Belle wasn’t like other women. She was the type of girl who’d take her secrets to her grave. But this, already, was enough. It meant the world to me that she chose to tell me.
“The two men I trusted and loved the most turned their backs on me, each of them in his own way. This no-trusting, no-getting-attached vibe you’re getting? That’s my fuck-you to your gender, Devon. If I decide to trust again and get hurt, it’d be the end of me. This is why I keep resisting you every step of the way. Whatever you’re feeling, I feel it ten times over. But it’s not worth it for me. Either I kill my feelings or my feelings kill me.”
I brushed a thumb over her sunshine hair, tucking it behind her ear. “Darling Sweven, what’s a little death in the grand scheme of things?”
This unbearable, infuriating woman truly understood me. My quirks, my eccentric ways. Mostly, our time together was frustrating and bad. But when it was good, when the walls came down—it was the best I’d ever had.
Emmabelle turned to look at me for the first time since she started telling me her story. “Enough about me. So what made you claustrophobic, Dev? A truth for a truth. You promised to share when I gained your trust, and I think I’m there. Tell me what happened.”
And so I did.
Past.
The dumbwaiter was the size of a bookcase when I was first shoved into it, at age four.
Like a baby in the womb, it was spacious enough for me to move my limbs, but still small enough that I needed to crouch.
By age ten, my legs were too long, my arms too gangly to fit into it properly.
And at fourteen, it felt like being shoved into a sardine tin with fifteen more Devons. I could barely breathe.
The trouble was, I kept on growing and the dumbwaiter stayed the exact same size. A small measly hole.
I didn’t always hate it.
At first, as a wee boy, I even learned to appreciate it.
Spent my time thinking. About what I wanted to be when I grew up (fireman). And later on, about girls I liked and tricks I’d learned at fencing lessons, and what it would feel like to be a bug, or an umbrella, or a teacup.
It all went to hell one day, when I was eleven.
I’d done something particularly nasty to upset my father. Snuck into his office and stole his poker then used it as a sword to fight with a tree.
That poker was vintage and cost more than my life, my father had explained when he caught me with the thing broken in half (the tree had obviously won).
I was thrown into the dumbwaiter for the evening.
Mummy and Cecilia were away, visiting relatives up in Yorkshire. I wanted to go with them (I never wanted to stay all by myself with Papa), but Mummy said I couldn’t miss an entire weekend’s worth of fencing sessions with my sabreur.
“Plus, you haven’t been spending enough time with Papa. A bit of bonding time for you two is just what the doctor ordered.”
So there I was, in the dumbwaiter, thinking about what it must feel like to be a bottle carrying a letter at sea, or cracked pavement, or a coffee mug in a busy London café.
That should have been it.
Another night in the dumbwaiter, followed by a morning drenched with silence and frequent trips to the loo to make up for the time I had to hold it in when I was caged.
Only it wasn’t.
Because on that particular day came a storm so big and so terrible, it knocked out the electricity.
My father rushed to the servants’ cottages, where the power was still on, to spend the night and perhaps be entertained by one of the maids, something I knew he did when Mummy wasn’t home.
He forgot one thing.
Me.
I noticed the leak in the dumbwaiter when a persistent trickle of water kept falling on my face, interrupting my sleep.
I was all mangled inside myself, pressed against all four walls. I ached to move, to stretch, to crane my neck.
When I woke up in a flurry, the water had already reached my waist.
I began banging on the door. Crying, screaming, raking my fingernails over the wooden thing to try and pry it open.
I broke my fingernails and tore my own flesh trying to get out of there.
And the worst part was, I knew I stood no chance.
My family wasn’t in the house.
My father left me for dead. Deliberately or not, I didn’t know, and at that point couldn’t care less.
If I died, they could try for another. My father would finally have the son he always wanted. Strong and tough as nails and never scared.
The water came all the way to my neck when I heard thudding across the hallway. Footsteps.