I take a deep, shaky breath, tipping my chin up as I stare into his eyes.
“Why did you try to kill yourself?”
20
ALEXANDRE
Looking at her hurt, angry face, I feel instantly ashamed. There are many things I have no desire to tell her that I know will cause every shred of sympathy she has for me to disappear, that will alter the perception she has of me completely. But I know that, after all of this, I owe her answers.
I’d thought she would leave me, that night in the kitchen. I never imagined I would live through it—least of all through her help. I had thought that finding me there, dead as I’d expected to be, would have felt like a victory for her. A release.
I hadn’t thought about how finding a dead man—or in this case, almost so—might traumatize her or how her options might be limited by her situation. I see now, sitting here, that I often didn’t think very far ahead at all. I made decisions quickly, emotionally, out of anger or fear or grief or what I thought was love—and my life has very often been the worse for it.
I’ve made Noelle’s life worse because of it.
I don’t want tonight to end with this conversation, with these stories. I want to sit here in the firelight, in the warm glow of the Christmas tree, in warmth and safety with the taste of wine on my tongue with a woman who I think might have been mykintsugiafter all. My healing, my gold.
But if this is what she wants, then I will give it to her.
“Let’s go to bed,” I say quietly. “I don’t want to talk about it here. But I will tell you the truth.”
Noelle bites her lower lip, as if she wants to insist we talk out here, but she finally nods. “Alright,” she concedes and pushes the blanket aside to help me up.
There was a time when being this dependent on someone else would have angered me, when being at the mercy of someone else would have terrified me. But I know that Noelle would never hurt me, that she only wants to help. She’s shown me that, time and time again, though I don’t deserve it. Though I know Noelle would say that she doesn’t love me, in her actions, I have seen a love beyond anything I’ve experienced in many years.
A love that could change even a monster.
But it’s not her job to change me or to heal me. And I know to the very depths of my broken soul that it’s time to tell her the truth, and then do what I should have done weeks ago.
I have to let her go.
Noelle helps me into bed, tucking the blankets around me gently, her face carefully composed. She walks around to the other side, pulling her soft blue cardigan closer around her as she sits cross-legged on the bed next to me and presses her lips tightly together as her soft gaze meets mine.
“Tell me,” she says simply. “And I’ll listen.”
“It’s hard to know where to begin,” I admit. “This was years in the making, Noelle. Years of things I have done wrong and years of things others have done to me. Years of doing what I thought was right, in my broken mind and soul, and finding at last that I’ve never known what was right.”
“Then start at the beginning,” Noelle says quietly. There’s no judgment in her eyes, only curiosity and sadness. “Tell me what happened to Margot.”
She would start with the worst of it all.But the beginning is a reasonable place to start. “She died,” I tell Noelle simply. “I loved her, and I was the cause of her death.”
Noelle flinches slightly, frowning. “You killed her?”
“No! Of course not.” I shake my head. “But if I hadn’t loved her, she would still be alive.”
“Alexandre—” Noelle lets out a long breath. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“We had plans to run away. The night after her eighteenth birthday, we met out in the barn, where we would meet late at night—my family lived on an old farm out in the country. She told me—” My chest tightens with grief at the memory, welling up in my throat to choke the words back, making it hard to speak. “She told me she was pregnant.”
Noelle’s eyes go wide. “And you were—”
“Happy,” I tell her firmly, the word coming out choked with emotion. “It was as if my whole world opened up in that moment. I saw it all—the life we would have together, the family, far away from the hell that we’d been living in. I didn’t care if we were rich or poor, where we had to live, what job I had to work, if I had Margot and our child. I knew she loved me in a way I believed no one else ever could.”
I pause, taking a deep breath. It’s hard to look Noelle in the eyes, telling this story. “Even then, I was—not entirely well. I knew there was something different about me. I liked things done a certain way, and it was hard not to get angry if I was interrupted. I liked routine and ritual, for everything to remain the same. I was sensitive to criticism and rejection, sometimes violently so, though I never hurt anyone. But I would get angry and lash out. My father hated me for it—for my sensitivity, the books and poetry I loved, and how much I hated the outdoors. I hated the dirt and sweat and stink of the farm. He thought I was less of a man for it. But Margot—” I shake my head, feeling my eyes burn with unshed tears. “She was the only one who could calm me, who could make me feel normal. I would never have hurt her, not in a million years. She was the only one who could tame the monster that was already inside of me.”
“And you didn’t tell anyone you were in love, I’m guessing?”
“Of course not.” I shake my head. “Our parents would have been horrified, although—as you said—we hadn’t been raised together, and we weren’t related. Margot and I both felt we were like any other two teenagers who met one another. We didn’t see why it mattered that we lived in the same house—wouldn’t we live in the same house as adults in a relationship?—or why things had to be different because our parents had married one another. It meant nothing to us.”