Page 52 of A Sorrow of Truths
The cab drives off and I’m left standing looking at the spot where I found her, still able to feel the anguish, the pain, and the fear that coursed through me when I picked her limp body up from the ground. Jackson was here within minutes and taking her to the one place she needed to get to. Beatrice was called immediately, and I left to deal with the man that caused it. Possibly wrongly now I can look back on the sequence of events.
The walk through the cold and desolate space feels as awkward to me as it probably should. It brings thoughts into my head that I don’t want to acknowledge any longer. Culpability. Blame. Guilt. I growl at it all, attempting to rid myself of every emotion as it passes through my skin and embeds itself further. This isn’t how it was supposed to be. I was going back to my apartment, asking her if she’d spend her life enjoying a new beginning, and now we’re here dealing with the past again rather than focussing on the future.
I eventually find her by a small mound of settling earth, the gravestone newly fitted and Jackson standing back from her. She’s dressed in her own clothes, a long green mac covering her skin but for stockinged legs and matching green heels. Make up perfected, hair scooped up into some sombre affair of elegance, as she holds a lone flower in her hand. She looks over briefly as I approach, not one hint of a smile on her features, and then looks back at the grave again.
“Sir,” Jackson says.
I nod at him and walk up to her side, eyes on her rather than anything around us.
“Why are you here?” I ask her.
“Saying goodbye,” she murmurs. “It felt like I needed to do it again. Last time was … messy. No truths here, though. Still. All lies. I’ll never get them from him. Never.”
A few minutes letting her look over the grave some more, and I reach for her. She moves away from me before I can get a hand to her skin, eyes slanting at mine with nothing but distrust in them. “Did you do it? Did you kill her?”
My hands slide into my pockets. “Yes, if you want to put it like that.”
“What other way is there to put it?” She stares so harshly, all those sinister lines of hers burying themselves inside me again. “You killed her for me.”
“No, Hannah. Not for you. For me.”
She stares at me some more and then looks back at the loose soil beneath her feet, her fingers reaching into her pocket. “I don’t know what these mean, or meant,” she mumbles, holding up her wedding band and engagement ring. “Do you? Don’t know what they’re for anymore. What’s the point in them? They seems so full of lies. Commitment does.”
They drop from her hand to the ground absently, and she walks away from the grave, tossing the flower with as much care as she can muster given the cheating fuck she’s stood over.
I watch her small frame go with foreboding cursing the body I’m trying to keep upright. “Hannah?”
She keeps walking, not even a glance backwards, as if she’s as done with me as I was with Heather. Fuck that. This is not done. No goddamn way is she walking away from this now I’ve found her, and definitely not after she was the one that instigated, provoked, and pushed me to this point in my life. I need her now. Want isn’t the conundrum anymore. It’s need. It’s instinctual. Primitive. Something that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t deny and no longer have to.
“Don’t do this now,” calls out of me. “Stay. With me. I love you.”
Her feet stop, hands going up into the air, and she turns to face me. “He loved me,” she murmurs, pointing at the grave. “He told me that. He told me over and over again, and he still fucked anything else that he could. What says you won’t?” She frowns and folds her arms around herself, her eyes searching the ground rather than looking at me. “And where is there to go anyway, Gray? We’ve already done it all. We started at the end. And if we go anywhere now it starts with death. His death, hers. Back to Malachi’s? Live a life that isn’t real and-”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“This. Us. It’s backwards. What happens now? I’m different. Changed. All this and us and I don’t know who we are, what we are. Are we just going to fall into bed again, doing the thing we’re good at and pretending your wife isn’t dead because of us?”
“That wasn’t my plan.”
“No? What was it? Tell me. Because I can’t see anything that doesn’t involve guilt and shame. I don’t want that. I don’t … Can’t … I need to be new. I need time to find me out here, be me and find those things that I was before-”
“I was going to ask you out on a date.”
Her mouth stops moving around words she was still trying to articulate until she eventually finds something. “A date?”
“Yes. Dinner. A movie. The theatre possibly. We could not fuck. I know that part of you well enough anyway.” She seems bemused, as lost as she looked the first time I saw her at the opera. “I’ll watch you eat instead. You need instruction in that.” Her eyes widen, as I walk closer. “And then maybe you can ask me about me, who I am. Maybe I’m new now, too.”
“I don’t know who you are.”
“You don’t know parts of me.” My hand reaches for hers softly, gently bringing it up to my chest, fighting her reticence. It splays under mine, fingernails gently holding onto a heart she’s already got. “Because I haven’t let you see that until now. I might even have forgotten who I am without reality to guide me.” My frown deepens at the thought. Years wasted. Time stalled in determined resolve to get my own damned truths. And now a new life beckons for me, for us if she’ll have me. “Either way, you do know me, Hannah. You knew me before I did. Help me find that guy I used to be again.”
She’s shivering, trembling, as she looks up at me. Wet lips parted, dark eyes reminding me of corners and dancefloors. “We’ll dance. Just dance.” My hand pulls her closer, gripping tightly as if it’s never letting go of this new volatile little thing she’s become. “And then, when we know each other better, when the past is gone and we can live in the future, you can let me know if you’re ready for more.”
Another shiver rides over her, making me want nothing more than to warm her up and dwell in dark corners with her for the rest of our lives. That isn’t all, though. Parks. Light. Coffees in hand and ambling. A new home maybe. A new real to play with. One just for us.
I smile at the potential in front of me, finally understanding the merits of what life truly could mean, and watch her lips beginning to smile.
“Really? You’ll wait?” she murmurs.