“You were going to do that to me! And to Olivia!” I felt sick just thinking of it, after trying to forget for so long. “It was Emma’s birthday, and you were going to take that one day, that one day that I was going to try to make into something happy for Olivia, you were going to take that with you and leave us with nothing!”
No matter what he might have put in his will, no matter how many billions of dollars we would have had to sustain us, we would have had nothing without him.
The one comfort was that Neil looked more ashamed than I’d ever seen him.
Good.
“I am…” His voice quavered.
“You’re what?” I demanded. “Sorry?”
“Yes.” The word was a pained whisper.
“I don’t care!” His “sorry” would never undo the pain he’d put me through, or the pain he’d intended to cause me. Maybe if he’d succeeded in his attempt, I wouldn’t have been so angry. Maybe I could have looked at his actions with more compassion. “I don’t care how sorry you are. You tried to leave!”
“And I won’t, Sophie. Never again.”
“You’re a liar!”
The word rang out between us and hung there, suspended by truth. Neil had deliberately deceived me in the cruelest way I could imagine.
“Do you have any idea how many times I’ve imagined that next morning? What it would have been like if I hadn’t found your stupid letter? I see myself, over and over, waking up and not noticing that anything’s wrong, at first. Feeling good about the day, the way I’d felt when we were standing on the beach, like something had changed or we’d let some of our pain go. And then, reaching for you. And you’re cold and…”
My throat flexed convulsively, stopping words and vomit from escaping.
He seized the opportunity in the silence. “I know you don’t care, but I do understand what I did. It would have been—it was—unspeakably cruel. I wasn’t in my right mind. But that doesn’t mean you can’t hate me for it.”
“I don’t need your permission to hate you! I hate you!”
There was never a time that I could have imagined saying those words to him. They didn’t feel good, but they felt accurate. I hated him for what he’d done to us, what he’d almost done. But I still loved him, with a fierce protectiveness that roared inside me, despite my words.
“You should,” he agreed. “You should hate me. I certainly hate myself. But I’m not going to do this to us again. Not to you, not to Olivia. Right now, there’s nothing I can do to make you believe that—”
“Get on your knees.”
When I’d opened my mouth, I’d intended to tell him to shut up. Instead, that had come out, those four words that he used so often with me. They proved my total obedience to him. Would they work in reverse?
“What?” he asked, as though he couldn’t have possibly heard me correctly.
“Get on your knees!” I screamed the last word so loud and so long my chest ached from stomach to collarbones. We stared at each other in near-total silence.
He approached me slowly, as though I stood on a ledge and he didn’t want me to jump. I thought he might say something. Instead, he slowly got down on knee, then the other. He slumped forward, his hands on his open in front of him.
“Stop fucking dancing around it! Say what you were going to do!”
Shame bowed his back. “I was going to kill myself. I was going to end my life and leave you and Olivia alone. I was going to…” A sob choked off his words. “I was going to let you wake up to find me dead.”
I shivered all over, from rage and exhaustion and the pain still running through my body. Seeing him supplicated in front of me, while I stood naked and vulnerable in this place where he held so much control over me, was enough to break me down. I covered my face, weeping.
He put his arms around me, still kneeling, and leaned his face against my stomach. “I’m so sorry, Sophie. I’m so sorry.”
I slumped to the floor, and he pulled me into his lap, though I knew it must have been killing his knees to do so. “I’m so sorry,” he repeated, again and again, his lips against the top of my head.
“You were sick,” I mumbled through my tears, because even though I’d craved his guilt, his true remorse, I still understood that he hadn’t been in control of his mind when he’d done what he’d done.
“I was,” he agreed, rocking me gently. “But I still hurt you. I can regret that, and feel responsible for it, without forgetting I was ill. I should have allowed you to do the same.”
I looked up at him, at the man I loved and trusted more than anyone in the world, and still felt that nagging doubt that he could ever possibly feel that way about me.