Rosemary was back to understanding nothing. She had been hopeful about the direction her brother and sister-in-law's relationship was progressing, more hopeful than she had been since the day she met Scarlett, and now …..

Seemingly out of the blue, Rhett had ordered the carriage, and had announced he was taking his mother, Ella and Garreth to the plantation. He had ordered rather than suggested that she stay behind, to 'support Scarlett', whatever that meant. And Scarlett had had a dazed, deadened look in her face that Rosemary had never seen before. The departure was hasty, he gave his mother no time to pack more than essentials, and they left within the hour, Ella looking flustered and only Garreth looking unconcerned, trying to blow on a small wooden flute Rhett had whittled for him and seemingly oblivious to the swirl of emotions around him.

Scarlett had paced around the house, and Rosemary had followed her, unsure what her role was. She wondered what had happened to provoke this sudden departure. Rosemary watched her stop in front of the fireplace, and in sudden impulse, pick up a small vase, throwing it with all her might against the wall.

Then she had convulsed in sobs. "The bastard…..the no good rotten ….cad…."

Rosemary came up behind her, and hugged her close.

"Scarlett. What on earth did he tell you?"

"He said …" and in front of her eyes, she relived the horror of that conversation. But no words tumbled out.

And Rosemary just held her.

-88-

"When I left", he had begun, "I spent three months in Charleston and Savannah trying to forget. Bonnie, you, us, our entire miserable life together. Whenever I started to feel anything I found … a way to drown it out. I wasn't particular about the methods, but alcohol and women proved most reliable. I thought I would continue on the path of decadence until death claimed me, which I hoped would be sooner rather than later."

"But when I came back to see you I realized I had been fooling myself in thinking I still had the choice to make a clean break. I believed your obstinacy in pursuing your goal would damage your own health, and, what was worse, the health of the children. I had also been away long enough to realize that, to me, it did not matter where I was. If my physical presence in our household was what was required to protect you from an obsession that was harmful to you and others and that I had had no small part in creating - I was willing to pay that price."

"I had no intention of giving up my …. particular ways of suppression when I came back", he had continued." I can tell you, tell myself that I never promised to remain faithful but the truth is I never offered you the choice. When you insisted on accompanying me to Savannah and Charleston and even Europe I found it more difficult to get away when I needed to."

His words had rained down on her like a thousand tiny knives. And he had lied to her this entire time. "You went to see …. that woman ….even after you came back?" Scarlett had breathed, still not quite comprehending, grasping at the straw of the known in that sea of confusion.

"Scarlett." He had staring down on his hands. "I haven't seen Belle Watling in ages. Even Atlanta has much more sophisticated, and much more discreet, establishments these days. Why do you think that you've never heard even a rumor about any of this until today? But it doesn't matter. I can give you all the details of place and time and what went on exactly but I can promise you you will never be able to get the images out of your head. It's bad enough that I will have to live with them."

Sudden comprehension had come into her dull eyes. "The business trips. The political meetings. And you always seemed to have something to do so you could leave me for a while. And…" she had whispered, painfully, "Garreth ….."

"Scarlett". He had looked at her then, and his eyes were black holes into which she would fall at any second. "There is no excuse …. nothing to explain away what I did. I told myself having a baby would make you happier, that you deserved to have something of me that was actually alive, but the truth is I hoped having Garreth would distract you. Not just from your pursuit of me, as you have figured out, but from what I did. I was confident by that time that I would never allow myself to feel anything again and wasn't risking anything if you had another baby. I felt it might even be beneficial for my freedom of movement and mind. To put it bluntly, I hoped he would tie you down for a few years. And he did." He had paused, for the briefest moment. "I know there is no excuse for my actions, except that I was truly dead inside. Wade and Ella were in a good place. They were happy. I thought another child would make you happy and give me freedom, and I was willing to everything in my power to give the child a stable home. Everything except …"

"All this time," Scarlett had repeated painfully, "all this time, you've ….."

"Not for a while." His face had been drawn, empty. There had been a strange hollow echo in his voice that reminded Scarlett of other times, a man coming to the end of his reckoning and finding there is nothing left. "It ended when you were at Tara with Ella. Garreth was ….about two. It was late at night, almost eleven, and I was ready to go down the stairs to go out….. when I …..saw him. He must have climbed out the crib and was standing there at the top of the stairs, in his nightshirt, and clutching a blanket. "Don't go" he said. And he looked ….. so much like Bonnie in the dark. And I felt for an insane moment that he knew everything about me, all my failings as a father and as a husband, and that I had brutally calculated his arrival on this earth for my own ends. Not since Bonnie's death have I felt such shame. I knew even then that it was madness, that he was simply a baby who had woken up in the middle of the night. I put him back in his bed and he fell asleep almost instantly. But I couldn't leave that night and I haven't gone since. It was easier than I thought, because I had gotten so used to being numb that it wasn't even much of a hardship, it had been more of a habit I couldn't let go of.

And that's the way it remained until I fell. That night, when you came into the room - and you …touched me." Scarlett's eyes, filled with unshed tears, opened wide – he had been awake. Somehow, that was almost worse than all the other terrible confessions he was making, this last humiliation to her hopeless love. "I don't know if it was that or if my head had really been scrambled but I started…..feeling something again that night. At first it was only agony - the grief, the pain- and I couldn't suppress them anymore. I couldn't numb them either because every time I saw Garreth I remembered the shame of that night and it seemed worse, somehow, than anything else I could possibly endure. So I stayed. So when you ….I took you, and you didn't run, and then ….. somehow ..it got easier. And it occurred to me that that is the one thing I hadn't tried, is to feel all the emotions and see if there is something on the other side.

The next day, when we talked, I realized one other thing that I hadn't even considered before. That I, in my selfishness, had…. trapped you, by giving you Garreth. Had you had …that realization about your love wearing out, without him, you could have left me. Now, you no longer had that choice. And I repaid you by lying to you.

And then ….." he had continued, "After the torrent was spent, I ….felt alive again. It sounds trite, but …..when you've been dead for so long feeling alive, even a little, is a miracle. And ….I realized that I desired you. I'd thought I'd forgotten what that is. You have no idea, Scarlett, what that means to a man who thought he would never want anything or anyone again. It was so tempting to just …..follow that desire and start over. You would have made it easy for me, you would have told yourself that I had finally come to my senses and never known what lay behind it. But I would have known. And eventually, that would have destroyed everything again. If I start lying to you now, eventually I will start lying to you about other things as well. And I can't do that again.

There had been a deep silence, the silence of caskets in houses of mourning. "Where do we go from here?" Scarlett had asked, mechanically. She felt empty. As if every possible feeling had been carved out of her and left nothing but gaping holes. She saw, for the first time in her life, the temptation of the abyss, the blandness that Rhett had lost himself in. How pleasant it would be to simply feel nothing.

"I don't know, Scarlett. Kissing you last night was the sweetest thing that happened to me in years but I knew even then that it was just one last deceit. I am not even sure what I can offer you if you … want to remain my wife in more than in name. I feel the need to hold you, to touch you, and I want to make love to you so much it hurts but I am not sure if I will ever be able to feel the kind of love again that you once wanted. I could lie to you now and maybe you would forgive me but I can't. The only thing I can promise to be honest. I can promise to come to you instead if you can bear it, if I'm afraid, or in pain. I want you to come to me if you're angry, or devastated, even if I caused it. I don't know if that'll be enough, if we can build on that or if simply too much has been broken." He had drawn a deep breath, his black eyes measuring her, measuring himself as a horse trader would measure a pack of not very promising draft animals hitched to a mountainous load. And he had smiled, with terrible sadness. "I'm afraid you will have to make that choice."

Disclaimer: They belong to MM.

Owwie, painful chapter. One more left.