gone and won’t be back. As I take in her shocked expression with detached recognition. Why is she surprised? This is how it has to be. The sun peaks and falls below the horizon.
I lost her.
It’s irritating for its inaccuracy. I didn’t lose Haley. I sent her away. With my own two hands. She fought. Screamed. Cried. I put her in the SUV anyway and sent her to her father. I did it because I had to. We were at the end of the line. She touched her father’s face on the TV screen and I knew, I knew, that was it. That’s all I could ever offer her. Winston wasn’t convinced, or he couldn’t convince Caroline. Either way. Haley can’t live like that. I’ll never be a replacement for her family. She loves them. They love her. People like Haley belong with their families.
End of the line. Now I’m past it.
Mrs. Page comes into my office on the second day with a sandwich.
She tries again on the third day with a bowl of my favorite soup.
On the fourth day, she’s desperate. The teacup trembles in her hands. “It has milk and sugar,” she says. “You need to have something if you’re not eating, Mr. Morelli.”
“I’m not sleeping, either. Is there anything else you wanted to know?”
She leaves the tea on my desk. It goes cold, and after a few hours, it disappears again.
I don’t stop eating to spite Mrs. Page. It just no longer seems worthwhile. Sleeping would be an escape, but it’s not available to me. I’ve never stayed so long at the peak of my pain. It started when I watched Haley lose her shit over her dad having a heart attack and it hasn’t let up. It makes no distinction between my back and the rest of my body. My head throbs and burns. My bones are broken shards. My nerves are piano wire cutting through flesh.
For these four days, I sit through meetings like a fucking corpse. I don’t hear a thing anyone says. I send emails I don’t remember sending. My business runs on autopilot. Daphne pokes her head into my office every afternoon and talks to me with worried eyes. She’s painting a wall in her suite. She’s painting the ocean. She’s painting an underwater forest. Are you okay? I’m fine. I’m busy. I’m working. Go back to your painting, Daphne.
I am not fine.
I’m a pillar of flame. A torched cathedral. Ash burns to ash. It hurts too much to bear. The pain tears out my mind and throws it on the pyre of my soul. Dante would have jumped into boiling glass to escape the heat of purgatory. But he was promised paradise. There’s no such promise for me. I had her in my hands, and I let her go.
On the fourth night I attend a last, desperate Mass at St. Thomas’s. I spend the entire thing on my feet, gripping the back of a pew. Sitting is beyond me. Kneeling is beyond me. When I approach the altar for Communion, Father Simon asks if he should call an ambulance.
Of course not, of course not. What would they do? Bring her back to me?
It’s past one when I return and climb the stairs. I’ve been avoiding my bedroom, and my private library, because Haley’s books are there. I thought it would spare me more pain, but the opposite has happened. As of this morning I’ve started to hallucinate her.
I don’t go to the library. I go to the medicine cabinet in my bathroom. If my mind is already short-circuiting, which it is, I might as well lean into it.
There is a bottle in the medicine cabinet. Every six months, it gets taken out and replaced with a new one. I suspect Gerard, or Mrs. Page. I suspect they are in league with Eva. In eighteen years, I’ve never opened one of the bottles.
Father Simon told me once that refusing painkillers isn’t a penance that’s required of me, but that’s not why I do it. Or—penance is the least of those reasons. When Eva brought me home from the hospital all those years ago, seven pills came with me in my bag. Taking the first one was enough to know it wouldn’t be an option. Not for me. Not if I wanted to be alert enough to protect my siblings from my father, and to protect my secret from my siblings. The amount it takes to touch the pain is enough to render me unconscious. I told myself that one day I would be in a position to take them.
It’s never been true. The years have added more responsibilities. More threats. And a reputation that makes it more necessary than ever not to offer that kind of weakness to my enemies. I would never forgive myself if I missed something. If I let danger through because I couldn’t handle the pain.
I woke up from that first and only pill in a cold sweat. It had made me defenseless, made my siblings defenseless, and stole my ability to know when our father was arriving home. The clutching fear set off a new round of pain.
It’s been a long eighteen years.
I take the bottle out of the cabinet and shake it. It’s full. A month’s worth of pills at least.
Enough.
In my office, a bottle of whiskey waits for me in my desk drawer. I don’t particularly like whiskey. Lucian gave it to me as a joke. It burns going down, but my brother was right. It is a joke. A fucking joke. It goes to my head but it doesn’t touch the pain. I can see Haley out of the corner of my eye. Not all of her, just a flash of blonde hair and the glimmer of sunlight in her blue eyes. If I look directly at her, she disappears. I make a game of it. Drink. Look for her outline. Drink some more. Consider the glass paperweight on my desk. Drink. The paperweight is shaped like a rose. Daphne gave it to me when she was twelve. She was so proud of it. The whiskey loses its burn and its taste.
I’ll never see Haley again. She’ll stay with her father, and she’ll help him recover from his heart attack, and she won’t be able to leave. She won’t want to leave. She’ll realize that’s where she is supposed to be. A good daughter. A good sister. Not mine. Never mine. God. Fuck. It hurts. Does it make me a coward to open the pills and take one out? Does it make me a coward to take one? What about two? Three?
I abandon both bottles and take out my phone. I have a question for a person I talked to once. I have a fucking question. Does it make me a coward that I couldn’t ask him before? I’m quite drunk now. Drunk enough that it’s difficult to search my call log for the number. Consciousness starts to play hide-and-seek between rings.
“I don’t have anything you want, Leo. You got your book. Did she like it?” The coldest voice I’ve ever heard spears through my drunkenness. Colder than Lucian’s voice. Colder than snow. Colder than the void of my life without Haley.
“She wept to see it.”
A silence. I hate Hades’ silences. What a prick. “You’ve been drinking.”
“I’ve been dying.”
“In what sense?”
“All of them. And me with no one to say the last rites.”
“If it’s a priest you’re looking for—”
“No. No. I wanted an answer.” Ah—there she is. Getting clearer all the time. Hallucination or dream? I’ll take either one.
“I’ll require the question first.” In the background, a door closes. Is he in his office too? Or somewhere with his wife? I don’t have a wife. I don’t have Haley.
“You’re so fucking demanding.”
“This from the man who’s called me in the middle of the night. Ask.”
“You said you were acquainted with pain.” Haley disappears again. “What kind is it?”
“It’s nerve pain related to a genetic sensitivity to light. My past history worsened the condition.”
“You get headaches or something?”
“I have seizures. Preceded by pain I would describe as excruciating. It’s the feedback loop of the pain that causes the episodes. This isn’t what you want to know. Ask the question.”
“You can’t be a ruthless terror if you have—” A hiccup interrupts me. “If you have seizures. That would make you weak.”
Hades laughs, the sound icy and dark, the tone a vivid illustration of fuck around and find out. “Perhaps. Though it has had little to no effect on my reputation.”
“How?”
“No one in the outside world knows. As far as they’re concerned, I am—how did you put it? A prick with strange eyes.”
“I know. You just told me.”
“You’re drunk. And you sound like you’ve taken pills.”
“Just a few. But I can’t take them normally. Only on special occasions.”
“What’s the occasion tonight?”
“I lost Haley. I sent her out of my house to save her. I won’t see her again. And even if a fucking miracle happened, even if she came back to me, I have nothing to give her.” I stifle a bitter, unhinged laugh. “I’ll die like this. Either I’ll die from the pain, or I’ll be a fucking coward and die from a hit while I’m incapacitated by painkillers. I have too many enemies to risk them.” The dark is closing in. Haley brushes her fingertips over my cheek. “Did you find a way to live with it? Did you find some secret? Or do you just wait to die? That’s what I want to know.”
“A secret for a secret. What happened to you eighteen years ago?”
God help me. I tell him. I just fucking tell him, slipping into a nightmare. He’s a voice on the phone. A windswept mountain. A prick with strange eyes. A confessor. And he keeps his word. When I’m done talking a lifetime later, he tells me a story like a fucking fever dream. About a farm and a mountain. A white building in the city and the sea. And a wide green field with red poppies.
I fold my arms on my desk and put my head down. Bless me, for I have sinned. I don’t receive absolution before I fall into a black, eternal night.
A door opens.
A gasp.
“Leo.”
I’ve been here a long time. I don’t want to wake up. Don’t want to come back. Can’t move.
“Oh, shit. Oh my god. Oh my god.” Glass scrapes on wood. Shut up. Shut up. I’m not here. A muffled sob. “No, Leo, No. Oh, shit, what do I do? What do I—Leo. Please? Leo—”
A hand meets my shoulder blade and pain erupts over my skin. It takes me off the desk with a roar. I sweep one hand out to get them the fuck away. “Don’t fucking touch me. Don’t touch me.” Jesus, it hurts. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I stand up to get out from under it and brace two fists on the desk.
“I thought you were dead.” Daphne stares, her face pale, eyes shining with tears and terror. “You weren’t moving, Leo. Have you been in here all night? Did you drink all of that?” She points a shaking finger at the bottle on my desk.
“Get out.” I glare at her, and she shrinks back. “Get the fuck out.”
“No. I can’t leave you in here. I thought you were dead. Did you try to kill yourself? You’re—you’re scary like this.” I sit down hard in the chair, the fight going out of me. The pain stays. It’s Daphne. My sister. It’s just Daphne.
“I didn’t try to kill myself. I’m fine.”
“You’re lying.” She swallows. Clears her throat. “You’re so pale. And you were so still. I know you’re not fine. I can see you.” She approaches the desk, and I fucking hate this. I hate what I’ve become. “I think I should call Eva. She would know what to do.”
“She has her own heartbreak to deal with. Her own life.”
Daphne’s tugs on the collar of her shirt. “Why don’t you go to her? Why don’t you go to Haley?”
I rub my hands over my face and try not to resist the pain. Resistance only makes it worse. “Because I love her.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” Daphne’s crying now, and I see how badly I scared her. “If you love her, you should be with her. And you do. I know you do.”
“My love for her is more than that. It’s strong enough to let her go.” I take a breath I don’t want to take. A breath that hurts like a bitch. “She has a family. Those are her people. I was always fooling myself that she could be mine.”
