Wages of Fear/C6 Colin
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Wages of Fear/C6 Colin
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C6 Colin

She brought the platter heaped with feta cheese, tomatoes, and red onions and set it on the table on the veranda. She sat down beside Yeo and poured herself a glass of wine.

They began to eat.

“Do you like my tomatoes?” she asked after a while.

“They are better than last summer,” he told her.

She smiled proudly.

They were her tomatoes.

He had said they were better than last summer for so many summers before that he couldn’t remember when the ritual had started.

“They are good for preventing prostate cancer,” she said.

“I’m not worried about prostate cancer, Ilina.”

She held her head in her hand.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Yeo,” she said.

“I’m sure it was well-intended, love.”

It was she who had driven him to such a strict vegetarian diet years ago.

He followed her directives to the letter, hoping his cooperation would bring her closer to him.

But it was always their separation that made it work. They never lived together. She didn’t want to.

She preferred to be alone with her brushes and paints in the Villa.

Even after Collin was born, she didn’t want him to live with her. Collin spent the summers with Yeo and the rest of the time with Ilina.

And then Collin had hung himself. At sixteen.

“I feel lonelier now,” she said. “Yet, I have even less desire for people.”

“Will you miss me, Ilna?”

He was half-serious. He was never sure how much she loved him.

Even in their greatest moments of passion, he was never sure how much she loved him.

“I am always missing you, Yeo. I am always missing Roland. You are the only two people who ever mattered to me.”

“You are always missing me?”

“That wall in front of my heart, as you so often like to remind me, is not necessarily hard on the inside. It only appears that way to the rest of the world.”

It was the most open thing she had ever said to him.

He had spent a lifetime circling her masks to interpret her real meaning, and often did, but it was as if his death had opened her heart in a way that his life never could.

“I’m touched,” he said.

“You have always mistaken me for a mystery, Yeo.”

“Perhaps I needed to.”

She filled his glass with wine and they raised their glasses in a toast.

“Yes, I will miss you, Yeo,” she said.

Then the tears streamed down her face.

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