Leather & Lark (The Ruinous Love Trilogy, #2) (23)
But maybe if I’d acted sooner …
“You can’t second-guess the decisions you made to survive.” Ethel lets go of my hand and coughs, a rumble of discomfort that creases her face with pain. When I reach out to lay a comforting hand on her arm, she waves me off.
“We could get nurses here for you. Get a room set up just the way you want it. You don’t have to go to a care home,” I say as her cough continues and her face pinks with strain. My heart squeezes as Ethel raises a tissue to her mouth and wipes away a smear of bloody saliva from her lips. “I can arrange it all for you. I don’t mind.”
“I mind,” she wheezes out. It takes her a moment, but she regains her composure, though her cloudy eyes are still glassed with a thin film of tears from the mere effort to breathe. “I won’t have you all scurrying around this house like deranged little hamsters while I slowly wither away into the afterlife.”
“Well that’s … bleak. And kind of weird.”
“Maybe it’s time you learn that power can be found in unexpected decisions.” Ethel picks up the hoop with one hand, her needle with the other, and levels me with a serious look. “I’m the one who decided to go to Shoreview. No one will watch me deteriorate in my own home. It won’t stop it from happening, of course. But it’s even worse to fall apart in full view in the symbolic heart of the empire I built. Besides, I’ll be closer to you. And you never know,” she says with a wink before her eyes finally drop to her work, “I might need to hang on to a little power for a final scheme or two.”
My head tilts, but Ethel doesn’t look up, not even when we descend into an extended moment of silence. “Scheme …?”
“Indeed. You know,” Ethel says as she pierces the taut canvas to pull a red vein of thread through the fabric, “something I love about your mother and Damian is that they are so steadfast in their beliefs. Family first. Promises made must be kept. Vows, honored.”
My gaze drifts out the window toward the sea as I nod. I expect my aunt will say something about how it’s our shared duty in this family to make hard decisions to look out for one another. There’s a lesson in this, she’ll say. Sometimes, we all need to sacrifice a little happiness to protect the ones we love and keep our promises to look after one another. And nothing is more important than that. But the hollow pit in my stomach will only grow deeper. More desolate. More insatiable.
“Back at the school, when Sloane protected you, did you promise to look after her in return?”
I blink at Ethel, only now realizing my cheeks are damp. “Yes.”
“Yes,” my aunt echoes. “You did. And you can keep that promise by making another. The kind of promise that your parents would not interfere with. At least, not if they were … convinced.”
“I don’t understand …”
Ethel lets my confusion linger in the air as she pulls her thread through the fabric. Pierce and pull. Pierce and pull. Maybe she’s waiting for me to find a solution myself, or to divine her thoughts from her simple motion, but I don’t. “Do you know what my favorite thing is about your mother and stepdad?”
“Their ability to obliterate their competition and take out their opponents while maintaining the image of a perfect, happy family?”
“That too,” Ethel says. “Mostly, though, it’s their loyalty. Their deep love of each other. Their deep love of you girls.” Ethel pulls a final crimson stitch through the canvas before she knots the thread and clips it with scissors. “Their unwillingness to break promises to the ones they love.”
She’s right, of course. I know that for all the darkness in their lives, my mom and stepfather love us deeply. Just like my mother loved my dad, Sam. And long before she met my dad, she loved Damian. Her childhood sweetheart. A young love that burned bright but couldn’t survive the demands of time. Or so they must have thought, until my dad passed away and those embers slowly came back to life.
“So you think I can talk them out of killing Lachlan because, what … my parents love their family …? That doesn’t make any sense, Auntie.”
Ethel turns to me, and I meet her eyes, the color of fog, a mist over the sharp mind that grinds away beneath the gray film. “Do you remember going to Damian’s father’s funeral when you were little?” I shake my head. “You were about five. It was the first time your mom and stepfather saw each other after so many years apart. I’m sure I’m not the only one who could feel that electric charge between them. But your mother had you girls. She had Sam. Life had moved on. And no matter how much love Damian and Nina still had for each other, they would never break your mother’s vows or wound your dad. Had we not lost Sam, that never would have changed.”
I swallow, trying to conjure a memory of the funeral, but it doesn’t come. Neither does the meaning of what Ethel is trying to tell me, though she watches my reactions closely as though imploring me to catch on. “I really don’t understand. Are you saying you think they won’t make a move against Rowan once he and Sloane are married, because they won’t interfere with her vows …?”
Ethel chuckles and shakes her head. “No. They care about Sloane, of course. But they care because you do. They took Sloane in because of what she did for you at Ashborne. But it’s your happiness that is their priority. Your heart they can’t bear to break.”