Now it’s after dinner and I’m sitting in the study, waiting for her. We hadn’t said a word to each other until I pulled her aside and told her to meet me in here, that we needed to talk.
She only nodded.
I hope she shows up.
April is okay, only a bump. The rest seem shaken up but hopefully not traumatized. Pike is a lot like me and wants to beat the shit out of everyone that was involved.
I look around the study and I remember the last time I was in here. We had sex on this very couch. I was just so happy she was here with me and I’d been missing her so much, craving her, that I cancelled my appointment and came back for her.
At that moment, everything between us was right.
Everything in the world was right.
I can’t honestly say that things will be right again.
Not for us.
Not for me.
The door opens slowly and I bring my eyes up to see Maggie step in.
She’s hesitant. Looks tired, listless, like she needs endless sleep. Still beautiful though. Always so damn beautiful.
But all that beauty doesn’t hide the truth I see. That there’s something in her eyes that makes my heart disintegrate.
I can tell that no matter what we talk about, she’s already left me.
She’s here, standing in front of me, and she’s already left me.
“Hi,” I say to her.
“Hi,” she says in a small voice.
“Please sit down,” I say and already it sounds like we’re strangers.
How the fuck did this happen?
“I’d rather stand,” she says, stopping in the middle of the room and folding her arms across her chest, hunching slightly over like she’s cold.
I shake my head and get up. The distance between us is now insurmountable.
“How are they?” I ask.
“Shaken up.”
“And you?”
She doesn’t say anything. She presses her lips together and I can tell she’s trying not to cry.
“Maggie,” I say softly, taking a step toward her, wanting to feel her warmth and not this endless cold. “I am so, so sorry about what happened.”
“Not your fault,” she says, words clipped.
“I didn’t expect it. We were at church for crying out loud.”
“It’s not your fault, Viktor.”
But she won’t look at me.
I walk up to her, taking her hand in mine and the warmth and pulse that once flowed from her body to mine, the electricity, the sparks, they’re all gone. I’m holding a stranger’s hand.
“I promise,” I tell her through a shaking voice. “That I will never let that happen to you or to them again.”
“How?” she asks, glancing at me. “By creating a law that will take years to come into effect? You can’t even create laws. You’re no king.”
Ouch. But maybe she didn’t mean it that way.
“I can work with my father –“
She lets out a sour laugh. “Your father hates me.”
“Please, we went over this. He doesn’t.”
She doesn’t believe me. She doesn’t want to.
“Look, it might take a while but it will happen. We just need to deal with it for now. These things take time.”
“But there is no more time left,” she says, blinking back tears. “Viktor. I’m leaving.”
I shake my head trying to ignore the crushing weight on my chest, like my heart and lungs are being poured with concrete. “No. Don’t leave. We have so much time before you need to go.”
“I need to go now,” she says, straightening up like she’s finding her resolve. “They need to go. What happened to April could happen again and to anyone of them and I am not going to do that to them. I’m taking the first plane home tomorrow with the kids. I don’t know if I’ll come back.”
I stare at Maggie for a moment, not sure if my ears are deceiving me or not.
It’s one thing to run.
It’s another thing to say you won’t come back.
“Won’t come back?” I repeat. “You have to come back. For me.”
“No, Viktor,” she cries out. “I can’t. Don’t you see how hard this is?”
She shakes her head, tears spilling down her cheeks in rivulets.
“It’s just too hard,” she says, crying. “It’s just too hard.”
“What’s too hard, loving me?”
God, please don’t say it’s loving me.
“Being with you! They’re two different things.”
“No they aren’t! When you love someone you’ll be with someone, no matter the cost!”
I can’t believe I’m hearing this. After everything she’s gone through and this is the part that’s too hard for her? Being with me?
“After all I did for you,” I mutter and the moment the words fall out of my mouth, I know they’re a mistake.
Her face falls.
Crumbles.
“So I was charity all along.”
I hurt her. I didn’t mean to.
I grab her, holding her face in my hands. “Maggie, you were never charity. I’m sorry I said that, I’m just…I can’t let you go. I can’t let you leave. You were supposed to stay with me like the princess that you are.”
“No,” she says. “You know I’ll never be that. That’s not who I am. It’s not who I’m supposed to be. I’m supposed to be taking care of those kids and that’s my priority. I never wanted to be in this position, the one in which I pick them over you but I have to choose. I have to. You have a duty to your country, Viktor. I have a duty to my family. I just…I…”
She pulls away from me and puts her face in her hands, shaking her head. “I love you but I…I can’t let my love for you dictate what I do.”
“I guess I should have seen this coming.” I can hardly breathe, hardly speak, yet the words are flowing. “Maybe we really didn’t know each other well enough. All I know is that I love you and that’s always been true and if you leave me, you’ll take every part of me with you. I know loss and I know it well but I don’t think I’ll ever be whole again.”
She starts sobbing and looks up at me, her face ravaged by tears. “Don’t make this harder on me, please! Please! You know what I have to do. Have the grace of a prince and let me go. Let me do the right thing for everyone.”
She’s right. I know why she’s leaving and I understand it. I’m just so scared of the pain, scared of what’s to come, that I’m acting desperate to keep her. I’m making it harder on the both of us.
I’m tired of losing the ones that I love.
I try and swallow. “Okay. I’m sorry. If you want to go, I won’t stand in your way. I won’t hold anything against you. I won’t do anything but love you even though now it will be from afar.” I reach out and grab her hand and tears fall from my eyes as I kiss her palm. “Mitt liv, mitt allt. Always and forever. Please don’t ever forget that, my Maggie. You will always be my Maggie.”
She takes her hand away from mine and, crying, runs out of the room.
That night she sleeps in a separate bedroom.
The next morning, she’s gone.
All the rooms are empty.
The palace is cold and quiet again.
Like someone reached in and removed the heart.
Never to put it back.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Maggie
Home.
Funny how leaving changes your perspective on your home.
When I left Tehachapi, there was a part of me that couldn’t imagine living anywhere else but here. I mean, I wanted to live in New York but I was so not a New Yorker. I was a small-town girl through and through.
Then when I landed in Stockholm, I started to think that maybe that could change. I started looking at the place, the country, not as vacation spot, or a fun romp with Viktor. I started looking at it all through new eyes, trying to see if I could see myself creating a world there. When I went to little cafes and indulged in the fika of cakes
and coffee, I tried to imagine making that part of my daily routine. I tried to imagine what it would be like to walk along the harbor in the summer, with a warm sun behind you, wooden sailboats bobbing in front of you. I tried to imagine shopping in all the cute little boutiques and even making friends with the locals, eventually working my way past their reserved facades and winning them over.
I imagined all of that and I liked it. I didn’t take into account that if I did move to Sweden, it would be because of a prince and there’s a chance I would be a princess and if I were a princess (I mean, how unreal does that still seem), I wouldn’t have all the freedoms I just mentioned.
But I would have had Viktor.
And he had my heart.
And I believed, foolishly perhaps, that you could build a home in someone’s heart.
Now I’ve learned that the heart is not enough to shield you from the world. The walls are soft, the pain is inevitable, and you bleed too easily.
Making the choice to leave Viktor ruined me and I’m still not sure if it was the right one because I haven’t been able to go one minute without feeling the deep stab of loss, one that reaches in so far deep into my soul that I don’t know how I’m still upright, how I’m still living.
It’s a loss that had me crying the entire flight home.
It’s a loss that has rendered me incapable of doing anything but curling up on on the bed or the bathroom floor, much like I did after my parents, like I should have done more of. Perhaps I’m grieving for them too. Lord knows that never goes away.
And now I’m back here.
In this town.
In this house.
And I realize that this isn’t my home anymore.
I don’t have one.
I’m officially nomadic.
The vacancy inside me has returned but I can’t even move in.
“Maggie,” Pike whispers from the door.
I’m curled up in bed. I haven’t moved all day, not even to go pee. Viktor the moose is tucked up under my arm.
“What?” I ask softly, hoping he doesn’t ask me to do anything because I don’t think I can.
“I’m taking R and T and Callum to see a matinee,” he tells me. He pauses. “I saw an ad in the paper for a job at the movie theatre. I know it’ll probably be obsolete in a year but do you want me to suss it out for you?”
“Sure,” I say, my voice dull. The world dull. Sure I could work in a movie theatre. Sure I could work back at the hotel. Sure I could try and do a lot of things but none of that seems to matter right now except for this pain that I’m carrying inside.
Why did we have that fight?
Why didn’t we just talk it through like rational people?
Why did I push him away like that? Because it got too hard? I’ve been able to stay strong through everything in my life and yet the moment that love got too hard, I bailed.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
The tears start flowing again.
I guess I fall asleep because when I open my eyes, the sun coming in through the window has shifted.
I should probably go and pee.
I shuffle out of my room, wearing the same PJs as I’ve worn the last few days, and look at myself in the bathroom mirror. I don’t even recognize myself and I desperately need a shower.
When I’m done in there, I shuffle out of the bathroom, planning to go straight back to bed when I pass by April’s room. Her door is open.
“Maggie,” she calls out to me.
April and I have gotten a lot closer since our time in Sweden, so at least something good came out of me dragging them all there.
I pause at her door and lean against the doorway. She’s sitting cross-legged on the floor with a bunch of letters displayed in front of her.
The sight of them makes my heart lurch.
“Where did you get those?” I whisper.
A wash of shame comes over her. “I took them from the mailbox.”
“Are they recent?” my heart jolts at the thought that maybe Viktor has written to me. We haven’t said a word to each other after I left, which is another thing that’s killing me. It didn’t end well.
But if he’s written me, if he says he loves me, if he wants me to come back, I’ll…
“They aren’t recent,” she says quickly, perhaps reading the look on my face. “They’re from the fall. I took them and hid them because I didn’t want you to read them.” She pauses. “I didn’t read them either, see, they’re sealed. But I knew they were from him.”
“Why did you do that?” I ask softly, my heart seeming to break all over again.
“Because I was a dick,” she says. “I’m sorry. I wanted you to have them. They smell nice still.” She picks one up and smells it and then holds it out for me.
I walk in and gingerly take it from her. Hold it up to my nose. Breathe it in.
I breathe in Viktor.
The faint smell of lavender.
The tears start falling. I’ve been conditioned.
“Aren’t you going to read it?” April asks, eying me with concern. She doesn’t do well when anyone cries, which is why I’m surprised she’s talking to me right now, showing me all this.
I shake my head. “There’s no point. I know what these letters would say. They’ll just remind me of everything I lost. Everything I had.”
“You know we all would have moved to Sweden,” she says matter-of-factly.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean Viktor asked us and we all said yes…thinking that you would have said yes.”
I blink at her, frowning. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. He asked you all? He never asked me. I mean, not in an official sense.”
She rubs her lips together, silently debating something.
“April!”
She sighs. “Okay well I guess he wouldn’t care if I told you now. But…he was going to propose.”
“What?!”
“He told me. The night we got into Sweden and you were asleep, we stayed up drinking together.”
“You what?!”
“Focus,” April says gesturing with her hands. “He was kind of drunk but, like, kind of sober at the same time and anyway he asked if I would move to Sweden and I was like, yes please, get me out of the murder house, thank you. Anyway, he then said he planned to ask you to marry him. You know, become a princess and all that. He said we could live in the palace and have nannies and eat pickled fish. I really thought that’s what was going to happen.”
I can’t believe a word of this.
He was going to propose?
“When?” I ask. “When was he going to propose?”
“Christmas Eve,” she says. “But you guys were being weird and the next day no one said anything, I guess because of the whole incident, so I assumed it didn’t happen.”
I put my hand to my head. “Oh my god. He was going to propose and we started fighting and…”
“Yeah so it seems you guys did the opposite. Instead of getting engaged, you broke up.”
“But,” I say, walking into her room and sitting on her bed, my eyes drifting absently over the letters as my mind tries to catch up. “But…you would move there? What about what happened with the paparazzi?”
“Whatever, I’ll deal.”
“What about the others?”
“They were all fine with it. Pike wasn’t loving the idea but I mean who cares. He’s eighteen, he can go and live in LA if he wants to and, like, open a tattoo shop or something while the rest of us live in a friggin’ palace. I mean, hello, who gets the better deal here. Not him.”
I can’t get this new information to settle in my head. All the crying has rendered it useless. “Rosemary and Thyme. Rosemary wouldn’t want to leave here, leave all her sports teams.”
“Rosemary has fallen in love with skiing,” she says. “She was quick to say yes. Thyme has fallen in love with the Swedish death metal music scene.” She laughs. “She says it’s musik spelled with a K. And Callum
wants to become a Swedish Chef now, so there you go.”
“Viktor asked all of you? When?”
“The day before Christmas Eve. I don’t know where you were. We had a family meeting without you.”
I can picture him calling them all around and asking them and…oh, my heart. My heart. This man loves them as much as he loved me.
He still loves you, I tell myself. It’s not too late.
“But if you guys moved there…the paparazzi, I mean they are ruthless. You know what happened.”
“I’m sure they’ll get tired of us and honestly, I don’t mind the attention.”
“You were knocked over!”
“I think that scared you more than it did me. I was fine, wasn’t I? And that made them all look really bad, I think they would have backed off after that. Look, I don’t like my photos being taken all the time but I don’t know, it’s kind of fun. Makes me feel like a celebrity. I’ll deal with all of that for a chance at a new life. Don’t you think we all deserve a do-over?”
April is right.
We do.
I’ve had days to mourn and stew and grieve and try to sort out my feelings.
And yet now I’m figuring out my feelings in seconds flat.
“I’ve got to go,” I tell her and immediately scamper out of her room into mine.
“Where are you going?” she asks, following me.
I grab a small suitcase and throw it on the bed.
“Where does it look like I’m going?” I ask, glancing at her over my shoulder. “Now help your sister pack.”
* * *
***
* * *
This is a mistake, this is a mistake, this is a mistake.
“Would you like some water, miss?”
Mistake, mistake, mistake.
“Thank you,” I tell the flight attendant, picking the cup off the tray and nearly spilling it on the guy that’s squished next to me.
I’m in the back of the plane.
Flying to Stockholm.
Landing in one hour.
I have no idea what awaits me when I land.
There was no time to plan anything.
Okay, well there could have been time but after talking to April, there was a switch in my brain that had always been connected to my heart and suddenly it turned on. It was a lightbulb going off, but it wasn’t just in my head, it was in the deep-seated soul of me. It was a light that glowed through the darkness I had been drowning in, a darkness I wanted to drown in, maybe because I’d spent so much time in the last year acting like a robot and distancing myself from all the loss and grief and reality. Maybe I fell so deep because I never let myself fall before.