The Queen of Hearts(100)
Or would I? Looking back on it now, with the terrible gift of hindsight, I had to admit my justifications for my behavior were the most tremendous bullshit. At some point, the theoretical becomes the inevitable. You either cross the river or you don’t. I’d known what I was doing, even if I’d buried the knowledge under a toxic mountain of denial. Only the truly psychopathic among us lack the voice of conscience perched on our shoulders, whispering into our ears the words we don’t want to hear as we do what we shouldn’t. The rest of us simply swat the voice away and convince ourselves it was never there.
Things drifted, as they so often do, a little bit at a time, so on the day I found myself alone with Nick for the first time, it no longer seemed so shocking he would proposition me. The voice in my ear tried to stop me, but I stepped into the river and let it drown. It seemed to me that for once in my life I was throwing caution to the wind, seizing a chance to live dangerously, to really feel. As rationalizations go, these were lacking originality. I wanted him. He wanted me. No one would ever have to know.
If intensity could kill, I would not have survived our first kiss.
—
On the night Graham took our picture, I had no inkling what was coming. I’d gone to Nick’s call room, thinking I’d break it off, unable to stomach the deception anymore after the day in the park with Graham. By that point, I hated myself: my weakness, my unceasing self-destruction, the ease with which I’d learned to lie. Nick listened to me with absorption, one eyebrow half-cocked, until I’d finished a long-winded and unnecessary denunciation of our behavior, and then he simply said, “Okay, if that’s what you want, Emma.”
I nodded curtly, my words exhausted.
He caught me just before I opened the door. “Are you going to say anything to Zadie?”
I wouldn’t have thought it possible I could sink any lower into the muck, but it turns out there’s a lot of room at the bottom of the moral sewer. My first instinct was not to protect Zadie—or Graham, who was somehow always secondary on my list of people needing protection—but instead a flash of pain for myself. He liked her more; he’d always liked her more. He’d let me go without a second thought, but he cared about losing her.
I’d have taken great vindictive pleasure in outing him, but the problem was, I didn’t want to lose her either.
“I don’t know,” I answered.
His face changed. Something ugly rippled under his skin, distorting it, so for one brief moment I didn’t recognize him. Then he pulled me back.
I let him kiss me. Self-loathing thudded through me, but I didn’t stop him. “Do not tell her,” he said, kissing my forehead, undoing my shirt. I will never have this again, I told myself. I closed my eyes and shut off my brain, mindless and thoughtless and numb.
Until the flash of a camera brought me back. I’ll never know how Graham got a master key to the call rooms, or how he knew where to find me, or what made him decide to take our picture. I opened my eyes and saw him, his gentle face twisted in pain.
And that’s the last time I saw him alive.
—
After Graham died, I steeled myself for the worst self-flagellation I could envision, and I went to my bookshelf and opened The Screwtape Letters. Insightful even at the end of his life, Graham had selected that volume as our place to hide letters to each other. This time, there were two pieces of paper inside: a folded poem to which was affixed a photograph, which I could not bear to open, and a very short note, probably the last words Graham ever committed to paper.
Anything that’s truly real can stand up to scrutiny.
They were Carl Sagan’s words, spoken as he attempted to explain the nature of death to his young daughter. For a moment I stared at them until my tears blurred them into meaningless black marks on a sea of blinding white paper.
If remorse could kill, I would have died.
Chapter Forty-two
INHALING FIRE
Emma, Present Day
A lush darkness enveloped the city as I drove away from the Packards’ house, but you would never know it from the blazing streets of uptown Charlotte. I parked and got out, sidestepping happy drunks and couples on dates and late-working young bankers and the entourage of a world-famous former basketball player. Ahead of me I could see the Epicentre, a multistory conglomerate of outdoor patios, rooftop terraces, and restaurants nestled at the base of the skyscrapers like a toddler at the feet of giants. This was a late-night kind of place; under crisscrossing strings of lights, it thrummed with a stew of polyglot voices and thumping bass. I walked up the stairs, scanning the crowd.
I saw her when I reached the top floor. She sat on a boxy woven chaise, holding a small mason jar sloshing with ice and pale amber liquid. She’d found a relatively quiet corner of the courtyard, her chair tucked in among a bevy of potted flowering trees, a few seats away from the only other patrons, a trio of young guys in suits. A floaty cashmere sweater extended past her wrists in soft flares; her hair flowed around her giant hoop earrings in a frenetic burst of waves.
She looked up from her drink and saw me. I braced myself for reproach, or anger, or worse, indifference; but her face held no clue to her thoughts.
“Hi, Emma,” she said as I sat beside her.
I handed over her note as if it were an admission ticket. “Thank you for inviting me here.”