Unfaithful (6 page)

“I think you’re ready now,” he said, leaving me even more puzzled. “But you’ll have to be patient enough to wait a few more hours to find out,” he warned, more and more amused by the look on my face.

Classes flew by with the predictable lightness of the first days of school. The classrooms were just as I remembered them, our blue-and-yellow school colors lining the walls, and even in the cafeteria our little group was still the same, with just one enjoyable difference: Evan sat beside me now. It made me happy, but it made someone else unhappy, I was sure of it. Peter feigned indifference, but sometimes when Evan kissed me or held my hand I became aware of his furtive glances and the bitterness hidden in his eyes felt like a punch in the chest. My best friend was suffering because of me and although I was sorry about it, there was nothing I could do.

Giving in to my impatience, the afternoon arrived at last, heralded by Evan’s BMW X6, a black shark on the gray asphalt.

“Finally,” I exclaimed. After school I’d eaten a late lunch with my parents and eagerly waited for Evan to pick me up.

“Your surprise wasn’t ready yet,” he apologized, though I was sure he was intentionally being vague just to pique my curiosity. He’d always enjoyed teasing me.

“I imagine you’re not going to tell me what that means,” I said, resigned.

Evan laughed and tapped me under the chin. “What is it exactly that you don’t get about the word ‘surprise’?”

I shot him a sidelong glance as I buckled my seatbelt. Evan lowered his head and looked at me. “I wanted everything to be perfect.”

With this, another silence fell. Only one thing was clear at this point: his idea of a surprise allowed for no hints or clues of any kind, so I promised myself I wouldn’t bother begging for them. His driving was aggressive but I was perfectly at ease sunk back in my seat. All of a sudden Evan laughed and I wondered why.

“Stop chewing on your shirt,” he said, grinning.

“I wasn’t!” Embarrassed, I hid my fists inside my sleeves.

“Now you need to close your eyes,” he ordered after a moment, his tone gentle. “It’s part of the surprise.” I made a wary face and he shrugged in response. “And no peeking,” he warned before I even had the chance to try. In the darkness behind my closed eyelids, I heard his engine being switched off.

“We’re there.”

“So can I open my eyes?” I asked eagerly.

Evan chuckled. “Your impatience is equaled only by your stubbornness.”

“Look who’s talking!” I shot back, my eyes still closed.

His door slammed shut, cutting off the last half of my remark. Almost instantly, I heard my door open and felt a wave of fresh air that smelled like the woods.

“Here, I’ll help you out.” Evan took my hand and I entrusted myself to him. “But don’t open your eyes,” he insisted.

The seat of the SUV was pretty high up and I held on tight to Evan until I heard the crackle of dry leaves beneath my feet. We had to be in the forest, I was sure of it. I could recognize its scent with my eyes shut. I took a deep breath of the cool, fragrant air, letting Evan guide me for a few yards. Then he stopped and I did the same.

“Now you can open them,” he whispered, his tone cautious, as if he wasn’t entirely certain what effect the surprise might have on me. I froze, not sure I wanted to open them. I didn’t know if my hesitation was a reflection of Evan’s or if it was caused by something else. A sense of foreboding. I took a deep breath and, when I felt ready, banished the feeling and raised my eyelids.

What I saw left me petrified, trapped in a body too heavy to drag away even as my mind screamed at me to run.

“You weren’t ready yet. I knew it!” Evan cursed under his breath. “Ginevra warned me I should wait.”

I shook my head to recover from the shock. “N-no, everything’s fine,” I said, hoping to wipe the disappointment off his face. My reaction had clearly ruined the surprise for him—and his good mood.

Silently I thanked God Evan couldn’t read my mind and realize I was actually fighting back tears. Still, it was something I would have had to face sooner or later. I swallowed and stared at it again: the old lake house. I couldn’t take my eyes off the worn walls covered with red ivy. Not a day went by that I didn’t think about what had happened that night and not a day went by that I didn’t try to suppress the memory and bury it in the deepest reaches of my mind.

Staring at the house that looked so comforting now by the light of day, it was almost impossible to believe it was the place where I’d experienced my worst nightmare. The place I’d been tortured. The place I’d died. A shiver turned my back ice cold. Why had Evan brought me back there? Why inflict such cruelty?

“Gemma, I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m making you face the issue, but I’m also sure you already know the answer. At night I can sense your fears and I want to help you overcome them. You said yourself once that you can’t go on climbing over all the walls you find in your way—you need to destroy them to be able to say you’ve overcome the fears—or you’ll always end up expecting them whenever you turn around.” He paused. “Think you’re ready?”

I nodded, worried that if I tried to speak the words might catch in my throat.

“Come on,” he whispered, cautiously holding out his hand.

After a moment of uncertainty, I took it. My knees shook with the same intense terror I’d experienced months ago and thought I’d left behind. Reliving it was harder than I would have expected.

I climbed the first step and the contact with the wood triggered a chaotic stream of images that raced through my mind too quickly for me to grasp them. All I could see was blood, shards of glass, terror. And then that face . . . Faust’s eyes blinded by hatred, corroded by his thirst for revenge.

I thought I might faint.

Evan urged me forward, climbing the wooden steps to the front door with me. “The surprise isn’t over yet,” he whispered to reassure me, my hand clasped in his.

It was hard to breathe; I took deep gulps of air as if I were about to go underwater. The door opened by itself.

Inside, however, I didn’t find what I’d expected. What my eyes registered had no connection whatsoever to the difficult, painful memory I’d kept hidden in the darkest recesses of my mind. Everything was spick and span, as if that hellish night had never happened. There was no trace of the stage on which the violent battle had been enacted, first featuring me—tortured to a bloody pulp—and then Evan, who’d struggled to defend me and save my life until the curtain had finally fallen and I’d died.

I’d been given a second chance and I owed it all to Evan and his family.

Finding myself in that place again, reliving the memory, was the last thing I’d expected. But the light that shone inside the house gave it a new look, new possibilities. For a moment it didn’t even seem like the same abandoned structure I remembered with such bitterness. It was so different.

The dust had been swept away and the walls were no longer gray with age. The coral curtains seemed to glow in the light that filtered through them. Amazed, I let go of Evan’s hand and stepped forward, looking around. My action finally seemed to relax him; he smiled with relief and a glimmer of satisfaction.

Anything that might have reminded me of that night had been repaired. The floor was intact and the stair my foot had plunged through, leaving a gash in my flesh, had been fixed. Everything looked shiny and new. The windowpanes had been replaced, the roof mended, even the ceiling beam had been reinstalled. Everything was so perfect and orderly that for a second I almost thought I might have dreamed it all. It was just a comforting lie—I knew it—but it was comforting all the same.

“Thank you,” I whispered to Evan.

“I did my best. Actually, we all pitched in so you’d forget, Gemma—in the normal sense of the word, just to be clear. I know you’ll probably never be able to erase the memory completely, but I was hoping this might help.”

“It does,” I reassured him, holding back a pang of emotion, because it was the truth. “It’s like nothing ever happened in this house. Thank you, Evan. You’ve done something I thought was impossible.”

“We’ll make new memories here. Memories of
us
.” He smiled, lost in a thought all his own. “But don’t forget to thank Ginevra too!”

“I’ll remember. And thanks for helping me get over everything in the more traditional way too. You know what I mean.”

“You mean Simon. He would never have done that without your consent.”

“I think they’re two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, his power to summon any memory and read it through the eyes of the person who’s experienced it is fascinating, but I find the other aspect terrible.”

“Deleting memories is a painful process, but its effect is even worse. I agree with you that it’s terrible. Eliminating a part of your past is like leaving a hole in your mind, a gap that threatens to make you stumble eventually. Memories, even distant or seemingly inaccessible ones, are always there, just waiting for a scent, a gesture, a look, to unearth them from your subconscious. But when you delete them, the process is irreversible and, no matter how crazy it might seem, a part of you, a part of your personality, is wiped away forever. Every instant helps make us who we are. Our minds never stop and every thought is another step toward who we’ll become. Simon is very careful with his power. He only uses it in extreme cases, to erase a traumatic experience.”

“Like dying,” I said.

“Like dying,” he confirmed somberly.

“The grand piano!” I exclaimed, walking over to the instrument that my mind remembered as a crumpled heap. It was now intact.

Evan followed me, looking pleased. Feeling like a little girl looking at presents ready to be unwrapped, I ran my hand over its mahogany curves. A shaft of golden light reflected off its surface, making it glow. I rested my hand on the ivory keys, pressing one of them with my finger. The note that played was faint and echoed softly through the room, nothing at all like the out-of-tune senseless series of notes Peter and I would bang out when we were little kids.

“Do you play?” he asked, his voice more melodious than the piano note.

“No, but something tells me you do,” I said, looking at him skeptically.

Evan bowed his head, smiling at the veiled compliment, then raised the piano top and searched inside. Just as I was craning my neck to see what he was looking for he pulled out a violin. I stared at him, puzzled, but he didn’t give me the chance to speak. “It’s part of the surprise,” he said, looking amused at my expression of amazement. It was the same violin depicted in the family portrait in Evan’s room. I recognized it by the beautiful flower carved into its scroll. He saw me staring at it and stroked it with his fingertips.

“It’s an orchid. It was my mother’s favorite flower. Our housekeeper Edina would always place a fresh one on our piano. My mother had this violin crafted just for me so I would always remember her. For many years after my death she always kept it with her, and when she died I went back for it.”

“It’s beautiful,” I murmured.

He beamed. “I have an electric one too, but it gets on Ginevra’s nerves.”

“The one with the hole in the middle!” I exclaimed, remembering an unusually shaped instrument I’d seen beside the piano in their house. The wood was wine-colored and looked solid, but there was actually a hole in the middle of it.

“I like to keep up with the times,” he said with a wink, his smile softening. His eyes grew intense as he rested the violin on his shoulder.

I watched him in silence, fascinated. Evan tucked the violin under his chin, his gaze penetrating mine. For a moment I felt naked, as if he’d torn down every barrier between us and was reading me, reaching places not even I knew about. Our eyes, our minds, our souls were irremediably intertwined. He clasped the bow in his right hand and the whole room filled with sound, transporting me beyond the confines of reality.

The melancholy conveyed by Evan’s music was so intense it was almost tangible, a melodious testament to the pain he bore inside—pain he was revealing for the first time. He had closed his eyes with the first notes, drawn in by the stream of emotion, and as my skin quivered to the sweet, sad strains, my heart bled to see the suffering on his face. He was lost in a memory. His fingers moved quickly, striking the bow against the strings almost angrily in pursuit of that dark emotion. Seeing him vulnerable like that disoriented me. For the first time Evan looked defenseless, unprotected by the tough, impenetrable armor I was so accustomed to seeing him wear. He’d taken it off, inviting me closer. I’d relived with him the memory that most tormented him, and now that memory was taking shape, coming alive under his fingertips. Every tiny vibration that rose into the air seemed to return, striking him straight in the heart.