The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(76)

“Are you all right?” I asked.

She nodded. I felt a tear slide down my neck.

“Did it hurt?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“I’m so sorry. What can I do? Tell me what to do.”

She shook her head. “Nothing. It hurts inside. It’s because I remembered something I don’t have anymore.”

“But it was real?”

“Yes,” she said. “It was. It used to be real.”

“Can you tell me?”

“I don’t want you to see me like this.” She started to pull away.

“Stay.”

She relaxed a little but kept her face buried against me. “It was like that man said. It was not a normal memory. I was living in the past. I didn’t even know I had forgotten it.” She was speaking softly, her words little breaths against my skin. “I remembered my mother holding me. I could smell the cypress trees waving against the sky. We were on the grass outside my home. An irrielle bird sang. The wind made the grass shimmer. I was small, unsteady on my feet. I didn’t know, then, that I had nearly killed my mother with my birth. My father raged at the doctors. He practically lost his mind with fear. I didn’t know, when I was a baby, that I would be the only child my parents would have. I didn’t know that all their plans would rest on me. I didn’t know what plans were. I didn’t know that anything would ever be more or less than it was at that moment. I fell in the grass. My mother lifted me into her arms. Her hair is similar to mine, but much longer. I pushed it aside and said, Away, so I could press my cheek against the smooth skin of her chest, just above her heart, and I felt so sure that she loved me more than anyone or anything in the world.”

“But,” I said, “this is a good memory.”

“Yes.”

“Yet it hurts.”

“Yes.”

I was confused. I didn’t understand how a memory so loving could pain her. I had believed both of Sid’s parents to be alive. “Did she die?”

“No. But things are different between us now.”

“Why?”

“Maybe I was easier to love then.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“It’s hard to remember something you no longer have,” Sid said. “My mother caught me with a girl when I was seventeen. She cried.”

“Why? Is it against your country’s law to be with a woman?”

“No.”

“But she doesn’t like it.”

“It’s not that, exactly…” Sid paused, considering, and when she spoke I saw that it was only because she had been thinking about this for years that she was able to speak clearly. “She has friends like me. I don’t think she would care about me liking women if it didn’t interfere with her plans. She cried because she was going to force her plans on me anyway, and she was sad for what it would do to me, and guilty for herself.”

“What about your father?”

“I think he hopes the problem will solve itself.” She got quiet. “I don’t want to be a problem.”

I stroked her hair. “You’re not.”

“I don’t want to marry.”

“You won’t.”

“He’s as bad as she is. Just more passive.”

“I don’t understand why it’s so important to them that you marry.”

She shrugged. “It’s expected. They want grandchildren. They want me to marry their friends’ son. That family will be angry if I say no.”

“They would rather lose you than lose their friends?”

“Let’s just say they hope to get everything they want.”

“But they risk losing everything.”

“I guess they must be comfortable with that possibility.”

My anger, which had been steadily growing, came out in a rush. “I hate them.”

Sid looked up at me.

“They’re selfish,” I said.

“They want what they believe is best for me.”

“But it isn’t.”

“No,” she said softly, “it isn’t.”

I shook my head. “What about that girl?”

Sid sat up. She ran a hand through her hair, trying to get it to settle. She stood, walked to the window, and opened it. The salty harbor air drifted in. The rising sun burned through the dawn. The sky was a thin blue, with a sheen like hammered metal. “She grew up,” Sid said. “Last I heard, she was engaged to a man.”

“Does that bother you?”

She shrugged. “It’s not like it was true love written in the stars.”

“She probably wishes she still had you.”

“Well”—she smiled, but her heart wasn’t in it—“who wouldn’t?”

“I would.”

Slowly, she said, “Is that what you want?”

“What do you mean?”

“To think about me while you’re in that young man’s bed.”

I stared.

“People want all sorts of things,” she said. “It’s not the strangest desire to want to be with one person but imagine another.”

I left the bed and came to her. “I don’t want to be with him.”