And it needs nothing, because it’s perfect, just like she’s perfect with her erotic drawings and her quietly clever plans and her sweaty palms.
Hope is the most excruciating torture.
The taste of the soup dies on my tongue. I leave the tray at the bottom of the door, and it disappears. I have no sense of time besides the needs of my body. The boredom is so intense I give the cinderblocks names, grouping them into families based on the particular nuance in their exact shade of gray.
This game does not excise fantasies about Sarah. It just occupies me with a menial task while my subconscious does the bigger job of building possible worlds around her, where she’s okay without me when I die. Or I relish the impossible alternatives to my current situation. Her body, and her voice, and the sound of ocean waves as I brush the hair off her face… they are wishes for a man manufacturing hope.
I hear footsteps in the hall on the other side of the glass. In a split second, I regret the families of rectangles and the happy lives I spent hours weaving. I should have been planning for the inevitable unfriendly visit, or at least mentally preparing for the moment it came. But I’m loose, and empty, and simple as a babe when I stand shirtless before the glass, waiting as the steps get louder, closer, distinct enough to determine that there are only two feet, and they step lightly.
My skin prickles and my thoughts narrow to the width of a knife blade.
It’s a woman.
There are a dozen women it could be, promising outcomes ranging from neutral to really fucking bad. I can try to figure out who she is, but there’s only one I truly fear.
“No.” I deny it—closing my eyes before I even see her, as if she’ll transform into someone else and all my stupid fantasies can remain possible.
“Dario.” Her voice is in front of me now. But with my eyes closed, she’s not there.
“No!” I am weak and moronic and childish.
“Please.” She’s closer, clearer. “I keep having to say ‘please’ and I’m tired of begging you.”
With my eyes closed, I hear the haughty self-regard she brought to her first hours in the greenhouse. It’s her shield against panic.
I put my hands on the glass, over the air slit, head down, and open my eyes. I see the floor and her shadow across my bare feet. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I know where I belong.”
She’s telling me she wasn’t captured or taken. She came back because she wanted to. This is what I did when I taught her how to exist outside the Colonia. She got trapped inside with them. Her ignorance may be swept away, but her agency is a permanent stain.
She’s open and vulnerable, curious and fearless, and the ways she and I are the same are the most dangerous. If she chose to be here, there’s a reason.
“I’m going to look at you,” I warn. “I’m going to pick my head up and, prima… I know my weaknesses… I’m not made of stone, no matter what you think… when I see you here in this place… it’s going to break me.”
“We all wish it was that easy.”
We all… what?
The rubble in my mind parts like the Red Sea, making a way through, but with forks and switchbacks and no clear path to the promised land. I don’t have to bend, hunched like a man carrying tonnage of his own pathetic sorrows.
I straighten my neck and open my eyes.
The sight of her wearing the uniform of mourning Colonia women shatters the memories of her in jeans, watching Black Widow with admiration. Now, the only thing she shares with the superhero is the color. Head-to-toe black, with her face covered by a black lace veil. Her hair in a single braid rips apart the memory of the way it fell over her shoulders when she came out of the shower.
This is the old Sarah, dressed to signal adherence, docility, and duty.
“They have you in mourning,” I say.
“You murdered my father.” She spits the truth. Even through the veil, her eyes are fire and her jaw is set firm. She has not surrendered to them… or has she withdrawn her surrender to me? Her words imply the latter. She hates me for all the right reasons. I deserve as much.
“I did. I gutted him while he was taking a shit and I don’t regret it. Not with you looking so good in black. Take off that veil so I can see your face.”
Our eyes have been locked on opposite sides of the black lace, and they stay that way for long enough for me to read her. She knows we’re in danger. She knows she has to stay in control. The list of what she doesn’t know is so long it disappears into the horizon.
“You can’t tell me what to do.”
I hold up my right hand. “These scars say I can. Now do it, or I’ll have your brother put you back in your place with a paddle.”
It’s a real threat. A husband can ask a male family member to punish his wife. It’s also a probing question about what’s going on outside this cell. Where is Massimo? Who’s in charge?
But she doesn’t take the bait by confirming or denying what her brother can do.
“I know my place.”
That’s a lie. She never knew her place.
She pulls her veil over her head, revealing her face in all its splendor. Her eyes are cupped with dark circles and ringed in red. Her skin is sallow, and her cheekbones are over-defined. But her lips are full, and her lashes are long and dark. Her chin points upward, and her throat is fearlessly exposed.
She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
She’s still the woman I came to love.
Something is off, but a lot has happened between her reasons to hate me and her reasons for wearing a black veil. I took her on a journey, and she pulled me to the destination.
“You’re my wife.”
“I am still.” Her hands—without the diamond I put there—fold in front of her. She rocks ever so slightly on the balls of her feet. A posture of attack. My reflection in the glass—shirtless, arms covered in history—is a wish she can wave away.
Her black dress is a pillar of smoke on the horizon, but that’s an illusion. I thought I was the fire under her and she was the smoke I created. But I do not have my own light. I do not burn on my own. I need her to exist.
I can manage the concrete cell, the torture, and the humiliation, but if I’ve truly lost her, I’ve lost everything.
I’ve built an international empire of revenge. Dozens of people do my bidding. I have more money than I can spend in this life.
Take it. Take it all. Take my freedom. Imprison me like an animal. Tie my guts in knots until every cell in my body cries out in pain.
I don’t care. Do it.
If she isn’t mine, I am no more solid than this reflection. The fire is hers, and I curl upward into the air, thinning and dispersing into nothingness.
Nothing I’ve fought for will endure. It’s smoke, and this whole time, she was the fire. She didn’t blaze into the sky, she smoldered quietly underneath, and she will grow, and change, and consume whatever stands in her way.
If she isn’t mine, everything I ever did will disappear with me, and that will be fair, and just, and right. It will be my destiny to fade away.
But if she is mine?
If together we are the fire and a billowing column reaching skyward?
If she is mine and she lets me be hers, then this cell cannot hold me. The glass cannot keep us apart. The men who stand between us are as good as dead.