Page 35 of Marrying the Gardener
Crimson…hasto know that there’s not just the options of staying enslaved or facing their wrath. She has to know that removing their power would allow her to live a normal life.
So that can’t be the only thing she wants.
She is tangled up in this mess because she wants to earn back what is rightfully hers. She wants to prove herself to people who don’t deserve her energy.
Whether she admits it or not, whether she realizes it or not, she wants her family to know that the person they cast out outsmarted them moments before she is powerful enough to safely tell them what they have always told her:I don’t need you.
She sees the angles. She’s smart enough. She’s made her choice…
Which makes me powerless to do anything.
Even though getting rid of her family isn’t where their abuse ends inside her.
Crimson has come to the conclusion that she does not need anyone.
She relies on herself.
She refuses to tell the people closest to her—the people who love her the most—that she needs help. Because she doesn’t want it. Because she’s not just after salvation.
She’s here for justice.
And I don’t know how to reach her.
Because when push comes to shove, I don’t seek vengeance. I just run.
Following that pattern, I forfeit this evening, send myself to my room, and hope the ambrosia of her lips overrules the revulsion of the day in my dreams.
?
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” Crisis says, while I’m trying to find peace in the spare hours I have to garden today. Crimson told me at the start of our contract that she wouldn’t have time to take me back and forth to the Bachelor estate so I could garden as consistently as I had been and I should inform Viktor in order that I might work something out with him.
As far as she knows, we’ve “worked it out.” Even though “working it out” just means I’m going to try not to ask to check on my plants more than twice a week.
After last night, I think when I told her I needed to tend to the Bachelors’ yard this morning, she was happy to be rid of me.
She took me to the shed I told her I lived in on the first night we met and left me there. Positioned at the edge of the property, the small building I keep my garden tools and supplies in is far enough from the main house that no one can see her come or go.
So she came.
And she went.
And I trekked the long way home to grab my straw hat and a set of work clothes from my real room. While there, I learned that Zakery, Maelin, and Morana—along with a reluctant Kyran—have been keeping my indoor plants fed, and the entire way out to my koi pond, I couldn’t shake the sensation of gratitude and guilt.
My family loves me.
So effortlessly.
And the only thing I can bring myself to care about right now is a woman who wants nothing to do with me.
Trust me, Crisis. Iamashamed of myself. All the same, I ask, “Why?”
Crisis, distraught and making me nervous with how close to the koi pond she is putting her face, mutters, “You stole my wife, yet now you want my help wooing her?”
“Am I under the correct assumption that you know her better than anyone?” I ask, pruning the miniature roses I have bordering the stretching pond laid out before us. Lily pads bob atop the surface while weeping willow boughs enclose the grove in partial shade. I’m pretty much finished with these roses and should be on the other side of the water, across a short bridge that leads to flat stones, which wind toward an open rotunda housing a mermaid statue in desperate need of cleaning, but Crisis is known for disaster, and I’m worried leaving her side will result in the ground giving out beneath her and sending her tumbling into the pond.
Hence, trimming the crawling ivy I used to decorate my mermaid as well as the phlox I snuck into every crack leading up to the cool stone monument will have to wait.
“Of course I know her better than anyone.” Crisis makes fish faces at the koi as they skim to the surface, greeting her. “I’m her twin. We were formed in the womb together, holding hands, which will be how we die.”
