If you loveme, do not let me leave alone. Let us brave the waves together.
Cyprian leans down and gently kisses her.
CYPRIAN
My love is not in doubt. You are the beat of my heart. The sun that warms me. The rain that washes me clean. But my love for you alters not the truth, my beautiful, brave shield-maiden. The vessel is not yet strong enough to hold us both.
Cassia sobs, and Cyprian comforts her in his arms. Then he positions the curragh at the shoreline and hands her inside as she continues to weep. After one final loving kiss, he guides the boat deeper into the rough water and shoves the vessel out as far as he can.
CASSIA
This boat may fail. Humanity may perish. But my love for you will remain.
She begins rowing. He watches waist-deep in the water until he can no longer see her or the curragh. Face like stone, he turns and strides toward shore, then toward the cliffs, where he’ll watch the woman he loves disappear into the horizon. Where he’ll meet his destiny and his death. Alone.
25
In retrospect, expecting a university’s Theatre and Drama Department to keep a celebratory event simple and subdued was stupid beyond words.
It wasn’t, after all, the Theatre and Low-Key Introversion Department.
Peter wasn’t thinking too clearly these days, though. Not since last weekend, when Maria fuckinglefthim after accusing him of leavingher. So here he was. All alone in a crowd of roughly a hundred strangers, flummoxed by the elaborateness of what he’d thought would be a pretty basic event.
Endowing a scholarship—one! just one!—didn’t require this sort of fuss, dammit.
Regardless, a seemingly endless line of people had pinned him in place at the front of Vilas Hall’s screening theater. They wanted to introduce themselves to him, congratulate him, thank him, remind him when and where they’d met before. They wanted to have a pleasant, lively conversation with the man of the hour.
But he had no reserves of energy or goodwill remaining after an agonizingly solitary week, and he didn’t know how much longer he could pretend he did.
In his own company, he hated himself.
In other people’s company, he hated them instead.
Either way: misery.
Then he saw two familiar faces standing right in front of him. And for a brief, very frightening moment, he thought he might have to excuse himself from an event thrown in his honor so no one could see him weep.
“Nava. Ramón.” A single throat-clearing didn’t remove the lump there, so he tried a second time, then a third. “Wh-what are you two doing here?”
Nava got up on her tiptoes to throw her arms around his neck and draw him close, and she wasn’t Maria. She wasn’t ineffable softness wrapped around iron strength, wasn’t his missing piece clicking into place every time she pressed against him.
But she was so fucking warm, her hug affectionate, her eyes brimming with knowledge and concern for him. Ramón’s own embrace included a fierce squeeze and several thumps on the back that somehow communicated both sympathy and fondness without a word spoken.
“I’m an alumna of this department too. Did you forget?” Nava’s finger flicked his tie, and she wrinkled her nose at him. “But even if I weren’t, we wouldn’t have missed your event for the world.”
He looked up at the ceiling and blinked hard.
When the department had asked for the names of family and friends he wanted to invite, he’d contemplated adding his father to the list. Because maybe, when faced with such a concrete marker of financial success and professional prestige, Dad would finally understand why his son had chosen to defy reason and escape to Hollywood. Maybe he’d look at Peter and say, at long last, “You were right. I was wrong. You had to leave, and I’m sorry.”
Then, once Dad made that life-altering realization, maybe he’d say the same to the decorative urn containing his late wife, andPeter would finally, after all these years, be able to picture his mother at peace, wherever she was now.
Only that wasn’t going to happen, was it? Not ever. So Peter hadn’t invited his father, because it hurt to see him.
He’d meant Maria to be his family in this room, in this moment. And she was gone too.
But here were Nava and Ramón, and he loved them. Maria had brought the three of them together and forged his initial, tentative connection to them, but Peter had earned their loyalty and affection on his own, just as they’d earned his, and he didn’t love them simply as an offshoot of Maria, but because they were good, smart, kind people.
Loyal as hell too. He needed them, and they’d shown up. He didn’t even have to ask.