“You didn’t mess anything up, Elle,” he replied quietly. “This is bloody life. Life is always messy. Now, we just need to sort it out.”
She nodded, the soft skin of her face moving against his hand, her eyes still confused and tired but they’d grown warm.
Before he did what very much he wanted to do, slide his thumb along her lower lip then put his lips where his thumb had been, he dropped his hand.
“Go to bed and get some sleep. We’ll talk when you’re less tired.”
She nodded, pulled in a breath and with a heavy tone, she whispered, “Prentice, I’m so sorry about the magazine.”
There was more weight to those words than was required. She hadn’t sold the f**king photo to the magazine.
“It isn’t your fault,” he pointed out the obvious.
“I’m the reason –”
His hand came back to her jaw and she stopped speaking.
“It isn’t your fault, Elle,” Prentice repeated firmly.
“Okay,” she replied quickly but not very convincingly and before he could say another word, she said, “Goodnight.”
He watched her whirl, open the door and then disappear.
Prentice stared at the door, feeling a vague sense of unease about that entire scene and not for the obvious reasons one would be uneasy about that scene.
His eyes on the door, he tried to call up what troubled him.
When he failed, he strode back to his glass, grabbed it, went to the cupboard, tagged the bottle of whisky by the neck and took the whole f**king bottle up to his balcony.
* * * * *
Fiona
You should read her journals, Fiona told her husband as she floated with her arse close to the railing of the balcony where he was standing.
She was floating as if she was sitting there, her ghostly elbows to her ghostly knees, her ghostly eyes on his brooding face.
He didn’t respond because he didn’t hear her.
Nevertheless, she kept talking.
You’d understand if you read her journals.
Prentice kept his eyes to the sea as he took a sip from his glass (the third glass, Fiona was counting).
She sighed a ghostly sigh.
Then she said, I don’t know why the powers that be did this to me and I hate it. But I love you enough to want you to have the world and she’s been your world for twenty years. If I wasn’t already dead, that would kill me. But even I can see that you two were meant to be. Why can’t YOU see? Why don’t you FIGHT for her?
Prentice continued to stare at the sea.
You don’t want her to leave, Fiona told him.
He didn’t respond.
Quietly, with all the feeling a dead woman could feel for the live woman who made the words true, Fiona stated, She’d lay down her life for our children.
“Aye,” Prentice said softly to the sea.