RUINED BY DESIGN

The means to an end

The gates had opened before we arrived, not when we pulled up, nor when my mother reached for the intercom but before, as the car rounded the last bend, like something had been watching the road, like it already knew about our arrival.

I didn't say anything, when we made our way inside, I noticed the staff didn't meet my eyes.

Every one of them without exception. They all brought their eyes down and gave short answers to every question asked. I told myself it was professional deference for four days before I stopped believing it, it was slowly driving me crazy.

Fifth morning, early, I found Elspeth alone in the kitchen, face completely unguarded, and she looked like a woman who had been carrying something for so long she'd stopped remembering what it felt like not to.

When she heard me, the mask immediately came back on, but I had already seen.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"Perfectly fine, Miss Cole." She answered with a fake smile and moved over to the kettle, signaling the end of our conversation over. I stood in the doorway and thought, nobody in this house is fine, not one of them. It felt like they knew something I didn't, and of course they probably did, hey've been here longer and.

***

He came back on the fourth night. I heard the car at eleven and when he came out, his footsteps on the floor, the one of a man who owned every surface he walked on. Then silence.

At two in the morning I opened my door to stretch my legs because I couldn't sleep, the waves had been making too much noise. And there he was standing at the end of the corridor, in the shadow, he was still fully dressed which was weird(not like a nightwear would have been any better), he had a glass in one hand, and he looked straight at me like he'd hoped or should I say, expected me to appear.

"I couldn't sleep," I said in a startled tone. I shouldn't have been said anything.

"The sea is loud at first," he said with the same voice as when I first met him, "you get used to it."

I didn't say another word, I hurriedly turned, went back to my room, locked the door and stood in the dark. I had to tell myself it was nothing, even though deep within me, I knew that was a lie.

Why would he be standing there by that time?

I wanted to go ask him, so I unlocked the door and hurriedly locked it back, I knew I was being irrational.

***

He found me in the library on a Tuesday, he was supposed to be in London, but to my surprise, he wasn't, if I had known he was around, I wouldn't have come to the library. He walked straight to my table and sat in the chair opposite mine like gravity had put him there, and we read in silence for twenty minutes and I almost forgot to be afraid of him – almost.

"You've been reading my annotations," he said without looking up.

"They're in the margins of everything."

"And?"

"You wrote too convenient next to the confession scene in Crime and Punishment."

He looked up, "confession serves the confessor," he said, "not the other person, it's control dressed as vulnerability."

I stared at him, "that's a disturbing thing to believe."

"It's an accurate thing to believe."

He went back to his book and I stayed very still and understood with absolute clarity that he hadn't been talking about Dostoevsky at all.

After that Tuesday, one day went by before the roses started.

One dark red one with its stem, them I began to find them in different places each time like he was trying to tell me something, from the kitchen counter, to the library windowsill, and once outside my bedroom door on the stone ledge like something left in the night.

I didn't mention them to my mother, and I didn't even know if I should have.

I've thought about that since, and the honest answer is that some part of me already knew they were for me specifically, and some part of me wasn't ready to give that to anyone else yet.

That should have told me everything, he knew exactly what he was doing.

The photograph was a Sunday, I had ventured into to the wrong drawer, looking for a charger, and there it was, it was printed photograph of me at a coffee shop table, reading, with the sunlight in my hair, and the green jacket I bought in Edinburgh and lost in Vienna on. I had no memory of this moment, not even a memory of anyone being there.

I turned it over and saw a month on it.

March, Edinburgh,

Written in his small and precise handwriting with the same ink from the library margins.

Edinburgh was eighteen months before he met my mother.

I put it back exactly where I found it and walked upstairs, sat on the edge of my bed, and stayed very still while everything I'd been filing away without looking at began, slowly and without mercy, to open. I was right about not feeling right about him, he was too good to be true, and I couldn't forget the question he had asked me when I said mom was lucky the first night I'd met him.

"Is that what you think?"

That night at dinner he poured my wine before I asked, and when I looked up he was already looking somewhere else, and my mother was talking about the wedding flowers, and the candles were burning low, and I sat in the warm light of that beautiful dining room and felt, for the first time, the specific terror of understanding that I had walked in here thinking I was a visitor.

I wasn't a visitor, I was the reason, and my mother was just the means to end – me.