CHAPTER 36
ASTOR
Strands of Darling’s chestnut hair dangle from her loosely tied braid. She’s perched at the front of the small rowboat, and when she turns her head, I get a glimpse of where the saltwater has caused the strands of hair framing her face in front of her ear to curl into little ringlets.
It’s this scene I’m trying to memorize. The exact angle of those ringlets. The way her lavender scent mingles with that of salt and seaweed. The way her chest rises and falls at odds with the tide, the sound of her breathing a faint echo of the waves.
My mind fights to change the scene. Attempts to round out her belly. But I try my utmost to push those thoughts away. We have the next few months together. I can add those memories to my repertoire when it’s time.
For now, I etch the moment into my consciousness just as it is. When we return to the cabin, I’ll write it all down in a journal Charlie gifted me before we left the ship.
She hadn’t told me what it was for, but she hadn’t needed to.
One day, I’ll recount every detail of Wendy Darling to our son. There was a time I would have been too proud to write it down. Even now, I don’t wish to believe I’ll forget a single detail.
But I am losing my wife in a handful of months, and pride no longer has a place in my heart.
I watch her, that far-off look in her eyes that I’ll try and fail to capture with ink later tonight.
“Where have you gone this time, Darling?” I ask my wife.
The corners of her soft lips twitch, and she turns to me, twisting her back to place her hand on mine. “Nowhere,” she says. “I’m just…” She swallows, tears beading on her lids, deepening her blue eyes by a shade. “I’m right here.”
An hour later,Darling catches a grouper the size of my forearm.
She unhooks it and lets it back into the ocean, so we make do with the bread and cheese we brought from the ship to the cabin, and we dine on the sandy beach as the sun sets over the water.
After we’re done, Darling scoots over in the sand, lying back and leaning her warm head against my chest.
We stay like that for a while, until the guilt gnaws the truth out of me.
“You said this time is to be happy, and nothing else,” I say.
“Why?” she asks, knocking her head back and jutting her chin to the sky. “Do you have something unhappy you’d like to put forth as a point of conversation?”
“If my wife will permit it.”
Wendy flits her hand. “She permits it.”
I smile softly into her hair, even as the agony within me swells.
“I killed the warden.”
My darling Wendy doesn’t gasp, doesn’t react. Instead, she waits, staring off into the sunset as she listens.
“When I left you for those three days…” I shake my head, closing my eyes for a brief moment. “That’s where I was.”
“You didn’t tell me,” she says, though there’s more of a question in the statement than a gavel ring of judgment.
“The shock of discovering that you were with child drove it from my mind. At first, at least. But once my senses returned to me, I fear I had no other excuse but shame.”
“It makes sense. That after discovering your fate had been rewritten, that you were to end up a slave to the Sister once again…” She pauses, as if trying to convince herself that our plan still has a chance of changing that Fate. “You couldn’t punish her. It makes sense that you would punish the man who abused you as a child.”
My throat goes dry. “I was rather violent about it.”
Wendy goes quiet, and shame heats the back of my neck.
“I wasn’t even going to kill him. Just threaten him. I wanted him to live the rest of his miserable existence glancing over his shoulder, leaving his comfortable life behind in an attempt to hide from me. But then…” I remember the trembling little boy in the hallway hiding behind the maid. “Well, there was a child there.”
