Page 78 of Caution to the Wind

Her shrug slapped water against the rim of the tub.

I tipped her head back in my hands, massaging the base of her skull so her lids fluttered with pleasure as she looked up at me.

“Did I ever tell you why I got my first tattoo?”

Her green-grey eyes flashed wide open, alert and interested suddenly. “No. We weren’t speaking much at the time. I always wondered.”

“You could have asked,” I told her gently, only ever gentle for her. “I got this one right here.”

I used one soapy hand to lift the hem of my black shirt. Two koi fish swam in a kind of yin and yang around my belly button, one red and the other black.

Cleo twisted slightly to better see it, a wet finger reaching out to almost touch the design. “Dad drew this on your cast in the hospital after…after Mum died.”

I nodded. “It wasn’t a good time in my life, then after losing Kate, and when I got this, having lost you and Henning. I was…struggling, and the only thing that brought me peace was the idea that things could only get better from there. ThatIcould only get better from there. Rock bottom feels like a hellish place, but there’s some peace in knowing you can only go up from there, you know? It’s a fresh start. The perfect time to reinvent yourself. The koi evolves into a dragon only after reaching the end of a long, often dangerous and painful journey.”

“Do you have a dragon tattoo somewhere, too?”

I tried to hide my flinch, biting into my lip so the physical pain could ground me from the emotional slap.

“No,” I murmured. “I haven’t gotten there yet.”

She took a long, silent look at the koi fish, at the spiderweb caught beneath the base of my breasts, at the chain links arched beneath those and the flowers growing between their gaps. When her eyes met mine, they were fathomless, an enigma of unimagined pain.

“Did it hurt?”

“Sometimes. The skin is thin on the inside of the arms, the upper thighs, the ribs.”

“No,” she said softly, mouthing the words instead of truly speaking. “Did it hurt to get your life story written into your skin for everyone to see? Does it hurt when people look at them and know?”

A little shiver bit into the base of my spine that had nothing to do with the cooling bath water.

“A little,” I admitted, gently pulling her back against the tub so I could rinse the suds out of her choppy hair. “But it feels good, too. It’s hard enough to live with baggage without being ashamed of it. It feels fulfilling to be unafraid of someone knowing what’s happened to me.”

Cleo was quiet for so long, I wondered if I’d pushed too hard on tender buttons. Her gaze was fixed out the large window on the right side of the tub into the dark trees lining the back of their lakefront property.

“It’s hard,” she admitted finally when I’d finished rinsing her down and pulled the plug. “When anyone looks at me now. I feel like they c-can…” She sucked in such a deep breath she winced as her lungs filled to bursting. “…like they can tell what I let happen to me.”

I stopped, the towel in my hand unfolding to the floor with a whisper. Tears fought merciless with the backs of my eyes, trying to fall. A sob was lodged like a knife in my throat.

My knees gave out, dropping hard to the slate floors, but I didn’t feel the pain. I abandoned the towel and reached out to cup her beautiful, tragically pale, gaunt face.

“You didn’tletanything happen to you,” I whispered, and even though the volume was lost to my agonized fury, the words were filled with conviction. “I don’t care if you flirted with him. If he made you feel special and seen and you fell in love with him. I don’t care if you agreed to meet him in secret when you shouldn’t have. None of that matters to me oranyonethat would ever hear about the absolute tragedy of what happened to you, Cleopatra. Goodness, love, and kindness arenevermeant to be rewarded with violence and hatred. Sometimes the worst kind of people are attracted to the best kind of people, like moths to a flame, because they want to suck out your light and corrupt it. The blame for that has everything to do with Seth Linley and his broken mind and absolutely nothing to do with you deserving it. Do you understand me?”

Huge tears like dewdrops collected on her lower lids, trembling there for long seconds before falling down her pale cheeks into my fingers and palms. She trembled, her hands shaking as she reached up to clutch at my wrists.

“Do you promise?” she gasped between quiet sobs.

“Oh Glory,” I breathed, ripped apart by her anguish. “I swear it. If you believe anything I’ve ever said or done for you, please believe this. Sometimes bad things happen to good people for no better reason than that they shine so bright they’re incredibly alluring to someone swallowed up by the dark.”

“I-I don’t know how to live through this,” she confessed, shaking harder now, clutching at me so tightly that I lost feeling in my hands. “I wake up and feel like I should have died like Amelia. It would have been so much easier than living in this body and this mind. I feel like…like they betrayed me.”

“They didn’t. You didn’t.Hedid.”

Her eyes searched my face, scalpel sharp, searching beyond skin and blood and bone as if the truth lurked somewhere deep under my flesh.

“They tell me that,” she said woodenly. “But it’s hard to believe them. It’s hard not to think after what happened to Mum…maybe the Kay women are cursed, or maybe we do something––”

“No.” My word cracked like a gunshot through the space, making Cleo jerk with surprise. “Absolutely not. Neither of you deserve what happened to you, Glory. If I have to tell you every day for the rest of our lives, I’ll do it. I can be very relentless, you know.”