She ceased treading a track in his floor and halted the gross practice of mauling her finger. “I’m listening.”
“This whole time, you’ve been casting me as an innocent. Oh, poor Brian, skipping along, minding his own when some senseless hex stabs hooks into him. But what if that’s wrong? What if my own karma brought this about? I’ve lived a blessed life, Helen. I’ve gotten so lucky that it’s kept me up at night wondering when I’ll have to pay the piper. Wondering when it will all come crashing down, when I’ll owe some cosmic debt for enjoying a life that most men could never even dream of. Maybe this is it. My penance.”
She pressed fingertips to her skull, battling a headache born of equal measures denial and the wisdom bomb Brian dropped. “But you’re a good person. You don’t objectify women or abuse drugs or hurt people. You aren’t self-absorbed or greedy. You’re kind and funny and talented—”
“I’m not good, though, not compared to the people we don’t see, the people who fight in obscurity to make the world better. Me? I’m rich and famous, and I’ve made a ridiculous amount of money singing and playing guitar. Success and fame on my scale, we’re talking one in ten-million odds. If that. And I’m not bragging. I think about these existential things. I live in a palace on a hill while people on the other side of the world die of preventable diseases because they don’t have clean water. Do you want to know how my first wife died?”
No, but the doozy of a pivot seemed relevant. “Alright.”
He scooted to the edge of the bed, knuckles pale against his knees. “She was a fashion designer, at the top of her field. Janet was her name, and she got her start working as the wardrobe woman on one of our American tours. That’s where we met and fell in love. She was ambitious and talented. Fast forward to when she’s a powerhouse. An activist journalist reaches out to her, invites her on an investigative trip to Bangladesh. So she can tour one of the factories where her pieces were made. The third night, she calls home sobbing. Just broken. She’s describing girls who were Tilly’s age at the time, six, working the assembly lines from sunup to sundown. Crying for their mothers, wetting their pants because they weren’t allowed bathroom breaks. Some had stumps where their little fingers used to be.”
Tears stung Helen’s ducts, though she didn’t yet see the point of the tragic story. “That’s so sad.”
“The next day the sweatshop exploded. She was inside.”
Gauzy, crushing images of tears and fire and black smoke flooded Helen’s addled mind. “She died in there,” Helen concluded.
Brian nodded grimly. “Her and hundreds of others.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, Brian. I can tell that you loved her. To lose the mother of your child, too, and when Tilly was so young. I can’t imagine. It must have been hell.”
“Thank you. It was rough, though we managed. I went through my grief, my stages, did the therapy and support groups. In the midst of mourning my dead wife, shouting at God for taking her from me in this meaningless accident—and right after she’s had a revelation about the abuses inherent in her industry no less—I wondered if it was a cruel kind of design.” His tone was flat though severe, his face a mask of funeral stoicism.
Dismay spread from her middle, motor oil soiling her edges. If that’s how the hex was working on the macro level, humming along in a clockwork evil until a ticking hand decided it was time for someone to pay the fee on their fortune and balance some kind of mystical scale with blood, she had no clue how to win at such a cruel game of chance.
Brian cradled his head in both hands. “Maybe I deserve what’s coming to me. Perhaps my time is up.”
“Don’t say that.” Lame reply. But she lacked the tools to argue, for in this arena, the tidiness of the scientific method did not apply.
She sat down beside him and touched his thigh, for assurance of touch was all she could offer. Human closeness alone made for a paltry sum, but care counted.
His sigh was a portend. “I don’t think it’s bad to say it, though. I think it’s honest. And if it gets you to stop blaming yourself, I’m all for putting these dark thoughts out in the open. Consider it more information for us to work with. But I stand by my claim. I reject this idea that you’re the nasty, reckless witch and I’m the pure and clean male with a heart of gold who found himself ensnared in your treachery by no fault of his own. I reject this nonsense, this misogynistic notion that the original sin sticks to the woman.”
In a halfhearted return to humor and play, she tugged the collar of his robe. “Time to take this off and put on your ‘Feminist’ shirt. Or better yet, one that says ‘Eve was Framed.’”
He took her hand. “She was framed, no doubt about it. And I’m nowhere near perfect, but I try to be evolved and enlightened. But back to the serious note, let’s keep on being a team, okay? No more guilt dragging you down. Accept that I play some part in this. And hell, if magic is real, which it clearly is, there’s a reason I ended up caught in this curse. Maybe we’re meant to be together, and this just so happens to be the force in the universe that’s set on aligning our paths.”
She blew a loose piece of hair off her forehead. “I like the idea. Still, we shouldn’t have had sex.”
He pressed his forehead against her temple. “But it was so fucking good.”
Her laugh brought healing rain, rare respite. “Truth.”
“We’ll clean up this mess together, Helen. I swear. But
