Sweet Romance15 min read
This Life I Give to You
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I remember the snow the first time he knelt, the cold whitening everything like a mute witness. I remember the cheap silver shoe on his thin hand, the way I lifted my foot and felt the brittle bone under the skin. I remember his eyes — a black, cold thing that did not belong to a boy; it belonged to a thing that would never forget.
"Stand up," I said then, stupid with fifteen-year-old certainty. "You don't have to be ashamed here."
He did not move at once. His jaw was set. His voice came out small and hard. "Thirty years east, thirty years west, Miss Everly, do not mock a hungry man."
I laughed then, cruel and shallow. "You are a guest under my roof. You can leave if you like."
He took the cold as if it was part of him. "I will not leave. Not yet."
I lifted my foot higher. The fur on my sleeve brushed his ear.
"I'm sorry," I said before I understood myself. The words felt like a small coin I had been saving to buy something far larger: a peace I had never been given.
He looked at me, and his face did not warm. "Why now?" he asked. "Why should kindness come after shame?"
"I—" I stopped because I had no answer. I was fifteen. I was spoiled. I wanted a clean ending to an awkward thing.
He rose then, like a lean reed snapping upright. "Go," he said. "Take back your words. This bond means nothing."
I did not mean the rest that would follow. I did not intend the way he would carve my family into a cautionary tale, the way he would fit his cold hands around every advantage until my house was gasping.
His name was Ricardo Compton. He left the snowy porch, clutching that small scrap of our childhood agreement, and without knowing it I sealed the direction of both our lives.
Later, when storms came that I had not seen before, I would wish I had kept my foot on his hand.
"Everly," my mother said that day, wrapping my shoulders in fur as if she could wrap care away, "we will manage this kindly. Your name will not be sullied if we are generous. Your brother will protect us."
"Brother will shout at hired men," I muttered. "This was my fault."
"You are not to blame for a man's pride," she said. "You must keep your head. We will burn it."
So we burned the paper. I fed the fragile marriage binding into the coal pot and watched the ash cushion itself like snow on black. My heart felt thin as the smoke.
"Why do you cry?" Nicoletta asked, practical as ever. "The smoke stings the eyes."
"It is the smoke of something I pulled free," I told her. "It smells like ruined paper and a tiny, foolish hope."
I did not know then that hope could be a trap.
Years spun avalanches over us. Ricardo rose like a terrible comet — brilliant, cold, and impossible to look away from. He was clever, hungry to repay memory; he kept every slight like a ledger. He was a man who could take and make it look like justice. He married a woman chosen by court fortune, a woman who smiled too easily. He married Maki Morgan — my half-sister.
"Maki?" I heard someone say in the gossip halls one spring. "Ricardo married your sister? How fortunate for her."
"She must have learned something sweeter than we thought," my maid said, like a blunt-minded oracle. "She always watched him like a moth."
I stopped visiting the marble garden as often as I had. I walked more quickly through the halls, as if speed could keep the past from sticking like a frost.
When the invaders came — men with black banners — they took what they wanted. They brought fear not like a storm but like a method. They demanded a ransom for prisoners. Ricardo came with gold, but he brought only part of it — five chests where ten were asked. "Only one wife will do," he said, politely, as if choosing between dishes at a banquet.
They took us anyway. They slit the ropes for my half-sister first, as if she had more use to them; she laughed then, soft and guilty and triumphant, then pulled at a bandage while Ricardo stood with the gold like a man deciding percentages.
I remember the cold of that cage, the metallic tick in my veins. I remember when he came to bargain and offered less — and I remember how the captors looked to him with an animal understanding that their price was higher.
After that, my life narrowed into acts of endurance. I sought healers for him, tried to sew alliances for him, played the patient wife like a costume long after any warmth remained. He repaid me with contempt, with small humiliations that spread until there was no place safe in our house.
"Why do you do this?" I asked once, with more courage than sense. "You have everything. Why keep dismantling the one place someone would place you beside them?"
He took me by the jaw like he used to do when we were young and too stubborn to be reasonable. "Because you can be so proud, Everly. Because the feeling that you once made me kneel — that is a debt I will see in blood."
I laughed bitterly. "You wished to repay me?"
He smiled then, the smile with teeth of winter. "I don't wish, I always pay."
It is a strange thing, to be the instrument of your own collapse. It is stranger still to be the one who finds she is able to step away.
I could tell the story as if it ended there — with my death and his cold contentment — but that is not the life I kept. Something else happened, an impossible backspin of fate: I woke. I woke knowing some of what would happen and determined not to fall into the same coil.
The second life began like the first in snow, but this time I moved differently.
"I will not marry him," I said to my father in the little parlor. "I cannot have my heart rent again."
"You are certain?" he asked.
"I am," I said.
He looked relieved and then suspicious. "Then do not waste courtesy. Burn the paper. Show him the easiest exit."
"I will do more than that."
So I did. I went back to the porch where the young Ricardo knelt. Snow made little moons on the world. He lifted his head and looked at me, no warmer nor colder than before.
"I will not be your wife," I told him plainly.
"You will not?" he asked.
"No. I am not made for being the kind of woman you keep in a ledger." I did not kneel to mend the past. I stepped back from my own compassion like it was a dangerous thing.
He smiled, and at seventeen his face was all sharp angles and hard edges. "Then go," he said.
I left.
Years later, I've learned to live with the path choices make. I learned forgiveness not as a thing for him but as air for me. I learned that some bonds must be broken not because they are wrong but because they will become cages.
When the prince — Galileo Myers — entered my life, he did it quietly, like water finding a crevasse. He was a man who moved with titles and measured kindness like currency. He was called "Prince" in a court where crowns were handed out with a surgeon's precision. He could have been cold. Instead, he was attentive in a way that did not demand tribute.
"Your hand is cold," he said the first evening he questioned my well-being, and without ceremony he took off his cloak and wrapped it around my shoulders.
"Why would you?" I asked, surprised.
"Because you should not freeze for my comfort," he said simply.
He laughed sometimes, a quick, private sound. He seldom smiled for others, but for me there were little breaks of warmth.
"Do you remember the first time I saw you?" he asked once, when we were riding out to the Temple of Quiet Suns.
"No," I said.
"You fell into my arms," he said. "Literally. You were delivering rice dumplings, tripped on a hidden stone, and then—" He paused, eyes bright with a private joke. "—you landed on me like someone who had practiced falling all her life."
"I landed on you," I repeated, irritated and laughing. "You were so regal."
"I am only regal when I have forgiven the world for being inconvenienced," he said. "With you, I am merely delighted."
There were simple moments: his sleeve brushed mine in a crowded hall and he did not draw away; he tucked a blanket over me at an evening when my fever had returned, and his fingers trembled more than mine. He did small, secret things, like leaving a pebble where I would find it with a note: Stay. The notes were childish and tender. The courtyard gardener once snickered, "He who is a prince and leaves pebbles for his love." I raised an eyebrow and said, "He is a man who considers the details worth the trouble."
He was not a man who used me as a stepping-stone. He was a man who chose to stand with me.
"I will not be used," I told him one night, afraid of the old patterns already. "I will not pretend I am not frightened."
"Fear is honest," he said. "So am I. I am frightened too."
There were three moments that thinned me like ice softening under the sun.
The first was the night he touched my hair and stayed there, hesitant and then brave. "You look different in this light," he said. "Not worse. Not better. Different in a way I want to learn."
The second was the night he stood in the doorway between a hall of guests and me, and when someone tried to press past, he placed his hand over mine as if I were a glass cup he would break by accident. "My hand," he whispered, "is here to stop the crowd, not you."
The third was the spring morning he had gone down to the river merely to fetch stones for my garden and came back with one smooth pebble and two loaves and a grin. "I hope you like stones and bread," he said. "One to remember me, one to eat when I'm gone."
Those small things wedged themselves into the seams of the day. They were not fireworks. They were steady warmth.
All the while, Ricardo gathered power. He took offices, carved out influence, and when he could not take my heart he took everything else he could reach.
He married Maki Morgan for power and for spite. He showed what he had become and did it like a monarch stating law. She, in turn, accepted the costume she had prepared since childhood: smiled, arranged her face like still life, and took what she wanted.
When my family was seized again — this time for political reasons intertwining with personal loathing — Ricardo arranged that our humiliation would be a display. He made sure that when the city court judged property, carriage, titles, the things that keep a house breathing, he would be present to point and take.
But when cruelty wears power like a coat, the seams can be cut by a careful hand. The truth is a blade that is slow and tiny and will be sharpened by the hands of those you trust. Galileo Myers did not move for revenge at first. He moved for justice.
We arranged for a day at the central square — a public festival to mark the city's harvest. The whole market would be watching, vendors calling, ribbons and drums; a place soaked in witnesses. It was the kind of place where gestures register on the skin of a public. We chose it purposely.
"Are you certain?" I asked Galileo the night before, because my new life had taught me that certainty was a luxury I could not afford.
"I am certain," he said, voice low. "I will tell truth where lies were laid."
"Will they kill him?" I whispered. It was not a question of law but of the appetite of a crowd.
"No," Galileo answered. "They will see him lose what he loved: the image, the throne of thorns he had built for himself. That is worse."
When the day came, the square was a field of human faces. "We will stand here," he said, placing my hand on his arm. "If he reacts, do not look away."
Ricardo arrived like a storm in proper clothes. People part for storms. He stood tall, no easy pride, speaking to men who served him and men who chronicled him. He had many friends: men who favored strength, who found it useful to be seen beside him.
Galileo made no fanfare. He walked into the crowd as if he belonged to no faction, and then he turned and spoke with a voice that carried, though it was not loud. "Citizens," he began, "we gather to honor harvest and truth. Come to see justice when it needs spectators."
Ricardo's eyes met mine across the sea of faces and there was that old chill. He smiled thinly. "Prince," he said, "this is hardly a time for trials."
"It is always time for truth," Galileo said.
Then the instruments of exposure began to play: ledgers, lists, letters. We had found things that could be spoken plainly. They were not lies. They were not scandalous in the way gossip is; they were accounts and the signatures at the edges. We had the names of men Ricardo had bribed, the contracts he used to strip households — not with a sword, but with the pen. We had witnesses who would speak without curls of story. We had the captain of an old guard who had been paid to overlook a convoy and who had, reluctantly and at length, agreed to stand and tell what he had seen.
"Do you deny this?" Galileo asked, handing a ledger to the mayor. The mayor squinted, then read it aloud to the square — names and figures and dates — the sound of a ledger read in a public square is like seeing a skeleton drape itself into an empty room.
Ricardo's face remained composed at first, the iron mask of someone used to controlling the stage. He spoke with his old practiced voice. "These are forgeries. My enemies set them. I have forged no handwriting."
"Then explain why the signatures match your clerks," a witness called out.
"Why did your men take land held by the poorest in order to fulfill a debt you engineered?" another voice followed.
The crowd was a tide. It leaned forward to listen. Eyes that had once sought his favor were now mirrors. Men I had once feared slipped behind his shoulders and watched like crows at a theater to see how a big bird might fall.
His composure faltered at a slow pace. First a line around the mouth, then a flicker in the nostrils. He tried to speak, but each question hooked at his armor. He found his answers shrinking. "I acted for the city's strength," he said. "I... I only did what was necessary."
"Necessary for whom?" a woman shouted.
For the first time I saw a line of panic cross his face. He tried to summon the old look of superiority, of one who had already built a ladder and placed a hand to help down anyone who needed it only if it suited him. But this square was full of people he had pushed. A voice from a fruit stall called how his actions had ruined their warehouses. A young scribe squinted at a decree and read aloud a clause that left no room for moral spin.
Ricardo moved through a small theatre of denial. His initial arrogance gave way to irritation. He smirked, then lacerated his voice into accusation. "You are jealous!" he cried. "You all want what I have."
A murmur rose — disappointment rather than adoration. People do not like to be sold a lie, and they dislike more being told they are thieves for believing it.
Then came the most devastating part: Maki Morgan stepped forward. She had been graceful in the court, but here she was not wearing the armor of a woman who believed herself to be beyond consequences. She stood before the crowd, and in her hand she held a letter. "He told me we would be safe," she said. "He told me that my comforts were part of a deal for a better city."
The letters she read were not accusations about me. They were about the household accounts, the bribes, the men sent away. Each line she read throbbed like a wound opened again. She had been his choice and his instrument; now she was speaking into the square. "I thought I had power," she said, and the admission was a confession of a woman who had bartered her light. "I did not know power would cost others their roofs."
Ricardo's face crumpled then. The composure that had been his first armor shattered like thin ice when the people he had used turned and catalogued him with steady voices. He tried to snatch the letter from Maki. "Do you deny this?" she asked him. "Do you deny the men who came to sell off houses? Do you deny the contracts?"
He looked at her as if seeing at last that his instruments had faces. "No," he said, a low, terrible word. "No, I do not deny it."
The crowd let out a breath like a bell tolling. The mayor, who was as old and careful as a ledger, proposed a resolution: he would strip Ricardo of titles of honor for a season and order restoration to families where possible, if Ricardo handed back what he had siphoned. It was not a court with prisons and gallows, but it was public penance — worse for a man whose image was a fortress. The mayor declared restitution. The square listened.
Ricardo changed then, like ice melting in strange heat. He went from thin pride to defiance to disbelief to pleading. For a long time he denied everything. "You are wrong," he said. "This is slander."
When men brought a list of witnesses — people he had dishonored — he could not hold the elevator of his thoughts. He began to shout. He tried to invoke laws and friends and debts. He tried to cough up his old habit of patronage. The crowd, who had once cheered him, held back like a sea unsure of another tide.
The fast change was the worst part for him. He had been the man who could perform power as if it was art; now he was the man who watched his art exposed. His face became a palimpsest of emotions. At first he was furious, eyes blazing, claiming treason. Then his fury bent toward denial. "This is not true."
"Tell them," Maki urged, and the pleading in her voice made him look small.
He tried an old trick — name a large creditor, a far-off official, throw names the way an accused man throws meat to distract dogs. The mayor would not be distracted. Men raised the ledgers. Women wept for their sheds. Children put down their toys.
Finally, he fell apart. It was not a dramatic falling as in a play; it was a slow unthreading. His shoulders curled, his voice caught, the hard edges of his jaw smoothed into bewilderment. At first he called names, then he tried to bargain, then he began to beg.
"Please," he said, voice thin. "I will return them. I will —"
"Return them now," the mayor said.
"And if you do not?" a vendor asked.
"Then the records will stay," the mayor replied. "The city will know who took what."
He fell to his knees before the mayor as if some ancient law required it. He made a show of kneeling, and the people around him recoiled. The ritual was not a plea for mercy so much as a theatrical collapse: he begged the mayor to let him remain on some loose leash of dignity. "I did it for the city," he sobbed. "I did it to build strength."
Maki looked at him and then at the crowd. She did not fall into the drama. She spoke with the voice of someone who had been both victim and instrument. "We had a choice," she said. "We did not always have to choose him."
People began to take pictures on small glass panes, whispering. Business owners called for restitution lists. The captain of the guard wrote notes. The street emptied slowly, like an audience after a terrible curtain fall, but not before a thousand hands had been marked with the story of his deeds.
Ricardo's change of expression became a novel in a glance: from ruthless pride to wounded denial, then to angry protest, followed by a brief flash of pleading, and finally to the fragile, animal look of a man who has been seen. It was humiliating because it was not theatrical: it was a bath in sunlight for a creature that had lived in shade.
Around him, faces shifted. Those who had smiled the most in his company moved like people undoing jewelry. Some took the side of the mayor because they loved continuity. Others turned away entirely. Children watched, clutching their mothers' hands. "Is he mean?" one little boy asked.
"Yes," his mother said, "but he used to be kind to those who could pay."
By the time the sun slipped behind the roofs, Ricardo had been compelled to sign a list. He would repay the families as much as his ledgers and the city's coffers allowed. He would relinquish certain honors. He would submit to community work for a period. He had lost the mask. For a man who had built himself upon the idea that appearances were everything, this was worse than prison.
Ricardo left the square with his shoulders lower than when he had come. The crowd did not cheer. Some cursed under their breath. Some cried softly for having been used. Maki stood by him, her hand on his arm but not in comfort. She had chosen complicity and now must live with its cost.
Ricardo's reaction had been a study in collapse: rearguard tactics, denial, rage, pleas, then that final, heavy stillness. Around him, people who had once bent before him now catalogued him as a man who had squandered his grace.
Galileo squeezed my hand once, steady as a stone. "Are you well?" he asked.
"I am," I said. "Strange, to watch a man tidy away his false crowns."
"It had to be done," he said. "There will be no peace in the city otherwise."
After the square, life resumed the quiet business of living. Families repaired fences. Shops reopened. Children chased hoops. Ricardo kept his head down and recorded debts he could not pay in the still rooms where men mark their faces with pens and regret.
I had thought for a long time that I wanted revenge; what I found in practice was something like reparation. Seeing him humbled was not sweetness. It was settling a debt not to my heart but to the number of harmed lives a man could measure. Public shame did what private anger could not: it broke the illusion.
Later, when the city had shifted and the court moved like a great machine, Ricardo knocked at our door again. He came with eyes hollowed.
"Everly," he said, voice small.
"What is it now?" I asked.
"I—" He stopped. He looked at Galileo. He looked at the family he had wronged. "I want to make amends."
We let him.
Not because I was magnanimous. Not because I sought to be kind. Because the world is a ledger and a return is a kind of mercy.
Galileo and I married in a small ceremony off the court list — no fanfare, only the circle of people who could make a promise and stand up to the world. He never made me forget my first life. He made it lighter. He did not move with the greed of men who keep records. He moved like a man who prefers to leave crumbs for birds.
"Do you regret?" I asked him once, on a summer night when the moon was a pale coin.
"Only that it took me so long to see what matters," he said.
"Will you ever leave?"
"Only to come back," he answered.
His hands were warm, and he held me like a compass, pointing always toward home.
I told myself I had no desire to add cruelty to cruelty. I had learned a harsh lesson: a small moment of cruelty — a lifted foot, an unkind jest — could make a chain. I vowed to be careful with small things.
If I ever saw Ricardo again in public, it was sometimes with a hand out asking to be relieved of his debts. Sometimes he would look at me with a wish I could not return: the wish to have a woman he once could have had and ruined.
"Everly," he said once, the last time I saw him looking at me like a man requesting permission from a god, "I am sorry."
I looked at him. "You were always sorry with your own hands full," I said.
He flinched, then laughed, a small, brittle sound. "You are very cruel."
"Perhaps," I said. "Or perhaps I am careful."
The rest of my days were not perfectly bright. I tended a garden with small hands. I laughed at stupid jokes. I forgave some things and refused to forgive others. Galileo and I built a life that had small steady kindnesses: a bowl of soup when I came home late, a folded cloak on a chair, a pebble left on a sill. He was not the sort to tear down a man for pleasure. He was the man who would repair what was broken when he found it. He taught me to be gentle and not to mistake tenderness for weakness.
Sometimes at dusk, when the city made itself a sleepy thing of red roofs and smog-blurred towers, I would take a pebble Galileo had given me and press it into the soil of the garden. I would think of the snow on the porch, of the cold shoe on a thin hand, of the ledger read aloud in the square, of the way a man can choose to make himself small or great.
I chose neither vengeful nor naive. I chose to continue.
"Is this life enough?" I asked once, to no one in particular.
Galileo put an arm around me and did not give an edict. "It can be," he said, "if we make it so."
And so we did.
The End
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