57. Winnie

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

WINNIE

W hat’s he doing here?

He’s supposed to be in Italy.

Why is he in this shitty hotel talking to my mother?

My hand trembles as I shove the key in the lock and turn the handle as quickly as possible, slipping inside without announcing myself. My heart leaps into my throat I huddle in the kitchen, careful not to stand on the pile of crinkly papers Mum has acquired since I left, and strain my eyes to the bedroom.

I need to know what they’re saying.

“I don’t even know why I’m like this,” Mum sniffs. “I try so hard to be normal, but then I see something and I tell myself, ‘that’s it. That’s what I need. That thing will change my life.’ Part of me knows that’s not true, but another part of me doesn’t . But I can’t make both sides of me agree.”

From where I’m standing, I see them both. Mum’s lying on the bed, her filthy bunny slippers that she refuses to get rid of perched on the TV cabinet. She has a box of tissues beside her and a whole row of teacups on the bedside table. Alaric sits across from her, one leg tucked beneath him, his aristocratic clothes all rumpled and his head bent toward her, listening with that intense expression of his. He has a mug in his hands, but he doesn’t drink from it.

I slam my hand over my mouth to hide my gasp. Seeing him winds me. I can’t breathe. Alaric is here , in my hotel room, talking to my mother.

I don’t understand.

“—Winnie hates me,” my mother is saying. “I don’t blame her. I tried so hard to give her a good life after her father left, but everything I tried was a failure. I don’t blame her for moving away.”

What?

The slightest breeze could knock me over. My mother has never, ever spoken like that before. She brushes off my father leaving as no big deal. She says that she was going to kick him out anyway. She claims that if she had ‘more free time’ or a ‘better system,’ then she’d get on top of her hoarding.

I thought she loves her stuff more than she loves me.

“I understand. I too built a wall of things around me,” Alaric says. “A fortification so high and deep that no one could break through and hurt me. But someone did break through. Your daughter. And she showed me the joy that comes with tearing down the walls.”

“It’s too late for me.” Mum honks into her tissue.

“You are still breathing. It is not too late. You still have your daughter, who made her whole career out of helping people just like you, all because she feels as though she failed you. I’ve been reading a book about our condition. We are not doomed to live like this, driving away the people we love. We can change, but only if we have someone called a therapist, and also support and empathy, and Winnie is ready to give you both, but you have only to ask.”

The tears burst, running in silent rivers down my cheeks.

“Your daughter is decisive,” Alaric continues. “She’s like a modern automobile. She tells herself she wants something and she does it. It’s one of the many qualities that I most adore about her. But you and I are more like my butler’s car. We need a lot of love and coaxing to get revved up for such a task, and even then, we never do exactly what we’re supposed to do.”

Mum smiles over her tissue. “And sometimes I think the devil’s behind the wheel.”

“Exactly.” Alaric smiles back, and it’s so soft and sad that my chest can’t take the pain of it. “All the world sees when they look in on our lives is chaos and junk. But Winnie sees our creativity and our pain and our hope . She’s the first person who ever truly saw me, and she found me worthy of her trust and her love, which some might argue was a foolish thing to do. Winnie has so much love and grace to give that I didn’t appreciate her gift until I had broken it beyond repair. But you’re her mother. She loves you unconditionally, and she wants so badly to help you. She’s waiting in the kitchen, and I’d love it if we could tell her that you’ll try therapy and you’ll try loving her the way she deserves. Because she’s worth it.”

I let out a loud sob.

He…he…

I can’t believe he came here to say this to her.

It’s almost as though he’s still trying to save me.

But I’m not his to save any longer. He’s made that clear. So what is this?

“Winnie?” Mum shoves her tissues under her pillow and hops off the bed. “Are you in there? You didn’t make a peep. I was just having a cup of tea with your friend Alaric.”

“I—” I gasp through my sobs, furiously wiping at the snot running from my nose as I step into the doorway of the bedroom. “Mum, I?—”

“Oh, Winnie, there’s no need for all this crying.” Mum’s eyes dart nervously to the kitchen. She’s uncomfortable with displays of emotion. She doesn’t like to think that I heard what she said to Alaric. “Do you need a cup of tea? Tea makes everything better.”

For once, I don’t want to push down these emotions. I’m sick of tidying away my feelings into neat little boxes to make other people happy. “Mum, can you give us a moment alone?”

Mum looks as though she wants to argue, but she twists her face into a faux smile. “I’ll just go and put the kettle on.”

It’s a lie, of course. Mum can’t find the kettle in the disaster of a kitchenette. She shuffles out of the room and closes the door behind her, leaving me and Alaric alone, although I bet every storage container I own that she has her ear to the door, listening in on every word.

Alaric stands. He’s so tall that he has to stoop a little to avoid hitting his head on the grimy light. The sight of him standing amongst my mother’s accumulated piles of crap, his clothes so out of place, his features pinched tight, drives me to ruin.

He’s even more beautiful than I remember.

A warrior out of time, his noble steed long ago retired, but he’s still here…fighting…but for what?

Alaric nods to three boxes of paperback novels and a couple of old toasters stacked at the foot of the bed. “This is how you grew up?”

His voice is dripping with its usual snark, but beneath it, I catch a tentative plea. Is this what I did to you? Is this how deeply I hurt you?

I swallow once, twice. I don’t know how to answer without falling apart. I lean against the wall so I remain upright and stick to facts. “She goes out shopping while I’m at work. She thinks that she’s helping – setting us up with the things she needs after the fire took it all. If I didn’t throw most of the junk out while she was asleep, this room would be filled by now.”

“Winnie, I—” His Adam’s apple bobs. When he raises his eyes to meet mine, they’re swimming with pain. “I never meant to hurt you like this. The moment you walked into this room, you shrank. You became less of yourself. I never saw you shrink at Black Crag until you found that secret room. I am sick to my heart that I made you shrink like that.”

I stare at the boxes because if I keep looking into his eyes, I will collapse. Shame burns white-hot in my throat, on the back of my neck, in the pit of my stomach. I don’t want to feel this way about my own mother. But Alaric’s right – I’m shrinking, and I don’t know how to stop.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I mumble. “Go back to Italy. Your wife will be missing you.”

“I have only one wife who matters to me, and she never agreed to marry me for real,” he answers. “And I am precisely where I need to be. I came to give you something. I presume you haven’t opened that pretty box in your hands?”

I glance down at the jewellery box Viviana gave me. I’d forgotten I was holding it. “No.”

“Good. Don’t open it yet. Your gift is inside, but I’m afraid it won’t make much sense without the second half.” He pauses to visibly collect himself. “Winnie, I have so many things to say to you. Most of them are apologies. If you wish me to leave now and never return, I will walk out that door right now. I know you cannot trust my word, but trust that much.”

“How did you get a gift inside—” The butterflies are back, and they’ve started a mosh pit. “You arranged the job with Viviana? But why? Why are you here when you married Perdita?”

Instead of explaining, Alaric steps around the corner of the bed, over the boxes, to stand in front of me. The air between us fizzes with static – the magic that drew me to him from the moment we met still dancing on, even though the music has died.

I can’t look at his eyes, so I stare at his perfectly shiny shoes. That looks like Reginald’s work. Did he bring Reginald to Italy with him?

“I’m here because I couldn’t face eternity without explaining why I broke us.” Alaric clears his throat. “All the time you lived at Black Crag, I grew more afraid. Afraid that I would let slip my true nature, and you would see my fangs and run. But you didn’t run, Winnie. You saw something beneath the monster, and that something made you laugh and made you feel safe. I have never met anyone who looked at me the way you did, as if I was their harbour during a storm. I wanted to prove that I was worthy of you.”

“Alaric—”

“You turned me completely inside out. I’ve never felt this way about anyone before. I was frightened and ecstatic and frenzied and terrified and filled with awe of you. I knew I could never be worthy of your love, but I wanted you to know that the gifts you’d given me would endure long after your heart stopped beating. So I made painting after painting, but nothing came out right. Then I thought to try a sculpture. On my moonlight walks down to the grotto, I found flowers the colour of your golden eyes. I dried them on a rack in the cellar and made wreaths, but they were flimsy, dead things. I kept objects you touched because they felt like holding little pieces of you. I found myself ordering gold glitter from the internet like a vampire possessed. I grew obsessed with my task to make something that captured you. I planned it as a gift to you, but now I see that I was making this art for me – because I knew I could never keep you and I wanted to hold you in my heart for eternity. Each time I fell short, I hid away the evidence in that room so you wouldn’t see that I failed you.”

Oh, Alaric.

“I should have just told you how I felt,” his voice cracks. “I was so engrossed in my project that I didn’t consider how you might react when you saw the secret room. I hid those things away, and I hid the truth about the Kiss, because I was so terrified that if you knew these bad, rotten, monstrous things about me, you would leave. As everyone I trust leaves. In the end, I drove you away, not because I’m a monster, but because I’m me .”

I’m not prepared for the pain in his voice, for the way his words tremble in the space between us, so raw and sad and hopeless. More tears spill down my cheeks.

“Don’t you see?” I breathe through my tears. “This is exactly why I left. Because you shouldn’t have to change who you are for me. You have this wonderful creative mind and you shouldn’t have to shove it away into a secret room because of my trauma. You are right about something – I do shrink. I hold myself back when things get tough, because the only way I survived growing up was by curling into a ball and waiting it out. But I don’t have to do that anymore. I don’t have to change, and neither do you. We’re just perfect the way we are, but that doesn’t mean we’re perfect together. And I’m not just talking about being a vampire and a human. We never would have worked.”

“I disagree,” he says in that rich, commanding tone that I’ve longed to hear again. “I love to obsess over details and make big, messy art. You love to organise. It may seem as if we are incompatible, but perhaps what we truly are is—ah, that other half of my gift has arrived.”

“The what?”

My head jerks up, and I meet his eye. It’s a mistake, because I’m trying to hold on to the shattered pieces of my heart, and those dark, expressive orbs have me in their spell.

A knock sounds on the door.