Beneath it was darkness. And in that darkness, a small wooden box laced with dust. It looked like something meant to be forgotten.
I pulled it out. My hands were coated in powder, my lungs drinking in the musty scent of things that had not seen light in a decade. My heart rattled in its cage. What was this? Why would anyone put it here? Did Zagreus put it here?
The box was warm where my fingers gripped it.
I carried it to my vanity, locked the bedroom door, and sat.
It opened without a whisper of resistance. Inside were photographs. A smaller jewellery box. And the shock could choke a woman before she’d even drawn her next breath.
It did to me.
The first photograph was Zagreus. Younger by four, maybe five years. Black tuxedo, no scar cutting across his features. The scar I traced in the dark so many times was absent. He was… lighter, not smiling, but there was a curve at the corner of his lips that suggested something dangerously close to joy. His arm was wrapped around a woman in a white wedding dress. Her face had been scratched out; not blurred, not torn but violently erased.
I turned the picture over in my hands, the dust smearing across my fingertips.
Two more photographs. The first was an ultrasound of a foetus. And the second was Zagreus again. Shirtless, laughing at the camera, his head thrown back, the picture catching him in that fleeting, dangerous moment where men forget they are men and become simply human.
My hands trembled so violently that the images almost slipped from my grasp. I set them down before I could damage them, my breath slicing the air in uneven shards.
The jewellery box was velvety, and my fingers brushed over its surface as though I were touching something sacred and forbidden.
Inside lay a diamond ring.
The initial engraved inside was C.
The truth fell on me like a world collapsing.
Zagreus had been married.
Before me, before the day he forced ne into vows I had never chosen. He had loved… or at least bound himself… to another woman. A woman who had worn white beside him. A woman who had carried his child, or the possibility of it.
I could not move. My breath was gone.
My world was not mine. Perhaps it never had been.
And for the first time, I wondered if I was not a wife at all, but simply the ghost who had been stitched into the dress of another woman’s life.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
What I Cannot Unknow
I thought grief was more than screams and whispers, a soundless convulsion in the marrow, gnawing through silences and leaving its bones rattling inside your chest. It was not always death that birthed it; sometimes it was discovery. A photograph. A ring. Or a box in the floor where marble ought to be eternal.
My hands still trembled, raw with dust and paint, and something fouler… the stickiness of truth half-swallowed. The images seared into my skull would not leave me. Zagreus, younger, lighter, and unscarred. I did not know why looking at his scarless face disgusted me more than his scars.
He was laughing…. With a faceless woman, promised in white, pressed against him. One he loved.
I told myself I had misread, misseen, misremembered. But no… the evidence sat too real in my lap. I had been an interloperin a life already written. A counterfeit bride stitched into another woman’s veil.
I didn’t even know it affected me so much. It shouldn’t matter. I shouldn’t care. Why the fuck did I give a damn if he was married or not? I didn’t love him. I didn’t love him at all.
I scrambled. The box was clutched to my chest like a lifeline and a curse. My fingers fumbled frantically as dust streaked my knuckles when I pressed the panel down, my heart hammering a drumbeat loud enough to summon ghosts. I wiped my face with the heel of my palm, smudging tears into grey shadows, grabbed a brush, and sat before the blank canvas. Pretending I didn’t hear the footsteps outside.
Just as I wiped the tears, the door opened with a click. And I quickly felt his presence. It was diabolical how he was here when I didn’t want him to be here.
I knew before I lifted my eyes that he was not himself. Because he hadn’t visited me these last three days. Avoided me, if I put it in female language. So, his untimely arrival was odd. I lifted my eyes slightly, catching the sight of his tie hanging undone around his throat like a noose loosened at last. His storm-grey eyes were hooded, glazed down with something darker than fatigue. Lust. Wine. The scar on his face looked sharper beneath the dim light, crueller, as though it had deepened in my absence.
My heart clenched. My gaze fled, and I bent my head to the brush in my hand as if colours could shield me from him.
