“Stop.”
I try to shove it away. “Let go. I don’t want Antonia to have to clean it up.”
“She has staff for that.”
“No.” I push my chair back, sliding my hand out from under his to gather the mess on the floor.
“Ivy, stop.”
Mercedes’s words come back to me and I hate that they have the power to hurt me. She’s right. I am in love with him. And she knows her brother better than me. He can never love me.
“Ivy. Goddammit!” His chair scrapes back loudly and he’s behind me, hands on my arms, lifting me out of my seat.
“You’re making it worse,” I say, my voice breaking a little as I step on a piece of toast.
“It doesn’t matter.” He turns me, shifts his hands to my face to make me look at him. “What is it? What the hell has happened between yesterday and today?”
I look up at him and all I can hear is her. I have to think about what’s important now. Whether I love him or not and whether he is capable of loving me back or not can’t matter.
“Are you going to take the baby away from me?” I ask outright, my throat feeling tight to say the words.
“What?”
“Are you? Just tell me. I’m not going to run away. You said yourself I wouldn’t get past the front gates.” I remember when he’d said it. How it had stood out. “I just need to know.”
He exhales, shakes his head like he’s disgusted. He pulls his hands away and wraps one around the back of his neck, shaking his head, lips in a tight line.
“I just want to know. So I’m ready.” Can someone be ready for something like that?
“Is that what she told you? What’s turned you against me?” When I look away from him, he cups my face again to tilt it up, brushes a strand of hair behind my ear. He sighs deeply like he’s very tired. “No, Ivy. I am not going to take our baby away from you. Can we lay this to rest once and for all? Can you trust me and let this go? Because that’s what it comes down to. Trust.”
Before coming down to breakfast I’d walked past my old room. It’s cleaned up, more of a guest room now, the dark panels still there but open. The bed made to welcome someone new. The mask in its glass case gone. The rosary he’d made me wear since our wedding night not on the nightstand where I’d last left it but gone. I’d stood outside the door and thought about how much time I’d spent in there. How easy it would be for him to just put me back in, lock the door and forget all about me.
Trust.
He wants me to trust him.
I blink, my eyes focusing on his, something in my stomach fluttering when he smiles as if trying to draw the same from me, and I remember something else about last night. Something else she said.
That he could never love me because of what my father had done to him. To their family.
“I want to see my father,” I say.
His expression changes. Darkens.
“You want me to trust you, but all I seem to do is give, and all you seem to do is take.”
“That’s neither right nor fair, and you know it.” His voice is harder.
“Yes, you’ve come through on my sister. And I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful that we, you and I together, will have guardianship of her.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“That’s right, isn’t it? You and me together will have guardianship. Not just you.”
“No, not just me. That’s correct. Would you like to see the paperwork so you believe me?” His words are clipped.
I shake my head. “I understand about Hazel. About it being dangerous for her and maybe even for you to be keeping her location a secret from The Society. I don’t understand why I can’t have a cell phone or access to a phone and at least call her, though.”
He doesn’t say anything at that.
“And I’m willing to let that go. For now. But you have to give me something, too. In addition to Evangeline. I want to see my father. I want to see him today.” I don’t ask it. I don’t say please. Because what I want is not extraordinary. It’s not some ridiculous request. He’s in a Society hospital. He’ll be guarded. I will be too. No chance of Abel or anyone else getting to me. No risk to my safety. “You can take me, Santiago. I want you to take me.”
He studies me for a very long moment, and I watch how his left eye narrows, see the tic in his jaw, and I’m sure he’s going to say no, and then I won’t know what to do. What my next move will be. But he surprises me when he nods.
“You eat something, and I’ll take you to see your father.”
I almost don’t believe him, and he must see that because he turns me around puts a hand on the back of my chair, and gestures for me to sit back down. So, I sit, and I let him make a fresh plate of eggs and toast from the sideboard, and he sits down too and watches me eat.
“My sister is jealous,” he says once I’ve finished and set my napkin down after wiping my mouth. “It’s ugly on her. On anyone. But she’ll come around.”
“No, she won’t, Santiago. And you’ll have to keep choosing, and I’m just afraid the day will come when you choose her, and I’m back in my room or banished to wherever, and I don’t think I can survive that. Especially now that there’s more at stake than just me and you.” My throat tightens as I say the words, but I swallow them down.
“Ivy—”
I stand. “I’m ready.”
15
Ivy
I realize my father was in the same building as me when I was brought here after the aspirin incident. He was just a few floors above me kept behind secured doors not accessible by anyone without a reason for being there and with an additional guard at his door.
“He was here all along?”
Santiago nods as he guides me down to the last room.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“Would you have?”
“I haven’t lied to you, Ivy. Not once.”
Is that true? I’m taken aback. Confused.
We stop a few feet from the door, and he turns to face me, backing me into the wall. “Like I told your sister, you may not like what I have to say, but I won’t lie to you.”
He dips his head down, so his forehead is touching mine. His eyes travel to the pendant hanging at the hollow between my collarbones, and he touches it, then takes my left hand to finger the rings there, the salt and pepper engagement ring, the wedding band. He shifts his gaze back to mine.
“I am trying, Ivy.”
I reach up, I can’t help it, but I stop myself before I touch his face. Instead, I smooth his shirt down—he changed before we left for the hospital, showering and putting on fresh clothes—and when I do, I realize my hand is resting over his heart, and for a moment, I keep it there and just feel it beat.
He closes his hand over mine.
“I know you are,” I say and feel a little guilty because right now, I’m the one with the agenda. I’m the one lying because omission is a lie, and I am here not only to see my father, to hug him, to know he’s okay but also to ask him about what Mercedes said. To find out what it is they think he did that is so terrible that Santiago would do what he’s done. The thing that would leave him incapable of loving me.