Page 35 of The Vows He Buried
He saw me on the bench and stopped, his steps hesitant. He looked like a supplicant approaching a goddess he was no longer sure would hear his prayers.
“Savannah,” he said, his voice a low, gravelly whisper.
I didn’t reply. I simply gestured to the empty space beside me on the bench. He walked over and sat, leaving a careful, respectful distance between us.
We sat in silence for a long time, the only sound the gentle splash of a nearby fountain and the distant murmur of city traffic. He stared at his hands, his long, elegant fingers twisting together in his lap.
“Thank you for coming,” he said finally, his voice raw.
I remained silent. I was not here to make this easy for him.
He took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’ve spent the last two weeks alone in that house,” he began, his gaze still fixed on his hands. “With the ghosts. My father’s. My grandfather’s. All the men who built the name I have destroyed. And your ghost, Savannah. Your ghost is the loudest of them all.”
He looked up then, his eyes meeting mine. The cool gray was now a turbulent sea of pain. “I had so much time to think. With no company to run, no meetings to attend, no fires to put out. Just… silence. And the truth. And I finally understood.”
“Understood what, Maddox?” I asked, my voice flat, devoid of emotion.
“Everything,” he whispered. “Everything I did wrong. Every choice I made that led us here. It wasn’t one thing. It was all of it. Every day. For three years.”
He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his face a mask of profound self-loathing. “I was a coward. I see that now. I was terrified of my mother, of her disappointment, of her power over me. But I was also terrified of you.”
I stared at him, uncomprehending. “Terrified of me?”
“Yes,” he said, a bitter, humorless smile touching his lips. “I was terrified of your light. Your talent. Your fire. You were so alive, so real, in a world that was built on artifice and lies. And I knew, deep down, that I wasn’t worthy of it. I knew that my world, the Vale world, would try to crush it. So I made a choice.”
He looked at me, his eyes pleading for understanding. “I thought I was protecting you. I thought that by controlling you, bydimming your light, I was keeping you safe from her, from all of it. I thought if I could just make you fit into the box my mother had designed, she would leave you alone. I told myself it was for your own good.”
He shook his head, a look of disgust on his face. “But that was a lie I told myself so I wouldn’t have to admit the truth: that I was too weak to stand up to her. Too weak to protect you the right way. So I joined her. I became your jailer, convincing myself it was for your own protection.”
His confession was a river, and now the dam had broken. The words poured out of him, a torrent of long-buried truths.
“And the baby…” he choked, his voice breaking. “I didn’t know about the money, Vannah, I swear I didn’t. But I knew something was wrong. I saw how my mother was with you. I saw how sick you were. And I did nothing. I chose to believe the lie because it was easier than facing the monstrous truth of what my own mother was capable of. It was the ultimate act of cowardice. And I have to live with that for the rest of my life.”
He finally broke, his shoulders shaking with silent, wracking sobs. He didn’t try to hide his tears. The proud, untouchable CEO was gone, replaced by this broken, weeping man.
I watched him, and the strangest thing happened. I felt nothing. The rage was gone. The pain was gone. It was like watching a film of a man I had once known, a tragedy playing out on a screen. His pain was real, I could see that. But it couldn’t touch me anymore.
He finally regained some semblance of control, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. He looked at me, his face stripped bare of all artifice.
“I tried to protect you by burying the truth, Savannah,” he whispered, and in that moment, I knew he had finally reached the core of his own personal hell. “I buried the truth about my mother, about Sienna, about my own weakness. But all I did… was bury myself.”
He slid off the bench and knelt before me on the cold, stone ground. He didn’t try to touch me. He simply knelt, his head bowed, a king who had willingly abdicated his throne and was now begging for absolution from the queen he had wronged.
“I know I don’t deserve your forgiveness,” he said, his voice thick with unshed tears. “I don’t deserve anything from you. Not your pity, not your anger, not another moment of your time. I just… I needed you to hear it. I needed you to know that I see it all now. That I know what I lost.”
He looked up at me, his eyes swimming with a love that was so full of pain and regret it was almost unbearable to look at. It was not the possessive, controlling love he had shown before. It was the pure, agonizing love of a man who knows he has destroyed the only good thing in his life.
“I didn’t deserve your love,” he whispered, his voice breaking completely. “But I still dream of it. Every night.”
He remained there, kneeling before me in the autumn sunlight, a fallen king in a garden of stone, offering me the broken pieces of his heart.
I looked down at him, at the man who had been my world, my greatest love and my deepest pain. And I felt a profound, quiet sadness. Not for me. But for him. For the man he could have been. For the love we could have had, in another life, in another world.
I stood up from the bench.
He looked up at me, a flicker of desperate, terrified hope in his eyes.
I didn’t offer him a hand. I didn’t offer him a word. I simply looked at him one last time, a silent, final farewell.
