The Mark of Chance••√•• Pure Love

chapitre : 3

Dinner was a masterpiece of cold sophistication. Pink, bleeding duck breasts resting on a bed of olive oil mash, green beans so perfectly aligned they looked like a miniature army. Léna had prepared everything herself, of course. Each dish was an assertion, further proof of her absolute mastery over her domain.

The conversation, however, was a minefield.

"So, Marina, still single?" Léna attacked, sipping her Bordeaux. She was smiling, but her eyes were assessing, judging.

Marina felt the hairs on her arms stand up. "Still, yes. The market isn't very strong these days."

Chris, sitting across from her, looked down at his plate. He had barely touched his food.

"You mustn't be so negative," Léna continued. "Perhaps you should lower your standards a little. Perfect men don't exist, you know." Her gaze slid towards Chris for a nanosecond. A deadly flick. "You have to know how to compromise with reality."

Chris raised his head. "Marina's standards are her own business, Léna."

The silence that followed was heavier than the cast iron serving dish. Léna set her glass down with a sharp little click.

"Of course they're her business. I was just trying to help. It's obvious she's not happy, all alone in her little studio."

"I'm not unhappy," Marina defended, her throat tight. She felt Chris's gaze on her, a warm, attentive presence amid the surrounding cold.

"Yes, you are," Léna insisted, deaf to the protest. "We can see it. You have that... empty look. As if you're waiting for life to fall into your lap without you lifting a finger."

Like you, you mean? Marina thought, bitterly. Like you landed Chris, without effort?

"Léna, that's enough," Chris said, his voice firmer.

"What? What's enough? I'm worried about my sister, that's all! I don't want to see her end up a bitter old maid with three cats. Sometimes you have to seize opportunities, even if they aren't perfect. Even if the man isn't exactly the prince charming you imagined."

She was staring at Chris as she said this, a tense smile on her face. The message was transparent, cruel. You weren't prince charming either, but I 'seized' you.

Chris turned very pale. His fingers tightened around his knife. "I think you should stop with the wine, Léna."

The fuse was lit.

"Stop the wine?" she cried, her voice rising an octave. "That's your argument? Always avoiding conflict, Chris! Always burying yourself in your silence! Like a child!"

"Shouting won't solve anything."

"And what does your muteness solve, huh? Tell me! Does it solve the fact that you spend your weekends tinkering in the garage instead of talking to your wife? Does it solve the fact that you look at me as if I were a problem to be solved?"

Marina made herself small, wishing she could disappear. She stared at the pink streaks of her duck, suddenly nauseous. Chris's gaze met hers. It wasn't anger she read in it. It was shame. A deep shame, mixed with a distress so raw it took her breath away. He looked at her as if she were the only person in the world who could understand the torment he was living.

"I don't look at you as a problem, Léna," he said, his voice strangled. He was trying to keep his composure, but a vein throbbed at his temple.

"Then how do you look at me? Because sometimes, I wonder! You're here, physically, but you're never really present. You're always somewhere else. In your head. Thinking about what? About who?"

The "who" fell like a guillotine. Marina's heart lurched erratically in her chest. For a moment, a wild, terrifying intuition flashed through her mind. And the look Chris had been giving her all evening... that loaded, intense, melancholic gaze... suddenly took on a dizzying significance.

"I'm not thinking about anyone, Léna. Stop your delusions."

"My delusions? My delusions! You think I don't see anything? You think I'm blind?"

She turned abruptly to Marina, her eyes bright with furious tears.

"And you? What do you think of all this? Of this ghost husband I have? You sit there, so quiet, observing. Judging, perhaps? Telling yourself that your big sister who has everything isn't so happy after all? Does that reassure you?"

Marina opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She was petrified, caught between her sister's fury and Chris's desperate silence.

It was then that Chris slammed both hands flat on the table. The gesture was so sudden the cutlery trembled.

"LÉNA!"

The word exploded in the room, v*****t, hoarse. A word he must never say. Léna was left gaping, stunned. Chris stood up, pushing his chair back with a horrible scrape on the parquet floor.

"That's enough," he repeated, his voice low and vibrating. "That's enough now. You don't get to speak to her like that. You don't get to speak to anyone like that."

He was breathing heavily, nostrils flared. His gaze went from Léna, mesmerized, to Marina, frightened. And in that gaze, when it settled on her, there was no more shame. There was a form of fierce protection, a painful determination.

"I... I need some air," he murmured.

And he turned on his heel, leaving the dining room to disappear into the darkness of the hall.

The silence that followed was worse than the argument. A thick, guilty silence, filled with all the unspoken things that had just burst into the open. Léna, livid, stared at the space where her husband had stood. Then, very slowly, she turned to Marina. Her eyes no longer held tears of anger. They were cold, hard as steel.

"You see?" she whispered, in a voice so low and venomous that Marina shivered. "You see what I live with?"

But Marina saw only one thing. She saw Chris's gaze. That gaze which, at the height of the storm, had settled on her like an anchor. A refuge. A recognition.

And amid the smell of cooling duck and spilled wine, amid the ruins of that perfect dinner, a single thought whirled in her mind, startling and impossible:

He doesn't look at me like a brother-in-law. He doesn't even look at Léna like his wife. He looks at me... as if I were the reason for everything.

The house was colder than ever. And for the first time, Marina knew, with a visceral certainty, that this cold did not come from the stone walls. It came from her sister's heart. And perhaps, a terrifying intuition, from her own.