The Undoing of Daisy Edwards (A Time for Scandal) by Marguerite Kaye Page B

films. Tell her that we could go on as we had. That having what we’d had would be more than enough. Then the credits would roll. But if I’d said those things, it wouldn’t be any more real than those movies.
    I risked taking her hand, because I didn’t want her to run. It was freezing. It lay limp in my grasp. ‘Daisy, don’t you see. Just because you don’t see her doesn’t mean you will be hurt any less if something happens to her. More, because if something did, you’d spend the rest of your life regretting the time you could have spent together.’
    ‘No. You’re wrong. It’s not like that.’
    But for the first time, there was doubt in her voice. Another point when I could have stopped. Left my point to sink in. Backed off. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. ‘I didn’t come here to show this place off. I came to show you that it was done. History. That I was ready to face the future.’
    ‘One day at a time. It’s what we’ve been doing, Dominic. We’ve been doing it so well.’
    ‘Dammit, Daisy, it’s not enough. Not for me. Not any more. I am so tired of being alone. I’m sick and tired of not raising my eyes beyond the horizon of the next twenty-four hours, of not expecting or planning or anticipating. Of not hoping. Of never taking more than a tiny piece of life at a time. Of not allowing myself to want more. I want more, Daisy. I want you.’
    ‘You have all of me there is, Dominic. I don’t have anything else.’
    ‘That’s not true, and you know it. You’re scared –’
    ‘I’m not scared. I’m absolutely terrified. I can’t. I won’t. I wouldn’t be able to—what happens when it ends? What will happen to me? What then? When you’ve had enough of me, if you leave me, if you die, and I’m alone again, with another life to take apart and rebuild. I can’t. I won’t take that chance. How can you ask it of me? Why couldn’t you just have been happy with what we had when it was so much more than we thought—that we believed—why couldn’t you just have let things be!’
    Daisy
    I was crying. Shrieking. My hands were claws, tearing at his coat sleeves, then fists, pounding against his chest. Sobs stuck in my throat like lumps of stone. My chest was heaving. I just kept thinking over and over, no, no, no. I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to think about this. I don’t want to have to try to deal with it.
    He didn’t fight back. He let me howl and wail and lash out at him. I knew I was getting hysterical, and there was a part of me that just wanted to let myself go the whole way, because then I really wouldn’t have to think and he couldn’t ask me any more. But there was another bit of me, like the part of me that always knows when I’m on-stage that I’m acting, the part that can direct and analyse, that little voice inside me that watches me all the time. The part that’s mostly silent. But when it speaks…
    That part was saying to me,
the lady protests too much
.
If it really didn’t matter
, that part of me was saying,
you wouldn’t be fighting so hard for it not to
. And another thing that part of me noticed was Dominic. Hanging grimly on, absolutely determined. Fighting in his own way.
    I stopped. I stopped wailing and crying and let my hands fall limp to my sides. I stared up at him, and inside, it was like a sort of dawning horror. A whiter, colder terror. The kind that you can’t escape. ‘No,’ I said, but this time I was speaking to myself. The knowledge in me. ‘No.’
    Dominic pulled me close. I didn’t resist this time, but I didn’t cling, either. ‘I can’t pretend it hasn’t happened,’ he said, ‘and I don’t think you can, either.’
    ‘Yes, yes, I can,’ I replied.
    It was the way he stilled that made me realise what I’d said, how my words had betrayed me. His fingers tightened on my arms. I felt the sharp intake of his breath.
Now comes the fancy speech
, I thought. I wish it had.
That
I’d have been able to