“When you were sixteen?” he growled, voice low.
She lifted her palms. “With the caveat that no marriage would take place until I had turned twenty-two. The idea was quite progressive and exciting for the families involved, mine and the one I matched with. My and Rashad’s futures would be secure, despite our young ages, while also giving us an opportunity none of our parents had received. We would have the chance to get to know each other, to perhaps fall in love the American way along the process as well.”
“And you were fine with all of this?” Jag pressed.
Rita shrugged. “Outside of cars, my family was the most important thing in my world. It didn’t seem like a big sacrifice to play the role I was expected to, especially because I didn’t understand at first what I was being asked to give up. Rashad was kind and funny and easy to get along with, if a bit distant and aloof. At seventeen, a difference in age of even two years can be a long time, especially with how sheltered and tunnel-visioned I was. But he came from a medical family, which I knew, and the reason they accepted me despite my working-class family, which I did not know, was because of my intelligence, particularly in science and math. With the promise that I would join the medical track, which my father never told me, simply enrolled me and expected me to obey, Rashad’s family had offered and my family accepted. In hindsight, it makes sense now why my father took me to register in person. I thought he was proud, but it was really so that he could make sure I was signed up for the right courses. He underestimated my willfulness, though. He didn’t understand that I wasn’t inherently brilliant, but because I loved cars. And I didn’t understand that by going behind his back to change majors and continuing on with him none the wiser, I had unwittingly broken my marriage contract, as well as made my family look foolish and grasping. My father didn’t disown me because of what I had done, though. He disowned me because when he found out and gave me the choice to stop chasing cars and behave in a way that put my family first, or to continue to pursue my dream alone, without the love, support and warmth of a family and future, I chose to walk out the door.”
She didn’t look at him as she finished her story, afraid of the judgment she might see in his expression, but even fearing that, she felt there was a weight lifted off her chest in the telling.
Whether or not he thought her selfish, it felt good to have no dark secrets from him.
“That’s no choice,” Jag said, his voice heavy with condemnation, but not of her. Of her father.
“Come again?” Rita asked, startled, having expected any number of reactions but not protectiveness on her behalf, and in the surprise, another part of her stitched itself back together.
“What kind of father asks his child to choose between her dreams and her family? The worst thing you did wrong was lie in order to do what you were born to do. Even in deception, you remained a testament to your family. As far as youthful transgressions go,” he said with disgust, “I’d say your father got off easy.”
“I don’t think you understand how poorly my behavior reflected on my family as a whole. If I could be so willful, what did that reflect about my family’s values and lessons, about my parents and uncles and sister?”
“I don’t think you understand that a real parent’s love is dependent not on how their child behaves, but on the miracle that they exist at all. Real love is not conditional, like your family’s or my father’s, but boundless and unfettered.”
“Like your mother’s,” Rita finished for him softly.
A shadow banked the fires of his eyes, but he did not pull away or deny it. “Like my mother’s.”
With a soft sigh and smile, Rita said, “What it must have been like to have felt such unconditional love like that.”
With no trace of hyperbole, Jag said, “Terrifying,” confirming with a single word what Rita had suspected.
“Until the day my father found out,” she said, voice still low, “that’s what I thought my family felt for me. I never realized that their years of tolerating and indulging my fantasies and dreams had actually been payment in advance for doing my part when the time came.”
Taking her hand, he caught her eye to say earnestly, “You made the right choice, Rita. In my experience, conditional love is never truly satisfied, even when its demands are met. It will simply demand more and more until failure is guaranteed because conditional love is not about love at all, but power. If you had sacrificed the things that made youyou, they would have only asked for more. Instead, here you are, better to yourself and the world than you ever would have been had you allowed them to clip your wings.”
It took a moment for his words to penetrate, as if they had to travel through thick layers of calluses left by years of hard feelings between her and her father.
But as they did, something broke open inside her, a box filled with grief, and guilt, and shame—all of the feelings that she had carried and shoved deep down inside in order to survive the pain of separation and loneliness of being cast out from her family.
All of the self-doubt and second-guessing that she had taken on as her responsibility and used to create a hard protective shell started to crack and crumble and fall apart like the ruin she and the Prince sat atop.
For the third time that night, Rita’s eyes welled up with tears, this set years overdue.
Unlike those she’d cried for the car, these were silent tears, racking her body with force that felt like it could tear her apart.
Like before, Jag’s arm came around her, drawing her into the warm circle of his embrace, this time all the more comforting for the heat that radiated upward from the stone they sat upon.
Rocking her, he made soothing sounds, like a mother.
The experience was so unexpected that it took Rita a moment to realize, between heaving gasps and big wet tears, that the shooshing noises were not coming from the wind, but from him.
“Shh. Shh. Shhh. There, there,” he murmured, voice a low rumble against her form.
She didn’t know when she had crawled into his lap, but at some point in the process of enveloping herself in the arms he’d offered, she had.
Giving in fully, she nestled her head in the crook of his neck and closed her eyes, letting the warmth and comfort he provided seep through her suit and ease the ache of being alone all these years.
He held her there, quietly rocking her back and forth, for a long time.
Long enough that her body stilled, calming in its silent hyperventilating, and her tears ebbed and dried.