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Lonely As F*CK

Dev, Later That Afternoon

I watch Lily from the Library Window, walking in the west gardens. She always walks there; it's where Ashe proposed to her.

I ask Lewis to make me a pitcher of anything three-quarters gin, and I carry it and a glass out to the west gardens because, like Lily, if find the castle is not big enough for my unhappiness. I wander among the fall flowers, but she has disappeared.  Eventually, I make my way down to the greenhouses, which aren't far from the lads' apartment block. I wander through the rows of orchids, and I see the exact flower from which my wedding boutonniere was probably culled. Rare and priceless bouquets and boutonnieres made from the hothouse flowers of Mallerton airlifted to the Castle Swain in Scotland was one of our wedding gifts from the Duke and Duchess.

I make my way past three large banana plants to find myself nearly running into Lily, who is standing before a section of very beautiful lilies—a shade of blue-white so unusual they almost look silver. Their dramatic spotting is not quite black. It's a burgundy so deep it's nearly the color of drying blood.

This is not the first time I have found her here, crying over these flowers. They are a unique species, that only exists here at Mallerton. Randall's father had cultivated them at some point years ago, when Ashe and Lily were in college, at Ashe's request. The story goes that Ashe waited a number of years for the flowers to be propagated and sewn into gorgeous blankets in the west garden, and the first year that this beautiful and delicate species of lily bloomed in mass at Mallerton—that was the time that he took her to the gardens and declared that his love for her was as rare as these lilies that existed nowhere else on earth. He proposed to her among the lilies that he'd had changed from nature to be her signature flower--The Lily of Mallerton. He promised her they could be harvested in a season or two to decorate the Mallerton chapel for their wedding.

They don't bloom anymore in the gardens. Lily asked my father to have the new gardener dig them all up, after the fire. But the gardener wouldn't destroy them entirely, not after all that work to Randall's father undertook to cultivate a new varietal. So she's here again, crying among the few remaining plants that live in the greenhouse.

Lily, for all her professional competence and her beautiful armor, is as delicate as a hothouse flower. Mallerton is all she's ever known. It's her soil and her air and her sun. Mallerton is truly the only place she's equipped to survive.

I put down the gin and the glass and draw her into my arms. She is not here crying over her break-up with Knox. She's here crying over the reason for her break-up with Knox. And Ashe is the reason. It's been five years since he died, but Ashe is still always her reason for everything.

Maybe he'll be her reason forever. Maybe Bridge will be mine.

She holds on to me tight. Her sobs don't increase, because she's far too used to the pain she feels. 

"Does it get better or do you still miss him like you did at first?" I ask her.

Her head rests on my shoulder. In a childlike, detached voice, she presses a hand to her head, "The terrible pain—the desperate thoughts in my head that hurt—they are all but gone now. I don't think about how scared he was, or what his death was like, or how long my life has to be without him anymore." She drops her hand to her heart. "But the sadness grows. I try to fill myself up with other things, but the sadness grows."

I hug her tighter to me. "Ashe would not want that for you, Lily. He loved you. Sixteen years old. All three of us, smoking out in that damn secret passage, remember?"

She laughs quietly in remembrance.

"Even then, I could see he loved you," I continued. "It was a first and pure and rare love, dear one. But he would want you to be happy now. He would want you to find another love. A love to give you a home and children. He would want you to live a full life, Lily."