The Consequence

by Giana Darling

  I sighed into my nearly empty mug. It felt doubly wrong to break the news to her given what was going on with Cosima but it was for exactly that reason that I knew I had to do it sooner rather than later. If God forbid something worse happened to Cosima, Sinclair and I would need each other. Besides, we were ready to move forward together and keeping that a secret in the face of everything, seemed reprehensible.

  “Giselle,” Sin said softly, rounding the marble counter so that he could take my cheek in his cool palm. “There is no candy coating this. You are in love with your sister’s ex-boyfriend. I do not think words exist in any language that will make that more palatable to Elena.”

  God, I hated how true that was.

  “We made the right decision, the only decision, but it doesn’t make it seem any less selfish,” I admitted.

  His thumb brushed tenderly over my bottom lip before he dipped down to press a kiss there. When he tried to pull away, I abandoned my coffee cup to link my hands behind his neck and clasp him closer to me. He smiled against my mouth before kissing me more deeply, his tongue warm velvet against mine.

  “The only thing worse than being so selfish, I’ve found, is not owning it,” he said after a minute, pressing his forehead to mine. “We may have acted immorally but we did it for a purpose, we did it for love, and there is no shame to be felt in that.”

  “No,” I agreed, because I couldn’t imagine being ashamed of the man I held in my arms.

  “Do not show her regret, she is a shark, your sister, and she will sense blood in the water. She will make you pay for that shame.”

  I sighed loudly against his face and pressed another kiss to his lips. “You’re right, of course.”

  “Of course,” he agreed with a smile as I pulled away to scoot off my stool. He gave my bum a playful slap as I moved past him to get ready. “Go get ‘em, tiger.”

  I was happy that Elena had chosen our location for coffee because I fully planned never to set foot in the place again. Like a nuclear blast site, it would remain toxic for the next forty years. As it was, the place suited my sister entirely, posh and trendy without being hip, with black and white photos on the wall and tons of smartly clad business people milling about even on a Saturday morning. We both sat at a small bistro table in one of the large bay windows, holding our cups of coffee tightly as if to make up for the intimacy lacking between us. We had been sitting there for five awkward minutes in silence while I worked up the courage to begin.

  “How have you been?” I finally asked, lamely.

  “Well, thank you. I’ve told you before that I’m on the partner track?”

  Only a thousand times.

  “You may have mentioned it once or twice. That’s very impressive.”

  Elena nodded graciously.

  Awkward silence reigned for an excruciating minute.

  “Mama told me that you just got back from France. You went to visit friends?” Elena asked.

  Her words hit my hollow heart with a dull thud. She was actually trying.

  “I did, it was good to go back. It will always be home for me in a way that Naples never was.”

  She nodded, her eyes glazed over as she looked out the window at the softly falling snow. “I know what you mean. I have absolutely no desire to ever return there, even to Italy. Do you know, I tell people that I am American?”

  I wasn’t surprised but she did shock me by elaborating.

  “It took me over a year of constant study and practice to rid myself of that common accent. It was the r’s that frustrated me, the flat English sound took me forever to master.”

  “Why is it so important to you?”

  She was startled by the question, as if I should know the answer. “Italy stands for everything that I abhor. It is gritty, dirty, violent and fundamentally debased.”

  “Have you ever thought that you might be substituting the half for the whole? Yes, our childhood could be defined by those things but does that reflect on our country or only on our circumstances?”

  Elena blinked at me. “Does it matter? The half contaminates the whole. The poison spreads.”

  I swallowed thickly. “You’re saying that you cannot forgive Italy for the desperation of your childhood?”

  “I see no reason why I should.”

  “Yet you forgive Mama, for raising you like that?”

  Finally, Elena looked uncomfortable. “She didn’t have the power to control it.”

  I arched an eyebrow at her.

  She pursed her lips. “I understand the point you are trying to make but it isn’t valid. Mama tried her best to raise us right, there was nothing more she could have done and she has more than made up for her mistakes every day since we got out of that hellish place.”

  I sucked a deep breath into my lungs like a drowning man who knows that will be his last breath.

  The stage was set, however poorly, and I couldn’t put it off any longer.

  “Elena, I actually asked you to meet me here today to talk about something kind of difficult.”

  She stilled so completely that it brought into stark relief the motion of the coffee shop flowing around us. It was a popular spot at a busy time and I had to swallow the impulsive panic that everyone was suddenly listening to us.

  “I know that you and I have always had a… hard relationship and I wish so much that it was different.” I looked into her eyes and flinched at the lack of compassion there. She shared no such desire. “Our family has been through so much and it has been that, our strength and loyalty as a unit, that has gotten us through. I admire and respect you so much--”

  “Cut the crap, Giselle. What is it that you want to say to me?”

  My throat was so dry that it hurt to breath. Pain shot up my arms directly into my off-beating heart. I wondered if I was having a heart attack.

  I gasped for one more lungful of air before willingly falling on my sword.

  “I am in love with Sinclair.”

  Silence.

  Total and complete silence. A non-reaction.

  For a moment, I wondered if I had even spoken.

  Then she blinked in that slow way of hers that hypnotized you and when her eyes opened again, they were narrowed with laser-like intensity.

  “When?”

  The word flung me like a dart through a butterfly’s wing, pining me to the wall, helpless against her scrutiny.

  “We met in Mexico. I had no idea that he was your boyfriend and he had no idea that I was your sister. We knew each other only as Sinclair and Elle. We, well, we spent a lot of time together that trip and I fell in love with him. I fell in love with the person he made me believe that I could be.”

  “An adulterer?” she asked mildly.

  I had never been as afraid of anyone, not even Christopher, as I was of my sister in that moment.

  “I left him thinking that I would never see him again but then there he was in Mama’s kitchen. There he was as your boyfriend.”

  “He was more than a mere boyfriend,” she hissed.

  I nodded. “I know. I knew that he was yours; that this was the man you had been with for the past four years. I knew that you two seemed perfect together.”

  “We were. We are.”

  I choked on her words and coughed. “We both refused to acknowledge what had happened, we wanted it to be in the past where it belonged but…” I chewed on my lip, focusing on the pain there instead of how hurtful it was to look at my sister, to prostrate myself, my heart, before her even though I knew how it would end.

  Bloody, with her hand on the knife stuck deep in my chest.

  I tried to remind myself that I deserved it but it didn’t ease the pain.

  “We became friends again, just friends.” I whispered, more to myself than her.

  Elena just sat there, cloaked in righteousness and arctic cold disdain.

  “But I loved him so much even in those moments, I loved him so much, Elena, that it became bigger than anything else. Bigger than morality and sin
, bigger than our circumstances, bigger even than our love for you.”

  She was staring at me so hard. I could feel the weight of it like punishing gravity, crushing everything inside my body, folding me up into a crumpled little unrecognizable ball of waste. The beautifully pleated lines and contours of the origami figure I had constructed over the last few months with Sinclair, all those beautiful qualities I had grown to know that I had possessed, were destroyed with one slow blink.

  I began to cry, which disgusted me because she was the victim, but I couldn’t stop.

  “I fought it so hard, Elena. We both did. If you believe nothing else, please believe that we didn’t want to do this to you. But this wasn’t about a choice. If I denied myself my love of Sinclair,” an ugly sob burst through my lips and slapped wetly against the table, “I would have destroyed both him and myself.”

  “So, instead, you chose to destroy me,” she said quietly.

  I cried harder, burying my shameful face in my hands. Snot laced tears ran through my fingers and dripped to the table.

  Elena watched me cry.

  “You let him defile you, don’t you?”

  I recoiled at her sharp question, my head flying up so that I could look at her.

  She was sneering at me, her red lips twisted like a bloody smear.

  “You let him beat you, don’t you? You like it when he hits you, when he ruts into you like a wild beast and marks your body as his own.” She laughed at my gasp, the sound sharp and high pitched like an auditory weapon. “You stupid slut. Daniel doesn’t love you, he is just using you.”

  A whimper lodged in my throat. I wanted to beg her to shut up but I deserved her hatred, so I kept quiet.

  She leaned forward, her gorgeous face more animated than I had ever seen it, warped harshly with revulsion. “You think he loves you? What is there about you to love? You are just the same meek, stupid, self-centered little girl who always gets what she wants and is shielded like a baby from every bad thing life throws at her. Do you know why Mama and the twins do that? Hmm? Because they know you are weak. They don’t love you so much as pity you. If your family can’t even respect you, how do you think a man like Daniel Sinclair could ever love you?”

  She lifted her chin and looked down on me like the Queen Of Hearts condemning one of her subjects to the guillotine. “Daniel is the best person I have ever known. He is an intelligent, successful businessman and the son of the New York State Governor. And you think he loves you?”

  Her laughter sliced me into ribbons. All I felt was pain and still, I sat there and absorbed it, ever the masochist.

  She sat back in her chair with a comfortable confidence that was somehow cruel. There was a small smile on her lips when she said, “Did you know, when I first found out he was having an affair, I was concerned? Thank you for alleviating my fears. Daniel doesn’t love you, Giselle. When he inevitably grows tried of you, no matter how much you let him slap you around in bed, he will beg for a real woman, a woman of power and substance, to take him back. And that destruction you were so afraid of? It will eviscerate you. You will not have your family or Daniel at your side. I never wanted you to be apart of this family and I always knew Daniel needed to get his perversions out of his system.” She laughed lightly and took a sip of her coffee. “Two birds, one stone.”

  I sat, my mouth gaping wide open like an angry wound. There were no thoughts in my head or emotions in my chest. I was nothing, just as she and I had always secretly suspected.

  Elena searched my face for a long minute, her gaze scalping me, before she nodded, assured of my overwhelming pain. She stood up swiftly and tugged on her coat.

  “Tell Daniel to call me when he’s through with you. Oh, and Giselle, stay the fuck away from my family and me. If you don’t, every person in New York City will know what a gold digging whore you are.”

  Chapter Thirteen.

  I couldn’t go back to the St. Regis after that. Instead, after Elena left and I threw up for twenty minutes in the café restroom, I wandered around Manhattan like some kind of urban zombie, both hollowed out inside and rotten to the core. I was empty of thoughts. In a weird way, it reminded me of what it was like to be in sub space, incapable of coherency but eloquent with emotions. They crashed over me in tidal waves, drowning me in dark pools of pain and guilt.

  I knew that if I went to Sinclair, he would make it all go away. He would murmur sweet condolences in my ear, stroke my cheekbone in that way of his that made me feel priceless as a statue, more beautiful than anything rendered by Auguste Rodin or Botticelli. He would, as only he was capable of doing, as he always did, soothe my ugly, crumpled edges and fold me back into an origami swan.

  I didn’t deserve that peace. A small, protected piece of my mind argued that I did deserve it, that I was worthy of Sinclair’s love and that maybe all was fair in love and war. But I also knew that if I went back to him before I had somehow disassembled and portioned out the immeasurable mass of self-hatred and grief churning through my system, I would leave him.

  Margot had been right when she said Sinclair deserved more than a coward. It was difficult before, when no one knew about the affair. We had been disciples of immoral subterfuge and intense yearning, torn between our past and our dreams for the future. We had barely been able to see each other through the mess of obstacles between us.

  Now, I had him. The thought sent a zing of happiness down my spine even in the thralls of my guilt. Daniel Sinclair, the beautiful, misunderstood Frenchman with the seemingly perfect life had risked his reputation, his family and his career on me.

  Elena’s vindictive words echoed through my head. He was too good for me, on that we whole-heartedly agreed. I doubted that there would ever be a time when I believed myself worthy of his love. So few people ever found their soul mates, let alone had reason to believe in the concept, and there I was, finally, with mine. Whether or not I deserved such luck or not, I was not going to take it, him, for granted.

  I had made my decision and now I had to live with it.

  I wasn’t surprised when Mama’s restaurant loomed before me, the gold lettering of Osteria Lombardi glittering in the lower level window of the brick brownstone. I floated down the few steps to the entrance and entered before I could runaway in fear.

  One of the servers directed me to the kitchen where Mama was preparing for dinner service. It was that awkward time of day in the restaurant industry when it is too late for lunch and early for dinner, when most of the days prep had been done by the day crew before the night line up came in, so Mama was alone at a long stainless steel countertop hand rolling orecchiette pasta when I pushed through the swinging doors.

  She was so absorbed that she didn’t notice me, so I took a minute to watch her work. Her long silver threaded black hair was woven into her habitual plait and her soft features were arranged into an expression that was the foundation of a smile before it springs. Her nimble fingers gently folded the dough into tiny ear-like shapes before setting them aside to dry and she hummed as she worked. It was a different setting, but the sight of her like that took me back to the hot, dry afternoons in the Naples of my childhood.

  For one insane moment, I wished I was back there.

  “Giselle, my French baby, what do you do here?” Mama asked, startling me out of my past.

  I smiled softly at her, filled with tenderness. I indulged myself by hustling towards her for a hug. Immediately, she opened her flour-coated arms and pulled me close.

  This time, when I cried, the tears were silent.

  Mama soothed me like a child with indecipherable cooing noises.

  “I love you so much, Mama,” I breathed.

  “Sempre,” Mama murmured as she brushed my damp hair away from my face. She searched my eyes for a long time before wrapping me up even more tightly. “What has happened?”

  Somehow, it was harder to tell Mama, a woman that had raised me to be better than deceit and infidelity. My betrayal meant the end of a relationship with
Elena, but did it have to mean the dissolution of the bonds that tied the rest of my family together?

  Fuck, I hoped not.

  “I have something that I need to tell you,” I whispered.

  She sighed softly before steering me towards the other side of the counter where she pulled up a steel stool for me to sit on. Once I was settled, she nodded and returned to her pasta making. Love seared my insides as I realized what she was doing, giving me space to confess.

  I stared at the way her hands carefully formed the dough, mesmerized by the repetition. It helped me gather the edges of my shredded thoughts.

  “Mama,” I choked on a sob and cleared my throat. “Mama, I want you to know how much I love you, how much I respect the struggle you’ve been through in order to keep our family whole and successful. You’ve been a wonderful inspiration for me, the epitome of grace and goodness. Please, don’t let what I’m about to tell you be a reflection on your parenting or how I feel about you.”

  She nodded but didn’t look at me, her eyes fixed on her work even though I knew she would do it blindfolded. Her lack of attention gave me the comfort of a confessional. I knew she was on the other side of the pretend indifference, listening and trying not to judge. It gave me hope.

  “I had an affair, Mama, with a wonderful man that I met when Brenna sent me to Mexico. I didn’t mean for it to happen, I knew he was in a meaningful relationship, but there was this pull between us that I couldn’t ignore. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen and he made me feel worthy, good and free of my insecurities.” I sucked in a shaky deep breath. “I fell in love with him even though I never planned to see him again. Only, I did. I saw him that very same day, later that night, in your kitchen at my surprise party.”

  Mama stilled, just for a beat, in her movements but it was enough for me to realize that she knew where I was going with my story.

  I rushed on.

  “I was so ashamed, we both were, when we realized the truth. We avoided each other for weeks but there was still the agonizing magnetism between us. I really thought we could be friends…”