“I know we’d agreed to do something really small,” she says softly. “I know you weren’t expecting much. But I thought you might like this better.”
I stare at her, dumbfounded. “Like what better?”
As if on cue, Brendan pops his white-blond head around a corner. “Morning, everyone! All right to bring everyone through? Or do you lot need another minute?”
Winston lights up at the sight of him, assuring Brendan that we need just a few more minutes.
Brendan says, “Roger that,” and promptly disappears.
I turn to Ella, my mind whirring.
Save the birthday cake she surprised me with last month, I have very little in my life to offer me a frame of reference for this experience. My brain is at war with itself, understanding—while incapable of understanding—what now seems obvious. Ella has organized something elaborate.
In secret.
All of her earlier evasiveness, her half-truths and missing explanations—my fear that she’d been hiding something from me—
Suddenly everything makes sense.
“How long have you been planning this?” I ask, and Ella visibly tenses with excitement, emanating the kind of joy I’ve only ever felt in the presence of small children.
It nearly takes my breath away.
She wraps her arms around my waist, peering up at me. “Do you remember when we were on the plane ride home,” she says, “and the adrenaline wore off, and I started kind of losing my mind? And I kept looking at the bone sticking out my leg and screaming?”
Of all things, this was not what I was expecting her to say.
“Yes,” I say carefully. I have no interest in recalling the events of that plane ride. Or discussing them. “I remember.”
“And do you remember what I said to you?”
I look away, sighing as I stare at a point in the distance. “You said you couldn’t wear a wedding dress with part of your bone sticking out.”
“Yeah,” she says, and laughs. “Wow. I was pretty out of it.”
“It’s not funny,” I whisper.
“No,” she says, drawing her hands up my back. “No, it’s not funny. But it was strange, how nothing was really making sense in my head. We’d just been through hell, but all I could think as I stared at myself was how impractical it was to be bleeding so much. I told you I couldn’t marry you if the bleeding didn’t stop, because then I’d get blood all over my dress, and your suit, and then we’d both just be covered in blood, and everything we touched would get bloody. And you”—she takes a deep breath—“you said you’d marry me right then. You said you’d marry me with my bleeding teeth, with a visibly broken leg, with dried blood on my face, with blood dripping from my ears.”
I flinch at that, at the memory of what my father put her through. What her own parents did to her. Ella suffered and sacrificed so much for this world—all to bring The Reestablishment to its knees. All because she cared so much about this planet, and the people in it.
I feel suddenly ill.
What I hate, perhaps more than anything else, is that it doesn’t stop. The demands on her body never stop. It doesn’t seem to matter what side of history we’re on; good or evil, everyone asks for more of her. Even now, after the fall of The Reestablishment, the people and their leaders still want more from her. They don’t seem to care that she’s only one person, or that she’s already given so much. The more she gives, the more they require, and the quicker their gratitude shrivels up, the desiccated remains of which become something else altogether: expectation. If it were up to them, they’d keep taking from her until they’ve bled her dry—and I will never allow that to happen.
“Aaron.”
Finally, I meet her eyes. “I meant what I said, love.”
“I was hideous.”
“You have never been hideous.”
“I was a monster.” She smiles as she says this. “I had that huge gash in my arm, the skin on my hands had split open, my nose wouldn’t stop bleeding, my eyes wouldn’t stop bleeding. I even had a freshly sutured finger. I was Frankenstein’s monster. You remember? From that book—”
“Ella—please— We don’t have to talk about this—”
“And I couldn’t stop screaming,” she says. “I was in so much pain, and I was so upset that I wouldn’t stop bleeding, and I kept saying the craziest things, and you just sat next to me and listened. You answered every ridiculous question I asked like I wasn’t completely out of my mind. For hours. I still remember, Aaron. I remember everything you said to me. Even after I passed out I heard you, on a loop, in my dreams. It was like your voice got caught in my head.” She pauses. “I can only imagine what that experience must’ve been like for you.”