Slowly the door opened behind me.  She leaned down, plucked Diablo from my arms, and moved away, not toward the bed but to the chaise in the corner. 

She sat down, not looking at me, and restlessly stroked her hand over the kitten's fluffy coat, over and over. 

I thought that was the end of it, but our demons were not finished with us yet.

I rose, was about to move to her, when she said, voice low and accusing, "I should have had a choice.  You should have given me a choice."

I didn't have to clarify what she was talking about.  I knew.  I fucking knew.  And just like that, I was furious again.  "A choice?" I asked her bitingly. 

"Yes.  You had choices.  You could have told your mother to go to hell, consequences be damned.  I didn't have that privilege." 

"Privilege?  You're going to call that a privilege?  To go to fucking prison?  That's what you wanted?  That was never an option.  I would never have allowed that, and you fucking know it."

"Look at what you did allow!  Was that any better?  I'd have taken prison over what you let her do to us.  That's a fact."

"No. No.  No."  I felt my head shaking, over and over.  She was about two sentences away from me losing my temper.  I felt my rage taking over and told myself to walk away.  But I just couldn't do it.  We had to fucking have this out.  "Not an option.  Not a fucking option."

"I should have had the choice," she repeated.

I pointed an unsteady finger at her, upper lip quivering with fury.  "This is why.  This is why I couldn't tell you.  I'd have taken the fall for this; it was a solution I could have stomached, but you, you stubborn . . . "

She curled my lip at me.  "What?  Say it."   

"Would you have let me take the fall for you?"  I knew the answer.  I'd always known.  Her stubborn pride had ruined us both. 

I could tell she wanted to lie, just for the sake of winning this argument, but she couldn't do it, she was too righteously furious for that.  "Of course not.  Never.  I would never have stood by and let you take the fall for something I had done."

My eyes were wild, screaming at her.  "See?" I was shouting now.  "This was why you didn't get the choice!  I know you, and I knew what you would do.  If you can't forgive me for that, I don't know what to do, but I still don't see that I had another way.  I won't apologize for protecting you the only way I knew how."

She knew I didn't.  I could see it in the resigned eyes she turned on me. 

Even she, the mother of all grudge-holders, could only hold a grudge for so long.

"I'm tired of hating you," she said quietly, a world of regret in it.  "When all my heart has ever needed is to love you."  Those words were so very hard for her, I could tell, and the next ones were harder.  "For helping me survive for so long, for going through hell with me and getting me, somehow, to the other side of it intact, I will learn to forgive you.  Even with all of the ways you've destroyed me, I could never forget all of the ways you've saved me, Dante."

"You saved me, too.  Never forget that, either."

"And destroyed you," she said the words lightly, but they held all the weight in the world.  For both of us.   

I smiled and it was so bittersweet that she had to look away.  "Yes.  Broken.  Destroyed.  But now saved again.  It's enough for me.  You are.  You always were.  I have many demons.  But only one angel."

Now the problem, of course, was that she had to learn to forgive herself.

We both did.

It was later.  We were in bed and she was tucked securely against my chest. 

When I spoke, it was a quiet whisper into the night.  "You learn more about someone when you're fighting them than you do loving them. Things you can only learn from war.  We know each other in ways we wouldn't have.  Maybe it wasn't all in vain.  I love you in more complex ways than I did before.  I understand you more intimately." 

"You're a fool," she said forlornly into my chest. 

"I know, tiger.  Believe me, I know." 

"I love you for it." 

"I know, angel.  That, too." 

CHAPTER

THIRTY-FIVE

"Terror made me cruel."

~Emily Brontë

PAST

SCARLETT

It was almost nonsense to me—what he was saying.  I only caught snippets, broken off sentences, half-phrases, but my numb brain slowly put it together.  He was ending things. 

The conversation only lasted minutes, mere minutes to take everything I held sacred and tear it open, rip out the insides, and smash them under his heel. 

When he was finished, I felt diminished.  Like I was nothing.  Like I always had been.    

I should have not been so surprised.  I should not have been surprised at all, really.

The only real mystery here was that he'd ever tried to love me in the first place. 

Even so, my pain was breathtaking. 

I was inconsolable, and he did not even try to console me.  He said his piece and hung up the phone.

It was devastating.  Life changing.  When you have felt like nothing with that much certainty, you never come back from it.  Even if you manage to piece yourself up, a part of you stays in the gutter where you were left.  Always.