Page 93 of Every Step She Takes
It’s a stale, airless mausoleum, and I push through the French doors out onto the balcony to catch my breath.
The view highlights the elegant terraces of grapes that stretch for kilometers in every direction, and all it does is remind me that this house and those grapes and the wine they’ll one day produce are all mine.
But I don’t want it. I hated the summers I spent at my father’s different vineyards. I hate the smell of fermentation, the stain of grapes under my fingernails, the taste of the thing my father would always love more than me. I hated it, and heknewI hated it, so why did the bastard leave it all to me?
I can hear a knock on the door from out on the balcony, and I turn, expecting to find Felipe or Luzia or even Inez. “Come in,” I holler over my shoulder.
“Mal?” a voice hedges, and it’s not any of them.
I turn to see Sadie standing on the other side of the French doors. Her short red hair is wet and clinging to the side of her neck, and relief pours through me at the sight of her here. I stumble across the balcony and directly into her soft arms. As she holds me gently, my insides shatter all over again, and I start to properly cry for the first time all trip. Hell, for the first time since I got the news about my father.
I fucking hate crying. My chest gets hot, and my face gets sticky, and every breath feels like fire in my lungs. The headache comes instantly, followed by a wave of nausea, but I can’t seem to stop the tears. And there’s just so much snot.
“Mal.” Sadie coos my name and strokes my hair until I finally pull away, rubbing my hands across my face until I can see again. I’m arrested by the sight of Sadie’s face in the afternoon light on the balcony. Even though we’ve shared a hotel room all week, she rarely lets me see her like this, scrubbed clean and makeup free. And holy shit—those goddamn freckles. There are more of them than I thought, millions of them, perhaps from all ourtime spent in the sun. Dark freckles and light freckles and freckles the exact color of her hair. Big freckles and tiny freckles and clusters of freckles that all swirl into one thing, like an entire galaxy contained on her cheeks.
“Freckles.” I exhale the word, and I’m not sure if I’m calling her Freckles or expressing the sheer enormity of them. “I’m so sorry.”
Sadie is still sliding her fingers through my hair. “Sorry for what?”
For so fucking much. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. About Quinta Costa, or about who I am, or about my dad dying.”
Her hand falls away. “Your dad died?”
Oh shit. I still hadn’t told her about that. “You… you didn’t notice all the funeral wreaths downstairs?”
It’s obvious she did not. “When did he die?”
“Um, I don’t know, like…” I do the calculations in my head. “Thirteen days ago?”
“Mal!” Sadie gasps. “What the fuck?”
“I think the correct response isI’m sorry for your loss.”
“Why would I say that when you don’t seem sorry for your loss?” Her observation feels like an oyster knife, cracking my shell wide open, cutting to the core of me, the part I never want anyone else to see. It feels like there is nothing left to hide behind, and no reason to try to hide at all.
“I’m not sorry for my loss,” I tell her honestly. “Because I lost my dad a long time ago.”
And then I tell her everything else. It’s as if I can’t hold it in anymore, as if releasing the tears opened some kind of dam inside my heart. It all comes spilling out. About my complicated relationship with my father as a kid—about the good memories, and the bad ones, and all the ones in between that still hurt after all these years. I tell her about falling in love with my roommate at boarding school, about wanting to share my love with myfather. And I tell her about the day he told me I couldn’t be both gay and his daughter. The day I left. The day heletme leave.
We sit across from each other on my childhood bed with its black sheets and Hello Kitty blanket, and Sadie holds my hands in hers and listens to all of it. She makes the occasional sound of sympathy or outrage, and sometimes, she squeezes my hands tighter, like she’s reminding me that she’s still here, but she never interrupts. She doesn’t ask me to explain anything, and I find myself explaining everything.
It doesn’t hurt the way I always thought it would, unburdening all of this to another person. Putting the feelings into words doesn’t intensify them; it takes some of their power away.Sadietakes some of their power. She takes my complex grief, the years of sadness and shame and loss, and she holds them all like she’s holding my hands.
Maybe it’s because Sadie has experienced complex grief, or maybe it’s because she’s good friends with her own sadness and shame, or maybe it’s because she knows what it’s like to inherit something she never wanted, but Sadie is able to hold all of it, all of me, in a way I thought only Michelle ever could.
“Can I ask…?” Sadie starts when I finally finish. “Whatever happened with Prithi?”
“Prithi.” I exhale her name. It still holds some power. “She… after I left my dad’s that day, I went back to Scotland for her. I told her I wasn’t going to Oxford anymore, since I was never taking over the business, and I asked her to come with me. I wanted to take a gap year together to figure it all out. I… I wanted her to run away with me, basically. And she…” I huff a laugh.
Sadie gives my hands another squeeze. “I’m guessing that didn’t happen?”
“Worse. She told me I should go back to my dad and grovel for his forgiveness. She told me to go back into the closet. To go to Oxford and to do whatever else my father wanted. She… shemade it very clear that she wasn’t interested in me if I wasn’t the heir to Quinta Costa.”
This final confession festers between us for a moment until Sadie makes a grave pronouncement. “You have deplorable taste in women.”
I laugh fully, and it loosens something stale and airless inside me. “Hey, I’m currently having sex with you, so…”
“That doesn’t help your case. I’m a mess. Having sex with me is a horrible mistake.”
