Page 48 of Slanting Towards the Sea

“A mistake,” I say at the same time, pulling my hand back.

He smiles. His shape against the dark is so familiar it hurts. Outside, the birds warble, reminding me of that nest of swallows above our window back in Zagreb, how we would sometimes lean out to watch them fly in and out, feeding their hatchlings.

“Does Marina know where you are?” I ask, getting up because being close to him feels dangerous.

“No,” he says. “But I’m sure she wouldn’t need to guess twice.”

“What do you mean?” The bond of our hands earlier this evening was invisible to anyone but us.

“Marina knows.”

My pulse rises to my throat. “Knows what?”

He looks at me then. Straight into my eyes. “That I love you. That I’m in love with you.”

The room sways. This can’t be real. Vlaho seems colorless in the dusky room, an apparition. I’m either dreaming or recalling the past. But he gets up and nears me, and his warmth centers me back inside my body.

I can feel the full power of blood rushing through his veins as he puts his hands on my waist, the strength of his breath, the life inside him vibrant and pulsing.

My thoughts branch out in a myriad directions.

Is this really happening? If he loves me, what does that mean?

For our future, for his marriage? For my life?

If he loves me, why did he marry her? How come she knows?

What exactly does she know? Does she hate me? Do I love—

But I don’t even finish that question because my whole body is the answer, powering up, burning in his presence.

I love him with the kind of ludicrous love that won’t let itself be extinguished.

The kind that digs its nails under your skin and stays.

The kind that acts like an X-ray, seeing inside your deepest layers.

Which is what makes it so infuriating.

He, who could see it all, who knew how to see to the very bottom of me, did not see why I pulled away. He asked me so many whys during those months when our marriage was falling apart. So many whys, except the one that really mattered. Why now?

I break away from him, sit on the bed, and cradle my head in my hands.

It is heavy, a steel ball. After almost a decade of stagnation, everything is pummeling me all at once.

“So by coming here, you’ve put your marriage in danger?

” It’s a weight I don’t want to shoulder.

I don’t want to be made responsible for other people anymore.

For what they do or don’t do. I did that with us, with Vlaho, all those years ago.

Took it onto myself to set him free. But that was another version of Ivona.

The Ivona sitting here is not ready to shoulder anyone else’s responsibilities but her own.

“Not exactly,” he says, easing himself next to me. “Marina and I… We’re not together-together. Like, involved . We’ve never been.”

His words, barely a whisper, sweep across the room. I sneak a glance at him to catch any sign of bullshit, but there is none. He has said this with such composure that I have no doubt he’s telling the truth. But how? Because there are two children between them that didn’t make themselves.

With the day alighting outside, he tells me what happened in those early months after they’d met.

She taught him sailing, and when there wasn’t enough wind, they talked.

At first it was small talk. But the sea is primal and reflective, it has a way of drawing secrets out of you.

Masks fall easily when you’re left to its devices.

He told her he still loved me, and this must have been such a powerful confession that she felt like she needed to confess something in return.

So she told him what she’d never told anyone else.

What he has never repeated to anyone until now.

That she’d never been in love, never had a crush, never felt like she needed a relationship to feel whole.

That she’d sensed early on she was different that way from her friends, who were always fantasizing about guys, relationships, and marriage, while she was always the happiest on her own.

She thought something was seriously wrong with her, for not being able to produce the emotions that came so naturally to everyone else.

Years later, they read somewhere on the internet that it was an actual thing, being aromantic. That there are more people like her.

But back then, while she was teaching him sailing, Marina often complained that her mother was pressuring her into settling down, and his own mother was getting more depressed the longer he refused to move on after our divorce.

His dad called one day, and said, Son, you’re killing your mother .

And when he told Marina that, she repeated her mother’s similar words, professed the same day.

You’ll be the end of me, Marina , her mother had said.

“It dawned on us then,” he says. “We got along great as friends, liked each other well enough. So we figured we could have children together and make a happy home for them even if we weren’t in love.

” He presses his eyes with the heels of his palms, as if his own words are making him incredulous.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time. If I’d gotten together with any other woman, still feeling the way I did about you, I would have made her—both of us—miserable.

But Marina didn’t need me to love her that way, and I didn’t need her to love me that way either. ”

I sit back, stunned.

All the hard truths I believed, facts, waft above me, like smoke tendrils.

All these years of wondering why. Why she welcomed me into their lives so readily, without an ounce of jealousy.

What she was thinking, inviting me for coffee, then over for dinner the first time, to their son’s birthday, or scandalizing everyone, even myself, by asking me to be Tena’s godmother.

By then, I was too starved for Vlaho to really care about her motives, but if I’d ever concluded anything, it was that she had always liked me, and straightforward and confident as she was, she didn’t see a problem in having me there.

And this I thought could only mean she was sure he was over me, sure of his feelings for her .

I filter all that against what Vlaho just said.

The truth of his words drills even deeper when I bring back the early days of my own friendship with Marina, when I thought she might be gay because she wasn’t showing any interest in men. A thought I ended up dismissing, because I didn’t see her showing any interest in women either.

“She tried to tell you once, the first time you talked after we got married. Only you wouldn’t listen. We both thought it was because you’d moved on and had no interest in looking back.”

“I was not… She never said…,” I start, but then remember that she did try, the day I first held Maro. She tried to talk about what had happened on that sailboat, but I stopped her, unable to hear how or why they’d gotten together because I thought hearing it would have downright killed me.

The stack of photos on his socials that I stalked so many times crystallizes before my eyes in mesmerizing detail, the one where they’re sharing the look reigning over them all.

I cried myself to sleep so many times with that photo open on my phone.

I reassess it now, the angle of his lips, the warmth in his eyes, her casual smile, and see what he’s saying.

He loves her, but he’s not in love with her.