by Shen, L. J.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her voice so soft only I could hear her. “I’m sorry for everything. You are right. You deserve better than what we made of our lives, Cillian.”
I kissed her cheek. “All forgiven.”
“Really?”
I gave her a curt nod. “Now get out.”
Next, it was my father’s turn to stop by the door. His eyes crinkled with a mixture of annoyance and delight.
“Mo òrga.” He inclined his head. “You keep surprising me with your strength. Your brother has always been a wild card but simple to crack. That’s why I unleashed the Brennan girl on him. Your sister…well, she is a saint I don’t have to worry about, but you.” He inhaled, closing his eyes. “You were my damaged child, which made you so much more dangerous because we both knew you could survive anything. You think I don’t know,” he whispered in my ear, getting close, too close—the closest he’d ever been to me physically—“but I do. I know about your demons, Cillian. The same ones live in the basement of my heart. Only difference is, you seemed to have slayed yours. Good for you, son.”
Disoriented and in need of a stiff drink, I strode to my office.
“Mr. Fitzpatrick!” Sophia jumped from her station, sprinting in my direction as soon as I walked out of the boardroom. “You have a visitor.”
“Who?”
“Ms. Penrose.”
“Call her that one more time and you are permanently blacklisted from working at any respectable Boston company.”
Forcing myself to keep my steps even, I made my way to my office, finding Emmabelle Penrose sitting in my executive chair, her long legs draped over my chrome desk. She wore a pair of Louboutins I was pretty sure belonged to my wife, a pencil skirt, and a blouse that didn’t leave much to the imagination.
And the day just keeps better and better.
“Never mind. Wrong sister.” I waved Sophia off, pushing open the glass door and closing it after me. I leaned a shoulder against the glass wall, tucking my hands into my front pockets.
“Cillian! How’s life treating you?” Emmabelle purred, looking up from her phone.
“Like I fucked its underage daughter, and now it’s out for revenge,” I answered blandly, pushing off the wall and taking a seat in front of her. I was—and always would be—unruffled by her entire Dita Von Teese on steroids act. Her cry for attention fell on deaf ears in my case.
“Feet off the table,” I instructed. “Unless you want them broken.”
“Oh, dear, someone’s in a mood.” She removed her legs from my desk, dumping her ugly secondhand Prada bag on top of my laptop. I resisted the urge to hurl her out of my window. I doubted it would win me any points with my wife. “I’m afraid things are about to go from bad to worse.”
“I sincerely doubt there’s room for deterioration,” I lunged back.
“Then I’m here to prove you the sky is the limit, baby.” She plucked something from her bag—a stack of papers—and slid it across my desk with her pointy scarlet fingernail. “You’ve been served.”
I didn’t touch the papers. I glanced down and saw my wife’s handwriting. Curvy. Romantic. Small. Like her.
For a second, the temptation not to feel was overwhelming.
To laugh it off.
To kick Emmabelle out.
To show her that I didn’t care.
Then I remembered it was exactly why I had to fight to get my wife back.
“The answer is no,” I said mildly, cracking my knuckles under the table. “I told Persephone divorce wasn’t an option. It is tacky, brings bad press, and besides, she’s yet to fulfill her part of the bargain.”
“You realize you’re not God, right?” Emmabelle cocked her head sideways. “You can’t just snap your fingers and make people fall in line.”
I stared at her. “Prove it.”
“She doesn’t want you anymore.”
“I can change her mind.”
“What makes you think that?” Belle grinned, her eyes glittering.
“She wanted me before I even tried. Now that I intend to make an effort, she won’t be able to resist me. Either way, we both know you’re walking out of here with the divorce petition if I have to fucking feed it to you. This has no legal ground. You’re not the sheriff, and I’m not a guy you can push around. If it comes to court, I’ll ask the judge for couple’s therapy—and will receive it—seeing as we’ve been married for a short period and no adultery or abuse has occurred.”
“That’s what I thought.” Emmabelle chuckled, withdrawing the papers from my desk and tucking them back into her bag. “Look, I’m not your biggest fan for numerous reasons. At the top of them is the fact you planned to lock my baby sister in a suburban McMansion and have her produce heirs for you while you stayed here and lived the big life. But I’ve come to accept that, despite your sociopathic shortcomings, you’ve truly grown to love her. Am I right?”
There were many offensive things on the tip of my tongue, but Emmabelle had the advantage today. I had to let her have her day in the sun, even if I wanted to burn her down.
“Yes,” I agreed sullenly. “I love your sister very much.”
So much it goddamn fucking hurts.
“Well, maybe it’s time to tell her how you feel.” Belle stood, scooping her bag and hurling it over her shoulder. “You’ve been apologizing for the wrong thing the entire time. Persephone didn’t leave you because you’re an asshole. Heck, I’m sure it’s half of your charm. She left you because she thinks you’re incapable of feeling. Prove her wrong.”
“How the hell can I do that, seeing as I’m not supposed to see her?”
“Says who?” She blinked in surprise.
“Says her,” I growled. “She told me not to come after her.”
“Since when do you listen to what my sister says? One of the very things she loves about you is that you do whatever the hell you want. Always.”
Of course, the one time I decided to obey, it was to the wrong fucking instruction.
My sister-in-law tapped my shoulder as she exited my office.
“Go get her. She’s waiting, and I’m growing tired of taking my flings back to their apartments because she’s in my bed.”
It was time to break one more promise.
“There’s a cloud in our backyard!” Dahlia, one of my students, gasped, pointing her chubby finger out the window behind me.
“Whoa!” Reid’s tar eyes rounded, his pupils dilating like two splashes of ink. “That is one giant, humongous cloud.”
“Now, friends,” I said from over the rim of the book I was reading. They sat around me on the colorful alphabet carpet. The fog outside distracted them. “Crisscross applesauce. Everybody sit down and pay attention to the story. We need to finish reading about Paddington attending the Busy Bee Adventure Trail before we can play outside.”
“Collecting B-words is b-o-r-r-i-n-g!” Noah spelled the word wrong, tossing his limbs about the carpet in frustration. “Mommy says teachers are not very smart, or they wouldn’t be teachers. I want to play with the giant cloud!”
Well, Noah, Mommy is a B for bitc…
“Please!” Dahlia cried.
“Oh, Ms. Persy!” Reid whined.
The kids swarmed me, crawling onto my lap while pressing their palms together pleadingly. “Please, please, please can we play with the cloud? The nice man wants us to join him so badly. Look at him playing all by himself.”
The nice man?
Playing with himself?
Thinking now was a great time to call the police and make use of my pepper spray, I whipped my head, my jaw slacking.
My husband—who according to Belle refused the divorce papers yesterday and kicked her out of his office—was standing in Little Genius’ backyard, sleeves rolled, hair tousled, one knee on the ground as he created a huge, white, solitary cloud that floated above his head. It was the size of a hot air balloon. Big and fluffy and white. My eyes darted to the ground. How did he make it?
; I spotted a metal tray, a stirrer, a match, and a Mason jar scattered underneath him.
We stared at each other wordlessly through the glass wall.
The book slipped from my fingers. I felt the herd of kids as they ran past me, dashing to the window, pressing their sticky fingers and noses to the glass as they squealed excitedly.
Avoiding my husband was no longer an option.
He brought me a cloud.
He brought me Auntie Tilda.
My legs carried me to the glass wall. He walked over, meeting me behind the thin barrier.
I put my hand on the glass. Cillian mirrored the action, our fingertips touching through the wall.
“I told you not to come here.” I swallowed hard.
“I told you a lot of things I regret,” he answered. “I hope maybe what you said was one of yours.”
“I’ve already used my Cloud Wish, Kill. I can’t have another one.” My voice broke.
“The wish is not for you to make, Persephone.” He smiled. “It’s for me.”
The children poured into the backyard like hot lava, spreading fast, crackling with delight.
Their small arms reached for the cloud, trying to grasp the ungraspable, stretching their fingers in an attempt to capture its magic.
I was the last to get out to the yard, stopping a few good feet away from my husband. Seeing him after weeks felt like dropping a heavy camping bag at the doorstep of your home. I wanted to bury my nose in his neck and breathe him in.
I didn’t ask him what he was doing here. I was afraid to believe. To hope.
Descending from Olympus didn’t make my husband any less regal and beautiful, and the Greek gods had a history of making mortals play into their own hands.
“This one is Dahlia.” He pointed at one of the kids, who was punching the smoke, trying to bring it to submission. “You call her The Little Mouse. Sassy, sweet, stubborn. This is Teo,” he continued, jerking his chin to Teo, “shy and reserved but observant. And that’s Joe,” he continued, looking at Joel, one of my favorite pupils. A dreamer with a shock of bright red hair.
“How did you know?” I whispered.
“I’ve been listening during our dinners,” he admitted. “To every word you said. Even if I pretended otherwise.”
My heart soared.
“You’re claiming your Cloud Wish?” I wrung my fingers together in my lap, turning into the same girl he’d met years ago in the bridal suite. Innocent. Unsure.
“Yes.”
“Who said you have one?” A smile fluttered on my lips.
“Your aunt.” There was no hint of mockery in his voice, which I appreciated, considering he was fluent in sarcasm. “She said I have to be careful. That you only get one wish in a lifetime.”
Wait a minute…
It was the same thing Auntie Tilda told me. And I didn’t remember ever telling Kill about this particular part. It couldn’t be. It made no sense at all.
“What’s your wish?” I whispered.
The children were teeming around us, and I thought it was symbolic, that the reason we were brought together—heirs—engulfed us even though I hadn’t conceived.
“I want an hour with you. Sixty minutes of your time. That’s all I ask. When are you getting off work?”
“Four,” I answered. “Same as always.”
“I’ll wait.”
At least he hadn’t told me to ditch work this time.
“How did you make a cloud?” I pointed behind him.
“NASA has a manual. It’s nothing.”
“It’s amazing.”
“Third graders can do it.”
“I don’t care.” I shook my head. “Will you wait for me?” I motioned around us, to the school.
He smiled. “Persephone, my dear, I’ve been waiting for eight years. Four more hours won’t kill me.”
The drive to Cillian’s house was quiet. Before I got out of Little Genius, I put an alarm for exactly sixty minutes on my phone. Now, I fiddled with the strap of my shoulder bag, taking in the monotonous view outside, trying to regulate my breaths.
It was make or break time. A part of me always knew Cillian wasn’t going to simply accept the divorce. Maybe that was why I went ahead with the paperwork. Subconsciously, I knew it would be a call for him to come closer.
To seek me out.
To defy me.
“You stopped the drilling in the Arctic.” I cleared my throat, still looking out the window. It was twenty past. Damn Boston traffic. We had forty more minutes. Technically, anyway.
“Yes.”
“That was…nice.”
“Giving you flowers is nice. Losing approximately 1.4 billion dollars a year in revenue is, at the very least, a romantic gesture of Shakespearean proportions.”
He said it so incredulously—so seriously—I couldn’t help but snort out a laugh.
“I’m not even sure how many zeroes that entails.”
“Nine.” His fingers tapped his knee, and I knew he was itching for a cigar but trying to be on his best behavior. “Ten, including me, if my plan today doesn’t work and I find out I did this for nothing.”
When we got to his house, I noticed Petar was out. So was the rest of the staff. I’d never seen the place so empty. I had a feeling it was planned.
“Should we go to your study?” I asked politely. A part of me still considered him a complete stranger.
He shook his head. “I want to show you something.”
Motioning for me to follow him to the backyard, he opened the double doors in his living room, and we proceeded outside. I’d visited his garden religiously. Not only was it gorgeous but I was still on the lookout for the elusive demon fountain. For the mysterious part of Cillian’s property I’d yet to discover.
I followed him, holding my breath when he stopped by the ivy-laced door with the high walls. I’d tried opening it twice, but it was firmly locked. Kill produced a key and unlocked it, pushing it open.
We both stepped in, and there was the demon fountain. With water pouring out of the bat-like monster with pointy teeth.
It was a small space—maybe as big as Belle’s apartment—and I wondered what made him close this section and isolate it from the rest of the garden.
Kill crouched down, hands-on-thighs, squinting. There was something about his body language that jarred me. A certain stiffness that was gone. His composure was an inch less than perfect. I liked it.
“What are we looking at?” I came to stand beside him, leaning forward. He caught me by the waist, tugging softly at my dress to keep me from getting too close to the flowers.
To the sea of flowers.
I just realized this section of the house was jam-packed with wildflowers. And not just any flowers. The pink and white flowers were shaped as little sad hearts. I swallowed, taking a step back.
“How long have you had those?”
“Almost four years.” He turned to me with a slight frown. “About a month after Hunter and Sailor’s wedding, my landscaper called me outside, insisting I had to see this. He said it was peculiar. That he didn’t plant the bleeding heart, so he had no idea how the flower had gotten here. His best guess was seeds from a nearby garden blew in the wind and settled here. But I remembered that after I took the flowers from your hair, I put them in a napkin. Later that night, when I arrived home, I went out to the garden to smoke a cigar, found the napkin, and tossed it. It was just the one flower, and my landscaper asked if I wanted to keep it. I immediately thought about your curse—wish,” he amended, “and said no. He yanked the bleeding heart out from its root the same day. A month later, another bleeding heart grew in the same spot. I had him wrench it out again. This time he went as far as poisoning the soil. On the fourth time, I gave up. A part of me wanted to see how damn stubborn you were. And look at it now. My garden’s full of them.”
I pressed my lips together, fighting a smile.
He barricaded a part of his garden because it reminded him of me.
“So I lived with your bleeding heart. A poisonous reminder of how much I wanted you. Not much later, I found out you were getting married.”
“You never answered my wedding invitation.” I felt color rising on my skin.
“Everyone has their limits. I draw mine at celebrating my idiocy of pushing you into another man’s arms. Time went by. I’d forgotten about you, mostly. The wheels of life kept on spinning, and no matter how fast or slow they went, I barely even remembered I was on board. Then Paxton left, I’d been appointed CEO of Royal Pipelines, and you showed up at my office, looking for a favor. My initial reaction was to put as much space between us as possible.”
“You didn’t want to feel,” I said softly. He shook his head.
“At this point, I wasn’t even concerned about the possibility of feeling. I was mainly still annoyed about the damn flowers that kept showing up out of nowhere in my backyard. Like you snuck in at night and planted them there. But then the need for a bride arose…”
“Yes, and you had multiple candidates to choose from. You canceled the engagement to Minka Gomes. Why?”
He frowned at the bed of flowers.
“She wasn’t you.”
“She could’ve been pregnant by now.”
“It was never about having an heir,” he quipped. A gorgeous, irresistible king who was misjudged and misunderstood. “Deep down, I wasn’t altruistic enough to give a fuck about the lineage.”
I glanced at my phone. We had half an hour at most before his wish was over.
“Tell me about the Tourette’s,” I pleaded. “Everything, right from the beginning. I’ve only seen a few videos, but they were enough to show me what you’ve been through.”
“It started with simple tics, right after my father fired Andrew Senior, and moved to full-blown attacks by the time I’d gotten back to England after summer break. The lonelier I felt, the worse they became. I’d been in and out of clinics, and on top of Tourette’s, I also received comorbid diagnosis of having OCD and ASD. To me, it felt like the end of the world. People think of Tourette’s as crazy people who shout out obscenities against their own will in rags on the street, OCD as compulsively obsessive maniacs who wash their hands fifteen times an hour, and ASD means I’m on the autism spectrum. Which basically makes people think I’m some sort of Rain Man. Good with numbers, dumb at everything else.