Page 119 of The Dravenhearst Brides
Dr. Smalls stepped forward. The look in his eyes was pitying. Hearing the words would make it real, but God help her, she didn’t want to.
He said them anyway. “Margot, I’m so sorry.”
“No…”
“It was a strenuous evening, very distressing…yes, distressing circumstances indeed. Perhaps they…proved overtaxing? It’s impossible to know for certain. These things simply happen. We can’t—Ican’t always explain them.” He was wringing his hands.
Margot stared blankly at them, hearing only two words.
Distressing circumstances.
In those two words, Margot heard the echo of every single physician, the ones who had paraded through her life for years. They all stood before her now, their lips moving in unison. Voices raised like a chorus to the heavens, reading the words that would adorn her tombstone. That would sum up her entire life. That she would have to stand before God himself one day and answer to. They were all she was, the distillation of all her parts.
Prone to fits of hysteria.
Avoid distressing circumstances.
Avoid.
Hysteria.
Fits.
Distress.
Nothing would ever change. She looked at Merrick with longing in her eyes. She’d wanted to believe it could…thatshecould change. But no matter how many times she opened the music box, the same song always played. The ballerina spun the same way.
“It’s my fault,” she whispered. She drank the tea. Eleanor’s tea, yes, but Margot’s weakness.
“No.” Merrick spoke into his hands, still not looking at her. His words came out muffled. “It’s not your fault. It’s mine.”
She looked at him, her eyes brimming with tears. “I lost the baby?”
He didn’t answer; he didn’t have to. She was staring at her shrunken stomach and Merrick’s bruised hands instead of his amber eyes, and all the blame, all the doubt, all the shame in this mortal world landed squarely upon her shoulders.
“I lost the baby,” she repeated.
His hands finally dropped. His lashes were damp, eyes red-rimmed. “We lost the baby.”
She shattered.
They spoke in the corner, Dr. Smalls and Merrick. They spoke about her, not to her. In low voices. Concerned head tilts. Small nods. They discussed her body and her mind and her failings. And most importantly, as always, “the fix.”
Because broken dolls cannot stay broken. They must always, always be fixed.
How asininely enraging,she realized, her anger sharp enough to cut through her sorrow, a hot knife lancing through butter. How absolutely infuriating that they—these men—believed they could fix what was broken inside her. That they believed she needed fixing at all.
Because that was where the problem lay, where it festered.
Fiximplied an endpoint. Like flipping a switch to bring a room from darkness to light. That wasn’t how this worked. It wasn’t howsheworked. It wasn’t how grief and sorrow and distress worked either. There was no endpoint to those demons. There was no “cure.” This house was proof enough of that.
Margot wrapped her arms around her middle, forcibly holding herself together. If she let go, she would shatter all over again. Broken porcelain doll fragments would scatter across the floor.
She closed her eyes, feeling hopelessly tired. Today, surely, she’d earned sleep. And tomorrow?
Tomorrow, she prayed, she might be strong enough to rise.
The longer Margot slept, the deeper the house sank its tendrils in. Eleanor and Babette cuddled beside her on the bed, wrapping their arms around her. The women—the ghosts—were there instead of her husband.
