She got in the elevator, stabbing at the buttons with numb fingers.
She spent the entire elevator ride down to the lobby blinking back tears. She stumbled across the marble floor, headed toward the double doors, only dimly aware that she had no idea where she was going. Or who would take her there.
But, she supposed that finding a driver to take her to a destination was not as important as finding the destination itself.
“Liliana!”
She turned around to see Diego push open the doors to the elevator that was next to the one she had taken down, his expression wild, his dark hair in his eyes. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m leaving,” she responded.
“Come back up to our room,” he said. “Let us discuss this like reasonable people.”
She remembered what he had said at the wedding reception. How he had wanted to talk about the allegations that had been made against him in public. And she had told him no. That they would take their business back to their private space and deal with it between the two of them.
But that wasn’t what she wanted. Not now. If he wanted to make a scene, then she would make one. She had been...so well behaved. All her life. She had tried so hard to be good, and it had gotten her nowhere. She had been the best daughter her father could have possibly wanted or asked for and it had never earned her a damn thing. All it had gotten her was an arranged marriage, and then he had...
He had left her with her kidnapper. Had told her to marry him to protect his reputation.
That wasn’t the action of a man who loved her. Nothing that she had done had managed to accomplish that. And then there was Diego. She had done her best to make him happy. She had given and given. She had promised to stay with him. She had worn the wedding dress he had picked out, had given him all of herself.
And what had he given her in return? She was eternally hoping that if she threw herself over the top of the sacrificial altars that eventually someone would halt the execution and spare her out of a sense of great love. But no. They just sacrificed her. Again and again.
She had to want more. She had to be more.
“Do you love me?” she shouted.
They were drawing looks from both the hotel staff and the guests, but she didn’t care.
“Liliana,” he said, his tone warning.
“No,” she said. “It’s a simple question, and it shouldn’t be difficult for you to answer. Do you love me?”
He looked around, and then seemed to decide that he didn’t much care what anyone thought either. “Is that suddenly a requirement for you?”
“Yes. I want you to stop hiding. Stop hiding behind that ‘broodier than thou’ thing. I’m sorry that your wife died. I’m sorry that she left you. I’m sorry that your mother’s dead. And that your father is an unrepentant asshole.”
“He’s a dead unrepentant asshole,” Diego said dryly.
“Well. I’m sorry about that too, just because it means you can’t torture him to death. But there’s nothing you can do about any of it. There’s nothing I can do about any of it. You are the one that’s deciding to be unhappy.”
“I never said happiness was a goal, Liliana,” he said.
“Why isn’t it?” she shouted. “Why isn’t it a goal? We could be happy. We could be. Together. We’re having a baby. I love you. Why isn’t that enough for you?”
“What is it you want from me? You want me to make you my entire life? You want me to entrust my happiness to you? Look at you,” he said. “You’re such a fragile thing. So easily broken, and you want me to embrace a potential future with you and assume nothing will ever happen? You live in a fantasy world, Liliana. I knew that you were innocent, but I had no idea that you were this innocent.”
“What are you saying exactly? That you can’t love me? Or that you won’t love me?”
“It doesn’t make a difference,” he said. “I’m not a man who wants love. Not anymore. Perhaps there was a time when I would have. But that time is past.”
“So a dead woman who betrayed you gets to be your only attempt at being in love, and I get left out in the cold even though I’m carrying your child, and I’m practically down on my knees begging you to love me?”
“You’re not on your knees, tesoro. But, if you wanted to go ahead and make that a literal truth, I’m not opposed to it.”
“You wouldn’t want me to beg,” she said. “That isn’t what you want or need. You need someone to stand up to you and tell you that you’re not scary. The only person terrified of you is you. And that’s because you’re terrified of the fact that there might actually be hope living inside of that granite chest of yours. It’s not your darkness that scares you—it’s the light. The light that won’t go out no matter how many times you tell yourself and other people it isn’t there. In your heart, you want to love me. You want to love this baby. All of that stuff that you say about wanting to keep me, the way that you quiet when I put my hands on you... Diego, you love me.”
“I don’t,” he said, his face horribly blank.
He was scared—she knew that he was. She knew better than to take his word as truth. At least, she was hoping it was a lie. If it wasn’t, she didn’t know what she would do. She was trying to be strong, trying to stand there and cling to the realizations she had had only moments before, but it was so hard. So hard when she just wanted to fold herself into his arms and tell him it didn’t matter if he loved her. That she would give him whatever he wanted as long as they could be together.
But she needed more than that. She had to demand more than that for herself, no matter how difficult it was.
Because what she had just said to Diego was true in the end. He would not love a woman who got on her knees and begged. If he had wanted a captive, he would have kept her a captive. If he had wanted someone weak and wilting, he wouldn’t have boosted her strength over the course of the past few weeks. He wouldn’t have latched on to their banter, rewarded her sharp comments with witty banter of his own.
If she wanted him to love her, then she had to be herself. Not the creature her father wanted to shape her into. Not the woman she had been imagining she could be for Diego. That was the real test.
When they had made love the night of the wedding, she had imagined that because she had been created for him that meant taking on board his endless darkness if necessary and asking for nothing in return. But the fact of the matter was, he didn’t want her to just give. Not only that. He would want her to push too. To pull. She had to trust that she was made for him not simply when she was being accommodating, but when she was demanding more from him. When she was standing up for herself, for him, for all that he could have. When she was telling him things he didn’t want to hear and demanding what he wasn’t ready to give.
“Coward,” she said.
“What?”
“You heard me,” she said, taking a reckless step forward, crashing into a potted plant and sending it falling sideways, the ceramic shattering, soil spreading everywhere on the white floor. It hadn’t looked like an accident. It looked like she was having a tantrum. She didn’t care. She just didn’t care.
“You’re a coward. You could love me, but you’re scared to. And you can give any reason you want, but that doesn’t make it true. You’re trying to protect yourself. Maybe you should think about someone else. About what they want. About what they need.”
She turned away from him. “Wait,” he said. “You can’t leave me.”
“I have to leave you,” she said. “Because if I don’t, then I am going to be that wilting, sad girl that you met living at her father’s house, willing to marry whatever man he handed her over to when she really wanted another one.”
“If you really wanted me that whole time, then why won’t you take me now?”
“Because I need more. I need more than you at your worst, Diego
. I can love you through it, but I shouldn’t have to live with it for my entire life. Not when you can be more. More for me. More for our child. I’m going to leave. And I’ll probably love you that whole time, but I need to be somewhere else. To be better for our child. To be better for me.”
“You can’t go,” he said. “I won’t allow it. I will chase you down to the ends of the earth. I will ruin your father with all the evidence I have against him. I will... I will have our child taken from you.”
She drew back, feeling as though he had struck her, and he continued to advance on her. “Do not test me, Liliana,” he said. “You will not like the consequences.”
“If you won’t allow me to be happy with you, Diego, then I beg you allow me to be happy somewhere. You might choose to live in the darkness, but I’m not doing that. I’m sorry if that diminishes your bank account, Diego, but as you refuse to care for me, that’s all that will be left diminished.”
“So in the end you are just like Karina.”
“No,” she said. “I’m not leaving with another man. I’m not leaving to hurt you. I’m leaving on my own. I’m leaving to heal me. In the end, I hope it heals you too. But if not... I can’t live solely for someone else for the rest of my life. And you wouldn’t like the woman I became if I did. Let me go. If you have any humanity in you at all, let me go.”
Then she turned and walked outside into the night. And she waited. Waited for him to follow after her. Waited for him to wrench the doors open and call her name as he had done in the lobby. But he didn’t.
She called a cab, and on her way to the airport used that same contact she had used to get the ill-fated wedding gown collected. She figured out a way to find a new place to stay. Then after boarding a private plane using her husband’s name, she landed in London several hours later, and procured lodging using her father’s name.
And she decided that whatever she did after that, she would use her own name. She couldn’t figure out how to be enough for Diego. But maybe... Maybe she could figure out how to be enough for herself. And if she could do that... Then maybe she had a hope of being a good mother. Of being a whole, happy person.
The rest... Her broken heart, her need for Diego... She would worry about that later.
She laughed ruefully in the empty hotel room. Tonight, she had kidnapped herself, in a way. Taken herself out of that life that she had built with him, so that she could find something else.
Because if she didn’t, the kind of despair that she felt after he abandoned her would be all she really had.
And she was beginning to discover that she needed to find more.
The revelations she’d had at the hotel, that continued to unfold on her flight to London, were the kinds of self-realization that settled in her stomach like rocks. She didn’t feel lighter. Didn’t feel magically healed. But still, she couldn’t ignore them. That she didn’t know how to be with someone without constantly trying to fill the gaps. Without constantly trying to make herself invaluable.
She needed to fix that. And when she did, maybe she would feel better.
But for now she was lost in the in-between. Where she knew what she needed to become, but felt miles and miles away from it, when all she wanted to do was lie on the ground, curl up into a ball and howl.