Page 68 of Salt Kiss
Sedge regards me. I can see him weighing my reasons for asking. Finally, he answers, “No. Mark Trevena’s never been married.”
I think of the rings. “Are you sure?”
“If I wasn’t before,” Sedge says, and I could swear there is a pinch of dryness to his normally inflectionless tone now, “I would have been by the fifth time I had to reassure Mark’s priest of that very thing so we could get on with the wedding planning.”
He says the words like they all belong together, but they don’t.
They don’t make any sense. “Wedding planning,” I repeat. Not as a question but as an attempt to make the phrase legible.
“Yes,” Sedge says, eyeing me. “For the wedding. Weddings need planned. Thus the wedding planning.”
“There’s going to be a wedding.”
Sedge’s brows have lifted the smallest amount, and he blinks slowly. “Mark’s wedding? In two months?” His expression plainly says,uh, look alive.
“I didn’t—he didn’t—” The needles of curiosity are knives now. I’m being cut open by them. “How can he be getting married?”
“Well, I wasn’t there for it, but I presume that he proposed to Isolde and she accepted. That’s usually how it goes.”
Isolde.
I’ve heard that name before.
Isn’t she Irish?
That was her mother.
Other snippets of memory begin surfacing—Goran complaining about a wedding planner, asking me what Mark and I planned to doafter...
I thought I was going to find out that Mark had been married once and that there had been a tragedy, and the tragedy now lives inside various drawers, in rings and pictures and roses—but no, the tragedy hasn’t happened yet; it’sgoingto happen. In two months.
Isolde.
The tragedy has a name and it’s Isolde.
I stammer out a combinedI’m sorry for bothering youandthank you, and somehow push my way to my feet and out of the office.
I don’t know how I make it upstairs to Mark’s floor. The knives are cutting and cutting, and I’m in love with someone and he’s going to marry someone else and he didn’t tell me. I wasn’t even worth the trouble of disillusioning.
He hadn’t even taken the time to break my heart himself.
He’s not in his office when I get there, and for a minute, I consider leaving.
Just. Leaving.
Going down to my apartment, or even better, leaving Lyonesse altogether. Going for a drive, going to the farmhouse.
Quitting this job where I surrender my soul hour after hour to a man who couldn’t bother to mention that he was engaged. To a woman, which I shouldn’t care about because I like women too, but I do care.
But I don’t leave. Maybe because I spent eight years in a job I couldn’t quit until I was allowed, or maybe it’s because I can’t seem to stop flinging myself into misery, I don’t know. But instead I walk through the office to the hallway leading to Mark’s apartment.
Which is when I hear the swearing.
It’s not Mark swearing when I step inside, but Dr. Sutcliff, who is standing in front of a seated Mark, his cheeks a dark scarlet and a bloody hunk of gauze in his hand.
“—if you just would havelistened, just goddamned listenedfor once—most people would give anything to be told to stay in fucking bed—and I don’t even know how the fuck you managed this, you worthless shit-for-brains—”
I pull up short, shocked out of my fugue by this rant from the doctor, who I’d assumed was more of thesilently judge you from across a Men’s Wearhouse racktype.
