Of course it had leaked that Roland was involved, which created a whole other situation. When we got back home, we were bombarded by journalists camped out on the road of the mansion. Suddenly, Roland was this wounded and wronged man who everyone wanted to love. The media ate it up and some even apologized for thinking he murdered his own wife. A lot of them sought interviews, and his agent and publicist agreed it was a good idea for him to do some of them—that we both should appear in some of the interviews together, to look stronger. Publishers wanted him to write a book, and previous endorsers were blowing up his phone, begging him to come back to them to represent their brands. He wanted to do all of it, but not right away. First, he needed to digest everything that’d happened . . . and I did too.
The night we got back home, we both showered together in silence, but it wasn’t awkward. We were both deep in thought, glancing at each other every so often. He washed my back and I washed his and then we stood beneath the warm stream, holding each other until the water turned cold.
When we were out and dressed, Roland sat on his side of the bed with his back to me. His shoulders were hunched. He wasn’t okay.
“Roland?”
“Yeah?”
I sat beside him and grabbed his hand. “You okay?”
“Honestly? No.” He shook his head and gave me a humorless laugh.
“Wanna talk about it?”
He was quiet a moment, his gaze on the floor. “You know, all this time I thought Melanie’s death was my fault.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that for the past three years I thought she’d driven herself over that cliff because of me.”
“Oh.”
“I thought that—I mean, for years I thought I made her hate her life so much that she would have rather been dead than to be around me a second longer.”
“Why didn’t you just let her leave?”
“She could have left, Samira. She could have walked out that door anytime she wanted to and I wouldn’t have stopped her. I’d said things out of anger, yes, but if she really wanted to go, she could have. But I was raised by a mother who didn’t believe in divorce. Even when my father would beat the shit out of my mother, she still stayed. She didn’t feel free until he died. And I was loyal. I still am.”
I lowered my gaze.
“I think that’s why I got so angry with her that night. She told me she’d cheated to make me angry. And that alone infuriated me because I wanted our marriage to work. I wanted us to be okay. Things like that happened all the time in marriages, but I witnessed people making it work. I wanted to make her happy. Even after she told me, I tried finding the words to mend us, but I never did. All I could think about was the way I grabbed her. I’d promised myself I would never do what my father did to my mother—to any woman—and I did it anyway. I put my hands on her when I shouldn’t have.”
“We all make mistakes, Roland.”
“I know, and that’s a big regret of mine. Because I was so angry and worried, I made her angry and worried and I thought she killed herself because she felt trapped. I thought I was the reason.” His voice cracked and he squeezed my hand. “And the worst part is I wished she would leave. I wished she would just go away so my life would be easier . . . and when she actually did I just . . . I went numb. Everything in me went numb because I’d made a stupid wish and I immediately wanted her back. I could have helped her—saved her from that Calvin motherfucker if I hadn’t been ignoring her. She had no one to turn to—no one to express herself with anymore. I’d taken that privilege away from her and I regret it so fucking much.”
I rubbed his hand with the pad of my thumb. “Melanie wasn’t good to you, Roland. I understand you’re upset, and that you have regrets, and no, she didn’t deserve to die like that—her or her sister—but she wasn’t good to you. She tainted your marriage. She even said in her journals that she knew it wouldn’t work out between you two.”
He looked up at me. “So why did she agree to marry me then?”
“I don’t know, babe.” I rested my head on his shoulder. “But what I do know is that I don’t want to be anything like her. I agreed to marry you because I truly do love you and you mean so much to me. I want our marriage to work.”
“I love you too and I want the same thing.”