Page 71 of Shameless Vows

Arriving at the airfield to board the plane, I can feel the weight of Malachi’s eyes on me before he pushes open his door to step out. Through the windows, I see him wave away the driver and approach my door to open it himself. He offers his open palm for me to assist me, but I don’t take it. I don’t even look at it for more than a second, and then step out on my own. I do not needanythingfrom him, and I certainly don’t have any interest in touching him.

Malachi follows me at a distance as we traverse the blustery tarmac toward the stairs that lead to the plane. One of the staff offers me his hand, which I do accept as I climb aboard. After taking a window seat, I cross my legs away from the aisle and tug the hem of my skirt so that it covers my knees and stare out the window. In my periphery, I see him enter the cabin, pausing to speak with the pilot for a moment. When they finish, Malachi turns slowly, lingering as he casts another long, weighty look at me, then he walks to the seat on the opposite side of the aisle from me and sits down.

He unbuttons his jacket and adjusts his tie as he clears his throat. “Would you care for coffee or tea, Isla? Perhaps a mimosa?”

I turn my head farther away from him and remain silent.

He pauses for a moment. “Are you hungry?” Another uncomfortable clearing of his throat. “We have an assortment of—”

“I amnothungry,” I clip, shifting even farther away from him.

He hesitates again. “If you change your mind, I can—”

“If I change my mind,Ican ask Abigail to bring me something.”

That silences him for several minutes, and I become so hot under the collar of my blouse that I can’t help turning to him. “Your trivial platitudes are hollow, Malachi. Please spare me having to listen to them.”

He meets my gaze, his pewter eyes limpid and saturated withguilt, and after a moment, that tell-tale sheen of emotion glosses over them. The sight of it causes my veins to light with the fire of indignation because he hasno rightto cry over any of this. His throat pulses above the knot of his steel blue tie, which draws my attention to the red, scabbed-over slice of the knife from when I should have slit his fucking throat yesterday, and he offers a single slow nod.

“Of course.”

I continue to stare him down for a second, and he absently slides the length of his tie through his hand, smoothing it against the flat, solid slope of his torso, and Ihatehim.

I hate him for the gobsmacking levels of stupidity that caused him to believe something so absurd. I hate him for giving up on everything we had without even a semblance of a fight. I hate him for his pride that was so injured by the idea of infidelity that he threw away our lifelong relationship and our entire future. I hate him for causing me toactuallyhate him for the first time since he reappeared on the day of the engagement.

I draw in a sharp breath as a rage-filled tirade threatens to spew from my lips, but I manage to restrain it and turn back to the window. “Do not speak to me again unless it is to provide a status update on the progress of this divorce.”

And he doesn’t.

We spend the remainder of our travel time in total silence.

YEARS AGO, AFTER MY parents had brought me home from my strange, chaotic excursion to Mexico that I can’t remember, I began secretly writing books as a means to provide for myself in the event that Papá chose to kick me out and cut me off. Amidst the chaos of being married to Malachi, and especially after he caught and humiliated me for writing the books that were my safety net, my secret work as an author dwindled and was put on hold. Upon arriving back at the palace in Corwick, after everything he’d been holding over my head was proved to be a lie, I started writing again.

Writers speak of writing as therapeutic, but that has never been the case for me. Writing has never been anything to me but a means to build a secret nest egg. But now, I have arrived at the point of writing for catharsis.

Amidst waiting for Malachi to make the arrangements for our divorce, and with numbness drowning me in the room I refuse to leave, I write.

My fingers fly over the keys, words pouring out of me; a story of a man and a woman who are united by fate and become the center of each other’s universe. Two people cocooned together in the safety of love that they fully believe will last forever. The man has wealth and power, and the woman is merely an average person, and the bridge between their differences is a love that can’t be broken.

At least… that’s what the woman believes.

But then, the woman wakes up one morning to find the man on the phone with someone, looking like a shell of the person he was only the night before. He’s learned of a devastating secret that causes everything he believed about his life to change, and he redirects his anger and devastation to the woman he would supposedly love forever and always,world without end.

He tells her to leave. Heinsiststhat she leave. He kicks her out of their cocoon of safety, and offers a meager token as a means for her to provide for herself, but she refuses it. She won’t take his petty offering to placate his guilt over doing what he knows iswrongon more levels than he can count. She complies with his wishes and leaves. She has nothing. She roams the streets of New York City with nothing but her coat and the change in her pocket while she vows to survive on her own and never think of him again.

Hate hardens her. Guilt causes him to lose himself in a bottle of scotch. Resolve causes her to pull herself up by her bootstraps and create a life in which she never has to depend on another person again. Remorse over the realization that he was wrong all those years ago causes his life to fall apart in spectacular fashion.

Fate reunites them years later, and he wants to reconcile. As if there is any way to fix the things he broke. As if there is a way to mend a glass dish that you’ve shattered against concrete by merely casting a long look at the dusty pile of broken pieces and saying, “Sorry.”

There is no fixing something like that.

Even if you manage to find every tiny shard and piece the dish back together, there will always be cracks. There will always be crevices where the glass was previously a single piece. The dish will always be weaker and more fragile than it was before. It will never be the same again.

The woman ultimately grants the man one night to speak candidly with her, and she speaks candidly with him, and they sleep together. He sleeps believing all is well again. She doesn’t sleep.

She leaves him again before morning, and he wakes up to an empty bed, a note, and a heart as broken as the one he left her with ten years earlier.

I MANAGE TO FINISH the novel in record time. Only a week after returning from New York, I am typing the wordsThe Endjust as my phone rings.

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