Page 60 of This Vicious Hunger
“But have you been seeing Olea?” Leo presses.
“What does it matter if I have?” I snap. “I don’t need you constantly looking out for me. I’m a grown woman and I can make my own choices. I’mfine.” I hate lying to him. He deserves to know the truth about Olea and her sickness and the failed antidotes and Clara—but I can’t risk Petaccia’s research, or Olea’s safety. And I can’t tell him the truth about Clara without explaining everything else, and I won’t do that. Ican’t. Not now. It’s too risky.
Instead I summon all my anger, at Olea and Petaccia and the failed antidotes and the poisons, let it fill me right to the brim, and then I roll my shoulders back and direct it at him. “I don’t understand. You didn’twantyour wife, and you don’twantme, so why are you being so goddamn jealous?”
“I’m not jealous,” Leo argues. “I have a dreadful,dreadfulfeeling and you won’t listen to me. I’ve tried to ignore it to keep the peace, but I can’t keep pretending everything is fine. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s nothing to do with Olea and that damnedgarden, but look at you. You’re exhausted. You’ve lost weight. You’re never in class… I know you’re besotted with her, and that you think you’re the first person ever to feel this way, but you aren’t. You came to St. Ellie to learn, not to become Petaccia’s lackey and Olea’s little garden pet. This is why I didn’t want you going near that place. Olea’s doing to you exactly what she did to Clara. She’s corrupting you.”
“Corrupting me?” I say, genuine disgust seeping into my tone. “Is that what you think my private feelings are?Corruption?”
Leo glances over my shoulder, furtive and afraid.
“Is that what you think happened to Clara? Don’t be dim, Leo. You and I both know the way we feel isn’t a choice. And whatever Clara felt, you said it yourself: she had one foot out the door long before she met Olea. Olea did not corrupt your wife; Clara was just as guilty.” It’s the closest I can come to telling him the truth.Please, I urge silently.Please understand.
“You’re wrong,” Leo insists. “Clara wasn’t like that before she met Olea. She got in Clara’s head, made her think differently.”
“About what?” I demand angrily. “About sex?”
“Please, keep your voice down,” Leo hisses. He makes to grab my arm again, to pull me farther out of the light, but I dodge his grasp.
“How do you know what Clara thought?” I go on. I hide behind my righteous anger although I’m making myself sick. This isn’t how this conversation should go. Whatever Leo’s thoughts about himself and his own feelings, he deserves gentleness to unpick them. He’s only trying to help me—but he can’t. I won’t let him. So I push on. “Did you tell her how you felt? Did you give her the opportunity to understand?”
“No, but—”
I need him to walk away—far, far away from Olea and the garden and all this poison. But he won’t. Not unless I make him. The thought is swift and brutal, and I know what I have to say.Forgive me, I think. “You know what? You’re so damn insistent that I need to watch out for Olea, that she will hurt me, but what aboutyou? Did you ever stop to consider if you’re the one hurting people?”
Leo looks as if I’ve smacked him. His expression is a knife directly through my flesh, but I can’t stop now. So what if he hates me? At least he will never have to know the truth. At least he’ll be safe from the garden’s clutches.
“You couldn’t give Clara what she wanted and you still can’t admit to yourself why. You kept her trapped and Olea offered her an escape. Can you really blame her for taking it? You’re a coward, Leo. A controlling, frightened little boy. You drove your wife away and now you’re driving me away too.”
Leo is silent. It is a silence so loud it muffles the hot pump of blood in my veins, the screaming in my ears, the despair in my very soul. The worst part is, he doesn’t argue.
“What the fuck did you think you were doing?” Petaccia demands. We are in the top laboratory in La Vita the next day, and I’m sick and tired and sweating profusely in the sunlit room. “Have you any idea the damage you could have caused? Oh, I knew you might be trouble, Thora, but I didn’t think you’d do anything sostupid.”
“With all due respect, ma’am, Olea is slowly wasting away. If I hadn’t intervened she’d have found another way out—”
“Not just her,” Petaccia seethes. “The fuckinggarden. Thoseplants are a lifetime of care and cultivation. How could you think you’d just throw that away—for what?”
“For your adopted daughter.”
“I. Am. No. Mother.” Petaccia’s face is the blotchy red of a wilting rose. “How many times must I say it? Would you call me such if I’d never told you about Niccolò? Would you do it if I was a man?”
“Does it matter whether you’re her mother? It’s semantics,” I spit. “Olea is in your care. She’s out there right now rotting from the limbs up. Her body is shutting down, and then where will you be?”
Petaccia stills, her dark eyes flashing. “That is her choice,” she says coldly. “Don’t you think I warned her about all of this?”
“It wasn’t just leaving the garden that caused it,” I argue. “Her skin has been going bad since I first met her. Her hands—”
“You foolish girl,” Petaccia snarls. She flies the short distance between us and soon she is towering over me. I do my best not to flinch, not to back away, but there is a feral rage in the doctor’s face that is barely concealed. “You have such a hero complex you haven’t stopped to think that maybe you’re the cause in the first place.”
“I… what?” Freezing water down my back. I shiver.
“Didn’t she tell you the reason she isn’t allowed visitors?”
“She lets them in too soon,” I say, puffing out my chest. There are no lies between us, not any more. “And they die. It’s a tragedy but that’s not exactly my fault.”
“No.” Petaccia laughs. “Not just that. Those deaths were a tragedy, and they left their mark on Olea, I’m sure. But it wasn’t the intruders I was worried about.”
“You… you mean—letting people in is what’s causing herto…?” I can’t say it. A warning rumble of sickness twists up my throat and I swallow fiercely.
