I don't know why, but I walk very slowly back inside. I don't know if I was hoping Marcel would fight more for me than he just did, but it only makes me feel more desperate. My heart wants him more than my head can think rationally. Being apart from him is good for me to think more clearly. I can't be with him if it means going back to a relationship of secrets, distrust and violence...
I think that, and yet, once I get inside the hotel, I stay by the door, my clothes dripping on the carpet until I see Marcel's luxurious car drive away quickly into the city. Sobs find their way back to me. I feel suddenly tremendously lonely and empty. I can't believe he's gone and that it somehow means that Paul won.
Thinking of Paul sickens me. I look behind me at the hotel hall. Now, it's deserted as if nothing had just happened. I don't want to go back to the conference hall and talk about my book's love story when mine just ended. But first things first, I need to change. I can't stand my body to be soaking wet like that. Plus, I'm getting cold.
I walk painfully slowly the way to the lift with my head down. My thoughts are the only thing keeping me company. The constant dilemma about letting Mace go runs in my head. Love makes everything complicated...
I hear my name being called, and I get instantly annoyed. I want to be alone. I need to be alone. My name is called again, so this time I look up. I get surprised to see Edith getting up from a padded bench next to the lift. Her face is sad and lost at the same time.
"Grace!" She now calls me more categorically. I stop walking altogether to face her with the same cold expression she shares with her son. I don't respond, I don't want to deal with her blame that I made her fiancé angry and pushed her son away. "What happened?"
I frown a second. Didn't Paul tell her his side, however false and exaggerated it might have been? I sigh and drop my arrogance. Sadness saw the door and rammed into it, shattering me from inside right in front of her.
I take a step her way and circle my arms around her. My tears leave my eyes to fall in a endless motion down my cheeks. Sobs get caught in my throat as my face is nuzzled against her neck. Her hug is as awkward as her son's, but it's only because she is surprised, because it becomes quickly maternal. Her embrace is warm and it shields me from undesired thoughts. All I can think of is Marcel. Should I tell her? About our break up? It seems a little too obvious to keep it to myself.
"Where is he?" She asks gently, caressing my hair down with a hand repeatedly.
I don't respond. I try to contain myself and take back control on my emotions before answering. I take advantage of our embrace to calm down and enjoy this moment of proximity with her. It makes me sad to realise that it's only when we're apart that I get closer to his mum.
I part from her when I'm ready to face her and have the strength to look into her eyes. They're so green, just like Marcel's.
"He's gone. I was scared of what Paul might do to him..."
"I heard about it..." She only responds slowly to me, calmly to mirror my voice. Her eyes meet mine again once she's taken my hands into hers. "Paul is gone as well."
I don't know if I feel relieved or worried to know that Paul has also left. Did he follow Marcel?
As she sees me panic, she brings a hand to my shoulder to calm me down, I presume.
"I don't know where he went, but he only told me that Marcel tried to kill him. I didn't believe him..." She adds slowly, but I can see by the way she looks at me that she wants me to tell her it isn't true.
I look down and sigh, so my actions betray me and reveals the answer. She lets go of my hands and takes a step back in shock. I don't know what to say to comfort her, because it's true.
"I need to change, but we can talk about it after... I don't really feel like going back in there." I tell her candidly, pointing the conference hall with a move of my head.
"I understand... That's why we never wanted Marcel to mix business with pleasure."
"And yet it's the same with you and Paul." I let out on a more categorical tone, she understands my point immediately and it takes her aback a little.
"I never thought of it that way before... Let me see what I can do, but I want to discuss more with you." She says to me as her eyes scrutinise my expression. She is about to leave, when she turns back to face me. "I'll join you to your room."
-
I've just hung up with my brother when there is a knock at the door. With all the drama happening, I'm happy William has invited Cynthia to join him here in Edinburgh. I've been so busy, I'm happy I don't have to feel bad about not spending as much time with him as we originally wanted.
"I didn't remember if you preferred red or white wine, so I brought both." She tells me as I open the door. Her ease surprises me immediately, but I embrace that.
She puts the two glasses she held between her long artistic fingers on the desk, next to the rose Marcel had brought me last night. She then takes the two bottles she held under her arm and slides them next to the glasses.
"White, please."
I look at her in silence while she opens the bottles and serves a glass of each. Before turning back and offering me a glass, she takes the rose in her hand. She gracefully turns the flower between her fingers and a petal drops next to the wine. She puts down the thornless red rose and takes both glasses to offer me mine.
As I head to sit on the bed, I see the Womanizer still on the bedside table for Edith to see. I head there, take it and put it in my purse quickly before she takes a seat on the chair in the corner of the room. As if to show that nothing happened, I slide on the bed and sit right in the middle of it to make myself comfortable.
For the first minute or so, we sip our wine without saying anything to each other. The air grows awkward, but I shut down this feeling. I love sharing moments of silence with Mace. In this silence, it's like I can hear his mind work. He always thinks about something and the roads, twists and turns his mind go through in a short amount of time amazes me. I love looking at him think. But it's not him now, I'm with his mum... And I need to know the truth.
"For all my adult years," I begin to say, breaking the ice, but still not looking at anything else than the wine gently moving in my glass, "I've been in an abusing relationship with a man that I thought loved me."
I take deep breaths to calm myself. She has already seen me cry today, I don't want her to see how hurt and lost I am, but understand the depth of the situation that is going on between me and her son.
She doesn't say a word. She listens to me with great attention, like her son always does, taking in the information before making his own idea of it. At least, that's what it seems like. I prefer to comfort myself with that thought, because I'm not proud of what I'm revealing to her now. My own parents don't even know that Steeve had been violent with me or that he had raped me on multiple occasions. So many things happened that I thought was part of a relationship that I thought was love, and truly it just wasn't sane at all. And I never want them to know, I'm their baby girl.
It's with deep emotion, but a very delicate and slow voice that I open my mind and my heart to her. I need her to understand me. I need her to see me.
"For more than four years, I forgave everything in the name of love. Writing my book got me to escape and to live an idealistic romance in a time that wasn't now and what romance has become today. This story got me through the toughest of times that I just want to forget. Never a man had treated me like your son does. I feel valued and complete. I feel understood and never judged. In a world I thought I didn't belong, he saw me. Without even knowing him, I had created a fantasy that resembles unrealistically to the soul he is. We have both been outcasts in our past and we are trying to find ourselves outside of the typical standards of this world."
I sigh deeply and change my hold of the wine glass between my fingers. I look up as I inhale deeply. She is looking right at me, not having moved an inch.
"I love Marcel. I love him more than I ever thought possible. But I can't go back to a relationship of secrets and violence. I love his passion and I certainly loved the hole in his bedroom wall. It means strength, devotion, passion, but more than everything, it means expression. I've tried to show him how to express himself, and he's grown so much. He tells me what's on his mind and what's on his heart with his words. I celebrate that, because he isn't using his fists or he doesn't verbally assault me like I've grown used to in my last relationship. Maybe I could have forgiven what he did today... But I can't forgive him if it isn't the first time that he has threatened to kill somebody."
I look at her, waiting for a response, but she doesn't give it to me. She looks straight ahead, in her head.
"Paul didn't lie. Marcel did say that he wanted to kill him, but only because Paul lashed out at me and verbally abused me. Paul didn't like that I was standing up to him, so he told me atrocities about Marcel. Things that I didn't want to believe... Marcel arrived, protected me, and all of his issues towards Paul came out."
"Did you tell him about the engagement?" Edith hurries, alarmed that the engagement could be the issue that set her son off.
"He doesn't know, but he has every reason to hate him even without knowing. Paul told him to kill him to fuel Marcel's anger."
She looks down and sighs heavily. She raises her glass to her mouth and drinks its entirety. She refills it, and stays quiet for long minutes. I try to catch up to her and drink my wine quicker.
"Where is Marcel now? On his way back to London?" She only says, finally looking up at me.
"Yeah... We broke up." I respond slowly, lowering my head to drink the last sip of wine left in my glass.
She takes my empty glass from my hand and puts it on the desk next to the bottles of wine. She gets up and hurries to my side. I feel her sight on me, but I don't look up, so she takes my hands in between hers.
I don't cry... I think I have let out all the sadness in me earlier. It doesn't mean that I'm not sad though. I feel utterly broken inside, but I think the wine helps turning down the pain.
"What you have just said to me, about finding yourself with Marcel, I felt that with Andrew. And when I lost him, a part of me died with him." She confesses and I don't know if it's OK for me to retort that way, but it's what comes to my mind instantly.
"And Paul fills that loss?" I say with a bit of arrogance mixed with genuine care.
I look up and sink my eyes in hers in sign of apology for being out of line. She nods with a single move of her head and sighs deeply. I see her eyes moving, getting lost to the rhythm of her mind. It takes a second before she speaks. It makes me worry that I have offended her.
"His youth and his attraction towards me satisfied me for a bit. He was like a forbidden fruit that I enjoyed taking a bite of."
"Does it still satisfy you?"
"Of course it does, but is it worth the feud with my son?" She asks rhetorically, clearly trying to figure out what is best and what she genuinely wants. I see the struggle.
"Do you love him?" I ask her gently.
She smiles and looks into my eyes kindly. Her smile fades slightly and she looks away. I can see her mind travelling down memory lane, but after a moment she loses her smiles. And it says a lot to me.
"I agreed to go out with him after weeks of him asking me. For another month after that, I had gotten used to have dinner always ready when I got off work. He was cooking for me, and as you now know, I am not of the cooking kind. That's why Marcel is such a good cook, he had to learn very quickly when his father died..."
"Are you a vegetarian like him?"
"No, not at all. His vegetarianism is because of what he saw when his father died."
"He told me he didn't eat meat since Andrew's death, but he didn't tell me it was because he's traumatised by what he saw." I exclaim, thinking through to that date at the restaurant where he had agreed to answer some of my many questions.
"If I could take back those memories for him, I would."
"I think he's still haunted by that day."
"I know... It changed him, in every way. How can you help your child when you don't even know how to deal with your own grief?"
"A psychiatrist." I respond quickly, being an obvious answer for me.
"He never wanted to go."
"Why? He seems pretty fascinated by psychoanalysis. He analyses me all the time and I do the same with him. He still has many issues that come from his father's death."
She eyes me a moment and raises a finger to stop me.
"Pause on that thought. I think we both need another glass of wine before we continue this conversation. I used to think that I knew my son, but I guess I never really did ever since we lost Andrew..." She looks at me and sigh silently. She regains some energy and gets up from the bed to fill our glasses before joining my side again. But then, she gets up again and takes her bottle of red wine to keep between her legs, ready to refill her glass at any time.
She raises her glass for me to mirror her and she clinks them together without waiting a moment.
"So what do you want to know?" I ask her shyly, thinking that I have already opened up enough about private issues.
"I want to know everything. Like I told you before, I want to be there for my son, but it seems like I don't know what he's become. It seems like there conflict between Paul and Marcel, but I only know one side of the story. And then, there's the Kate thing that is still going on?! Everything changed when I got my elbow surgery. I left for a bit more than a month, leaving Marcel in charge, and when I came back both men in my life had drastically changed. I need your eyes to understand what is happening..."
I take long seconds to myself to go through my memories of what I've lived with Marcel, what I've observed and what I've felt. So much has happened in a short amount of time. I got to learn about him by watching him work and listening to him speak. I have analysed his thoughts and his mind, and yet I don't feel like I know him that well. I love everything I know about him, from his flaws to the way he writes, but I also admire that I don't know him that much. It proves how much depth he has. I knew Steeve like the back of my hand, and that's only because he wasn't very intelligent or mature, and he didn't have any soul at all.
"Like you said to me before, Marcel is a beautiful masterpiece. Unfortunately, the painting is more of an ensemble of stains rather than a picture."
"Where do you think the stains come from?"
"First, I think he somewhat stopped living when your husband died. He has lots of oppressed feelings inside him, and he lashes out at me every time I come close to get these feelings out. He has pushed me away so many times, and I fought through it because I see lots of potential with him. But he has been through so much trauma in his life. He doesn't trust easily because he never had a real friend he could count on. He had you and your husband, but when Andrew died, he lost both. And it made him lose himself. He lost who he was, so he got close to Kate. She was helping Marcel remembering his father by talking about him and what it was like working for and with him. And since, he kind of lost you as well when you took on the company, he needed a motherly figure. He was seeking for some kind of dominance from a woman figure, and Kate fitted in what he subconsciously wanted. I'm sorry to say that Marcel has still some unresolved mommy issues. I would really hope that by getting closer to you again, he wouldn't really seek to see Kate again."
I stop to take a breath and a sip of my newly filled glass of wine. I can see when I look up at Edith that she is still taking in every word I just said. She even takes this time to sip her wine as well. We avoid eye contact for a moment, but before my courage drifts off or that we lose this moment of truth, I continue.
"I'm sure you've noticed that he has some abandonment issues from all that. I'm sorry if it insults you, but it started like every trauma started. His father's death. And then he lost you to the company, and that's without mentioning that he never had any friend. He was bullied all the way through school. He had to grow up quicker than anybody else. He had to become an adult when he was a teenager."
"How do you know all that?"
"That's yet another thing we got in common. I've always been the fat ginger girl, until your son saw me as a woman and a talented writer. I've also realised at your house that he has a deep jealousy running through him. I have trouble figuring that one out... I think it's because he was jealous of the company, because you spent all your time there. Maybe that's why he has worked there so much, to feel closer to you. I think he might have a light Oedipus complex towards you, that's why Kate is so important in his life. His fantasy of you and him, he satisfies with her. It's completely natural, but it subconsciously controls him."
"And where do you fit in all of this?" She cuts me after my sentence. She doesn't seem angry, but maybe a bit lost in everything I have been saying to her about her own son.
"I think I make him realise that something is wrong in the way he has been living his life, hiding in the shadows of the past. He pushes me away so much because he doesn't want to fight the struggles that I bring out of him. And yet again, it's natural. That's why I always tell him that he's got me, that I won't let him go through life alone. I am his and he is mine, and no matter what happens, it will always be him and I in the end."
"What has changed? Why have you walked away from him?"
I frown an instant, not remembering if I had told her who left whom and what happened outside apart from the fact that we broke up... I look up and face the fact that this is my only chance to ask for the truth the same way she has asked for mine.
"Because Paul told me that Marcel had killed his father. Is it true?"
She is taken by a sudden shock that almost makes her drop her glass of wine on my bed. She gathers her knees to her chest to keep the glass from spilling everywhere on the white sheets. She can't sigh, she barely seems able to breathe. But when her eyes finally fall back into mine, I look at her strongly and confidently. I need this answer. It changes everything.
"Yes."