It pained her to admit it, but Lorraine was under her skin. The insinuation that she would never really know Mallos was a splinter, digging deep, fracturing until little pieces were everywhere. In their morning coffee, while he smoked and she wished she could smoke (she had forgotten the inconveniences of pregnancy). In his office, when she came to check on him and found him with his head in his hands. In bed, when pillow-talk conversation suddenly dwindled into silence, the weight of something unsaid weighing heavy.
Croe was no fool: she knew his job was burying him, suffocating him, driving him mad. She knew he was engaging in self-destructive behavior. She would have intervened, if she thought he could do lasting harm to himself…cursed herself on the inside, for considering only lasting physical harm. She wanted to talk to him, to help him, but didn’t know where to begin.
Because this wasn’t a crisis, per se. It wasn’t the kind of immediate, life-or-death situation that she was particularly suited to resolve. This wasn’t a kidnapping by pirates, or entrapment beneath a palace, or even a murderous son on a stolen throne. Croe didn’t know how to fight these ghosts.
Instead, she gave him space. It was the next-best thing – the absolute worst thing she could do. She watched him, pretended not to watch him, wrestled with the unease of helplessness, wondered what to say. She was an accomplished spy, but a terrible actor; surely he saw through this charade of normalcy that she was trying to conjure for him. Did it annoy him? It didn’t help, that was for sure…he became more and more distant, spent more and more time away.
Croe was agitated, and worried, and bored, and pregnant. She was approaching the end of the leave she’d incurred as punishment for her altercation with Lorraine – Alliannah had been right to assume the most painful penalty was playing housewife and mother – but it felt so selfish to want to return to work when Mallos was so obviously in a downward spiral. She had resolved to do the hard thing, to sit him down with a fidget spinner and a glass of wine and demand he talk to her, when he failed to return home for dinner.
When he failed to come home, at all.
Somehow, she knew. But she didn’t want to know. “I don’t need to kill you to fuck you up.”
He provided some canned excuse, to which she did not react. Inside, she was seething. How many times had he lied to her, before? She had never wondered, was sure she hadn’t cared…but now, in the face of this lie or half-truth that amounted to a lie, she couldn’t look at him. She was sure direct eye contact would spur her to commit a murder, right here in the hallway.
Ángela was a welcome interruption. Ned was another one, later.
But they couldn’t do this dance forever. Croe could feel the tension in her body like a bowstring pulled too tight; the slightest tremor would snap her composure. She couldn’t tell if she was more angry with Mallos, or that bitch of a goddess, or herself. She’d built an entire life on distrust before Mallos, and then she’d just thrown it all away – her power, her dignity. Her safety. The realization that their bond was not the unassailable fortress she’d believed, was devastating.
That’s what this was, then. This was what it felt like to have your heart ripped out.
The damage was already done, by the time he intercepted her in the garden. Croe couldn’t remember going there – she’d been in Ned’s room, in the library, in the kitchen…she’d been everywhere, and somehow the blazing Spanish sunshine had replaced the cool and cleansing interior air without her noticing. She was already numb. She turned to him with a blank look, the rage having given way to pain that she could not, in her pride, reveal to him. His confession poured out of him in a rush.
“Lorraine,” she supplied, not needing to look at him to know she was right. He’d left off her name, but it could only be her. She was the only one he’d want to protect…the only one that could really hurt her.
Croe’s hand went to the small swell of her belly, remembering the promises they’d made to each other, the empty words.
“Why?” Her voice was cold. There were so many possible interpretations of her question: why her? why now? why make promises at all? “If you wanted me to leave…” you could have just told me. You didn’t have to hurt me.
“When it comes to misery, I can be delightfully imaginative.”
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