Sparrow(100)

I nodded, peeling off a dead layer of skin from my palm. “The will said I’d get nothing until I married you. If we divorce, you get more than half.”

She let out a sarcastic chuckle. “I don’t need your family’s money. Everything you Brennans touch gets tarnished.”

“Nonsense. It’s yours. Always will be.”

“Let me go,” she said quietly, her voice cracking. “I need to leave.”

I nodded, knowing she was right but wishing she was wrong. Sparrow was my lovebird, and I couldn’t clip her wings anymore. I have bent her with the weight of my actions and lies for the past few months, and she took it all and took it well, but this was the last straw. If I bent her even more, she’d snap. Forcing her to stay was too dangerous for me and too destructive for her.

Some said that lovebirds could die of heartbreak. That was the myth, anyway. I didn’t look much into that, but I knew my lovebird, my Sparrow. She needed freedom, because even though she was incredibly good at accepting my shit, this was pushing it too far, even for her. I couldn’t hold onto her anymore, even if I wanted to. Now more than ever.

She was my beauty, and I was her beast. But this was not a Disney flick. In real life, the beast goes back to his solitary life, a freak who lurks in the shadows and watches as his girl runs away back to the arms of her family.

She was my only shot at a semblance of normalcy and happiness, and I had to let her go.

Slouching down, my head so low my nose almost touched my knee, I croaked. “You’re free.”

The most painful words ever spoken by me. Sparrow was free to go, to spread her wings and fly. I’d give her everything, as my father’s will ordered. And it still wouldn’t be as painful as seeing her go. “I’m just so fucking sorry. I know it sounds absurd, considering everything we’ve been through, but I never meant to hurt you that way.”

“I know.” Her voice grew cold. She was already slipping away from me. From us.

“My door’s always open,” I added, as if it mattered.

She tilted her head slightly with a nod. “I know that, too. Now, please leave.”

I got up from my seat. Walking in here, I thought I would never want to turn around and walk out. Thought I’d milk this conversation until the very last drop, get more time with her one last time before we said goodbye. But it turned out that when you really care, things don’t work that way. Her pain occupied the whole fucking room, invading my space and knocking me off my fucking ass, and I couldn’t tolerate it without feeling my pulse weaken and my body growing cold.

I reached for the door, about to walk away from her for the very last time.

“Just out of curiosity…would you have done things differently, all things considered?” she asked in her beautiful voice.

“All things considered,” I said, not turning around because I know I’d break and do my usual thing, coerce her, threaten her, force her to stay, knowing that she shouldn’t, “if I had known, I wouldn’t have waited until now, or until our parents were dead. I would have asked you to marry me when you were nine, on that dance floor at Paddy’s wedding, when you had your first slow dance, and damn the consequences.”

She laughed.

She thought it was a joke.

It wasn’t. This is what should have happened. We shouldn’t have spent a minute away from each other while we had a chance. Nothing bad would have happened if I told nine-year-old Sparrow that she was mine.

No Paddy.

No Catalina.

No Brock.

I would never lay a finger on her mother’s body, let alone hide it in the woods.

And now we were going to spend the rest of our lives apart. Damn that “Saving All My Love For You.”





TROY




Two weeks later



LAST TIME I saw him, Paddy Rowan reminded me that I couldn’t run away from my past. He was right. The truth was one hell of a runner, and it would eventually catch up with you. It caught up with him. It caught up with me. It was delivered coldly, like revenge, on a plate of misery, to my beautiful, wide-eyed, innocent, spitfire wife.

I wished I could cram all my lies into a ball of venom and shove it down my throat, swallowing the pain she felt, making it all better for her. But I couldn’t.

When I first married her, I didn’t tell her my father was responsible for our marriage because I didn’t want this to shame my family, my mother, myself. I didn’t want her to run off to the police with it. Didn’t even feel like I owed her shit. The truth was mine, and for me to stew in. Alone.

I couldn’t even stomach the fact that Brock and Catalina knew.

But as we got closer, things changed. I no longer cared about the stupid Brennan pride, but I still didn’t tell her. She didn’t need to know that her mom ditched her for a married man. Didn’t deserve to be saddled by more injustice and pain. For all she knew, her mom could have been kidnapped or murdered or just flat-out crazy, living with a herd of cats in the woods. I didn’t want to reopen that old wound for Sparrow. The parent-child relationship was the most complex thing in the human race, I knew that first-hand, and that scab was too deep and tender to dig open.