Page 119 of Bitter Burn
I lift a shoulder. The tears have mostly stopped now, just slow tracks of brine sliding to my jaw. I don’t bother to wipe them away.
We sit there for a long time, hearing the breeze and the river. Distantly, sirens.
She breaks the silence with a soft question. “Did I ever tell you about how I started wearing the gloves?”
As far as I know, she hasn’t told anyone, or if she has, they’ve guarded her secret with ironclad discretion.
“It was the bridge collapse,” she says when I don’t answer. “We got to the site so early—they needed to know how safe it was for the rescuers and if the bridge could bear the weight of ambulances and cranes and whatever else—and there were some people who were still alive?—”
She stops a moment. Adjusts her outer gloves so the leather is pulled tighter around her fingers.
“We heard voices when we got there. Faint but alive. Calling for help. Their car was trapped between two others, and it was slipping into the water. By the time the rescue got the back window broken and their seat belts cut, it was too late for all of them. But we tried. We made a human chain and pulled the people out. The teenage daughter was last. She was still warm when I helped carry her up.”
“Oh, Isabella.” I take her gloved hand in mine.
Isabella lifts her sad gaze to mine. “She felt all wrong when I was carrying her, and the wrongness was my fault, or at least partially my fault, because I’d watched her die. I’d watched her become wrong as they tried to winch the car free. And I got home later, and I couldn’t unfeel how wrong she’d felt, and it was like everything I touched became wrong too. Like I’d taken the wrongness into my hands and now I was its spreader, a bringer of the plague. I could barely eat, because I had to touch the food before I put it into my body. I could barely dress myself, because even the clothes felt tainted after my hands had been on them. It took five days for me to think of gloves, and now it’s been two years with my hands covered. Two years since I’ve truly touched anything.”
I tighten my grip around her hand. I’ve seen her in countless positions of physical vulnerability—I’ve had her tied to the top of my desk—and this moment under the dormant cherry tree is the most intimate one we’ve ever shared.
“But you know what?” she says, the wavering that had ruffled the edges of her words now growing steady. “I wouldn’t do anything differently. It cost me a piece of myself, cost me connection, the simple joy of a manicure or rubbing a puppy’s ears or digging my hands into some grass on a summer’s day. But the alternative is…what? Not trying to help when I could have? What use would digging my fingers into grass be if I knew I’d purchased it with cowardice?”
She leans forward, and with the hand I’m not holding, she flicks the tears off my jaw. The leather of her glove is smooth against my face.
“I don’t know what happened between you and Isolde,” she says softly, “but I know that whatever it was, you’ve done the right thing by giving her a choice. I know that even if doing the right thing leaves you broken after, it’ll have been worth it.”
I catch the gloved fingers still touching my face and kiss the back of them. “You are kind to share this with me. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. And the coda to the story is that I made an appointment last week to see someone about getting screened for something like obsessive compulsive disorder, so maybe I’m not doomed to wear the gloves forever. Maybe you’re not doomed to this either, sir.”
I try to smile at her, but it’s a faint and uncertain smile. What could she mean by doomed to this? Doomed to tears under the tree? The empty apartment upstairs? The empty life waiting beyond the next sunrise?
No, I’ve chosen my doom, because I’ve made it from scratch. I made it like a Swiss watch, designed to tick precisely and reliably to this one end: Cashel dead and Tristan and Isolde safe and happy.
And I executed it admirably, did I not? Did I not pick the two of them so well for each other? Did I not make them fall in love?
That’s some comfort at least. If nothing else, I know how to build a watch.
More footsteps come in the dark, and when I look away from Isabella, I see what I shouldn’t, and that’s a pair of broad shoulders, dark hair that’s slowly outgrowing a brutal haircut, a dolefully pretty face with a doll’s eyelashes and a full mouth. Well-made hands that once ended my husband’s life and that I can’t help loving anyway.
“Tristan,” I say as he comes to kneel next to me. I should feel ridiculous, like a painting of a dying king propped against a tree while his retainers comfort him, but the only thing I can feel is stunned, broken.
Hopeful.
“Sir,” he says quietly. “Let’s get you inside.”
“Is she…”
“She went with Anguish,” says Tristan, and hope is once again soil in my mouth, the taste of death itself as it’s extinguished. “Nimue, I mean. Nimue is going to give her a place to stay for now, since Isolde doesn’t want to go live with her father.”
“Right,” I say. “Of course. Nimue is a good friend.”
Tristan’s eyes have almost no color under the strung lights of the garden. When they search my face, they are all silver and black, just like the ring I gave him. “But I am staying,” he says. “Here. With you.”
I shake my head. “You should be with her. That’s what I wanted. That was the plan?—”
“Fuck your plan,” he bites out. And then adds unconvincingly, “Sir.”
“Tristan.”
