The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(8)

One day, I came across a piece of Indigo’s secret. It was a piece of hair crooked like a beckoning finger in the Gallery of Beasts. The hair was trapped beneath the paw of a granite sphinx positioned near the entrance of the bedroom.

At first, I only stared at the braided strand. I had touched the sphinx’s talons too many times to count on my way to our bedroom. This time I traced the groove where its wrist and arm joined, and it slid to the side, revealing a small hollow where the braid of hair ended in a loop. The hair was cool to the touch and nearly as dark as Indigo’s, shiny like brushed silk. At the end of the braid, a pair of teeth dangled. One of them had been engraved with the letter A.

“What are you doing?”

I shoved the braid back into the hollow, but it was too late. Indigo stood at the other end of the hall. Rain plastered her hair. A smell like metal and ozone seeped into the hallway and I briefly wondered if the thunder outside had followed her into the house.

“It was sticking out,” I said. “I thought—”

“You were prying,” said Indigo, her voice flat with fury. “You know you’re not supposed to do that.”

“It was an accident, Indigo,” I said, taking a step toward her. She trembled, and I hoped it was from the cold. “Let’s forget this happened. It was a mistake.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “I told you not to pry.”

“I’m only human, Indigo,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. “Don’t tell me you’ll leave me for the crime of occasional instances of mortality.”

At this, she went utterly still. I did not recognize her in that moment, the way the whites of her eyes nearly glowed, the tension of her jaw.

“I am scared of you,” she said in a quiet voice. “You terrify me, and that is how I know I love you . . . but you’re not scared of me at all, are you?”

Without another word, she left me there in the Gallery of Beasts. I didn’t follow her. I told myself she was overreacting, and my own guilt made me even more adamant in this belief.

I went about my day, pushed the bracelet of hair and the engraved tooth from my mind, though I couldn’t stop thinking about the exquisite temperature of the hair, only a few degrees cooler than Indigo’s. I avoided the Gallery of Beasts even as my tooth—the same cuspid that had been marked with the letter A—started to ache.

By evening, my pride had crumbled. I went to the dining room prepared to apologize. Indigo wasn’t there and the table had been set for one. She never came to our bedroom that night either. That was a first for her, but I told myself her anger would pass.

The next day was the same.

And the next.

And the next.

I began to count the clothes in her closet each morning and evening, hunting for some sign of my wife’s presence, hoping she had entered our room and I had not known. I walked the house for hours. I wandered the gardens at night. I interrogated the staff, though they refused to answer my questions. I left our bed and started sleeping in the living room. The day after that, I dragged pillows and blankets into the hall before the front door, determined to catch her. On the eighth day of her absence, I began to dream.

I dreamt of the sharp smell of cedar, splinters beneath my nails, my fists bloodied from knocking repeatedly on a door that wouldn’t open. I knew my brother was on the other side. I wondered if Indigo might be there, too, whether I had once more been judged and found wanting.

You forgot me, I screamed at them. You left me behind.

This fear had stalked my entire life. My parents, already old when I was born, had died while I was still in university. At the time, I felt grateful at their passing. Not because I wasn’t saddened at their loss but because now I could be certain there was no one left to leave me.

On the tenth day of her absence, I woke from my nightmare to find her standing at the foot of my crumpled blankets. I had piled them into a heap at the end of the hall, where I waited. At the sight of her, a terrible relief snapped through my ribs.

“Well?” she asked.

“I am scared of you,” I croaked.

She smiled.



After that, something changed between us.

I could feel her secrets exerting a gravitational force in the months that followed, pulling her into some other realm. She spent hours walking alone by the shore, sitting in our garden of hemlock, nightshade, and other venomous flowers, staring at various books whose pages never turned. Sometimes she’d raise her chin, eyes alert, as if someone had spoken her name. I thought of the tales of selkie wives. In the end, they were always called back to the sea.

I watched her every day, looking for some sign that her time with me had come to an end, and I began to notice little things: how quickly she passed through the Gallery of Beasts, how she traced the small, crescent-shaped scar on her palm as she dressed for bed, the way she ate with the feral quickness of an animal that doesn’t know where it will find its next meal.

We played our games out of desperation. Only through the guise of myth could we speak to each other. Only beneath the borrowed light of a fairy tale could I look at Indigo for as long as I wanted.

Lately, though, I had begun to hate our games.

My wife still loved me. I could see it in her eyes, how her fingers lingered on my jaw, how she moved my hand to her pulse and held me in the dark when I woke screaming. But after three years, her love wasn’t enough to keep her by my side.