After all, it couldn’t be easy to love someone with my disorder.
“Calliope, I have a headache,” I whispered because I did, in fact, have a headache, but also because I was greedy and selfish.
It took a few minutes.
Actually, a lot of minutes. But slowly, she rolled out of bed, going to her trunk and pulling out a bottle before crossing the floor of the room, like a shadow of death. She stood over me, looking at me with those cold gray eyes of hers before she tossed the bottle at me.
“You enrage me.” She frowned.
Dripping the liquid into my throat. I hung my head before I said, “I enrage myself.”
When she moved to walk away, I grabbed her hand. She didn’t fight, and I pulled her down to the floor with me, wrapping my hands around her waist gently. She sat rigidly, not allowing herself to relax in my arms.
“My grandmother…” I bit back the pain I was feeling in my throat, resting my head on her shoulder. “She left words for me.”
“Yes. If you want to hear them, you’re going to have to let me go.”
I didn’t want to.
I didn’t want to let go. And I didn’t want to hear the words.
“I should have made it back faster,” I whispered.
I expected her to blame me. To say she was right, I shouldn’t have left her behind. If had let her come, Nari wouldn’t have let Roman inside, Roman wouldn’t have used our daughter, and I wouldn’t have lost two of my family members.
“It’s my fault. I failed.”
“You saved them,” she whispered, and I lifted my head off her shoulder to lo
ok at her. But she didn’t look at me. “If you never trusted me, if you were…if you were less of a man, and I didn’t love you…the Orsinis would have gotten their revenge, and none of them would have ever know how or why. It could have been done by me. Or someone else working for Siena. No matter how much they tried to make you doubt, what they did, you chose, and you saved this family. Whether they realize it or not.”
I had no words, slowly my arms fell from her, and she got up, walking to her vanity and grabbing her phone. When she came back to me, she lifted it so I could see the recording.
“I wanted to delete it,” she said. “I wanted you to feel the pain of no closure, too.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because seeing you weep might make me hate you less,” she replied, dropping the phone in front of me before taking a seat right across from me. She was serious; she wanted a front-row seat to my pain.
The part of me that always wanted to fight, to win, to have the last word was beat back by the part of me that needed to hear from the woman who had raised me when everyone else had walked away.
Picking up the phone, I pressed play, and the moment I heard her voice say, “You’re okay. I’m so happy you’re okay, Ethan…”
My iced-over heart shook, and tear swelled in my eyes.
No, Nana, I am not okay.
CALLIOPE
He hung his head as he listened for the third time.
Each time he heard it, he pressed rewind and started from the beginning again. He didn’t sob uncontrollably. He didn’t make a sound. The only proof of his grief was the very few tears that silently fell from his face.
This was not what I wanted.
I wanted him to scream out in pain. To kneel over in grief. Instead, it was like ignoring the meaning behind her words and using them instead to tear himself down. He was going back to the dark corners of his mind and blaming himself over and over again. Telling himself, “This is what happens when you aren’t good enough when you aren’t worthy of leading.” How did I know? How was I so sure? Because I knew him. Because I also spent a lot of time reading about disorders to figure out my mother. No one else, except Evelyn, seemed to realize it. Not his doctor brother, not his parents, not the Irish or the Italians.
They all thought his intense anger, his detachment, and paranoia at times were normal. They didn’t realize the reason why he was also so controlling, why he fought so hard to bring his brother back, why he didn’t want to let go of Dona, it was part of his feared abandonment. They couldn’t see it because violence, anger, coldness, and being controlling were expected in this family. Even for the moments they didn’t understand, when Ethan acted completely out of character, when he seemed impulsive or reckless, they all just assumed he was doing something toward his master plan. The truth of the matter was many times, Ethan was covering up for his recklessness to make it look like that’s what he wanted to do all along. But he could only do so much and control so much. The irony was that he could control all the world, but he, at times, couldn’t control his own mind.