Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
But hope was a luxury, and Troy had never been able to afford much of it.
Because he knew how Camilla’s mind worked. He had watched it work since she was a child, watched her go quiet and careful and far away whenever the people who were supposed to hold her let her fall, and he knew that a girl could forgive almost anything except being made small in front of the whole world by the one person whose job it was to make her feel safe. She had stood in her father’s ballroom tonight and watched her husband choose another woman in front of three hundred cameras, and her heart had stopped rather than keep beating through it.
She would leave him. Troy was as sure of that as he had ever been of anything. And when she did, when she finally decided she was done, he would not say a single word to talk her out of it. He would do what he had always done.
He would help her disappear so completely that not even Trey Flint’s money would ever find her again.
Chapter Twelve
There’s a particular kind of surfacing that comes after the dark, slow and underwater, the world arriving in pieces that don’t yet agree to be the same world. A ceiling I don’t know. A weight of blanket that isn’t mine. A small green sound somewhere to my left, patient and electronic, counting something out. The ache of a needle taped into the back of my hand. And the smell, that clean nothing-smell that is somehow the most frightening smell there is, because it only ever means one place.
A hospital. I’m in a hospital, and I can’t remember—
And then I see him, standing at the foot of the bed, and the first soft foolish thought my drugged mind offers up is that I must be dreaming, because of course I’d dream him. Of course, given a dark to fill with anything I wanted, my traitor of a brain reached straight past every happier thing it owns and built me my husband, tall and still and watching me with an expression I’ve never once seen on his real face, the one I’m not allowed to want anymore.
But it isn’t a dream.
I know it the way I always know, the instant he shifts his weight and comes a half-step forward into the space at my bedside, because the heat of his presence reaches me the way it has reached me from the very first day, a thing my body reads before my mind gets a vote, a pull I have no defense against, like he carries his own weather, his own gravity, some magnetic field my whole foolish self leans toward even now, even here, even laid out on my back with a needle in my hand and my heart in pieces. I should be past this. After everything, after all of it, I should be the one woman in the world immune to Trey Flint. Instead I lie here and feel the room rearrange itself around him the way it always has, and I want to weep at how little my body cares what my heart has learned.
And the moment I think it, the moment I let myself feel the pull of him even that much—
Oh no.
Because my heart is aching again, the real one, the broken muscle of it picking up that wrong stumbling rhythm, and it hurts, it hurts so much, a deep wrong squeezing under my ribs that has nothing to do with poetry and everything to do with the thing that put me in this bed. I breathe. Four in. Six out. I have done it ten thousand times and I do it now, willing the green sound to my left to keep its patient count, willing the squeezing thing to ease.
“I’m sorry, Camilla.”
Three words. That’s all. And they do what the collapse and the ambulance and the needle could not, because I know that voice, I know every note it owns, and this is one I have never heard him use with me. Soft. Careful. The voice you use on something broken.
And I understand, with a clarity that is worse than any pain, what it means. He’s sorry. My husband, who has never apologized for a single thing in the whole time I’ve known him because apology requires you to believe you owe someone something, is standing at my bedside speaking to me gently, and the only thing on this earth that could have made him gentle is the thing I cannot survive.
Pity.
He knows about my heart now. Someone told him, at the ball, after I fell. And so the cold man has been made to feel sorry for his inconvenient little wife, the breakable one, the bad investment, and he has come to be kind to me because you are kind to the dying and the damaged, and somewhere underneath the kindness he is surely already doing the arithmetic on what it costs him to be saddled with a wife whose heart might stop if he raises his voice.