Shafts of dying dusk illuminated the water through the willow vines. I ran my finger through the gravel on the bank, hoping if I ground my teeth enough the gritty taste in my chest would be abated. It was a feeling, a flavor, a force, all in one. I picked up a jagged rock, wet sand still clinging around its edges, and flung it into the dead water as hard as I could, and still the anger did not die.

Maximo Bleshemer Dillingsgate was one of those projects you loved to start but never finished. He had a way of opening up that made you absolutely certain you could fix him. But in the end, it was always the same: he was too much for me.

"Virginia, you said you wouldn't be angry with me," a cool voice sidled up behind me. That stupid, sauntering voice.

"Perhaps we should talk about the things that you said then," I suggested, letting my growl drop so low in my chest I doubted he could hear my words. Though perhaps he didn't need to.

He sat down with one hand still in his pocket. Always hiding something. "You know I wouldn't have told you I'd lied to you if I knew this is how you'd take it."

My skin itched where he was near it. "Is that supposed to make me feel better?" I asked, feeling like a short rope in a game of tug-of-war between incredulity and vexation.

He chuckled softly out his nose. "No, I suppose it isn't." He looked down, and picked at a clump of vegetation by his leg, black watch glinting in the bronze sunset.

I stood so abruptly I startled myself.

I shouldn't press him. Good things never came of that.

I stared over the pond, tracing the drunken trails of fireflies who were just beginning to find themselves in the mirror of the water's surface. It would've calmed me. Any other day it would have been my balm, my tonic.

But these were his waters. And I was already suffocating in his pool of lies.

I whirled. "You told me I could trust you, Max! You told me that on the day I was dying!"

His surprise melted into indignation, swaggering eyes affronted. "It was what a dying girl needed to hear!"

"How can you say that? How can you sit there and say that like... like it was nothing?" My face felt on fire.

"Listen, I saved your life. Doesn't that count for anything?"

I hated Max Dillingsgate in that moment. I was standing over him screaming and even with a low whisper, he still had more power than I ever would.

I straightened. I would not be brought to stoop before him any longer. I swallowed. "Saved it for what, I wonder?"

I stepped nimbly around him and strode back toward the house.

I felt him follow me and I disgusted myself for wanting him to. He caught my arm halfway through the evening-cooled grasses, perpetually wet around my knees.

"Wait— please— I didn't mean it."

"Didn't mean what?" I demanded, leaning away from his grasp on my arm.

"Look, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I had to lie. But I did have to. There are things that I— huge things, crazy things that I... I never want you to have the torture of knowing."

I tilted my eyes up to the faint, timid stars to keep the water in, but it only made the tears spill out faster.

His strong fingers left my arm, but I was caught to deep in the mud to move now. He walked around me to look me in the eye.

"Please." He frowned. "Don't leave." His watch beeped on the hour. I looked past his shoulder to the masterpiece of architecture looming between the trees. Oh, how I'd loved it here. It had been too good to be true. I should have suspected.

"How can I stay?" I felt my face carve out another trench in my brow, between my eyes, around my mouth. Distorted with agonized hopelessness. "This place is just... an ocean of lies that you pour into every day. Don't think I didn't notice about the butler, Max. I'm... I'm drowning here."

Max stared at me with emotionally charged mental calculus. At last a sad, helpless laugh broke out of him. "People live in water, you know. Mermaids... that lady in the King Arthur story..."

"Those aren't people, Max," I whispered. "That's fantasy. And I can't live in your fiction anymore."

He stiffened, and I pushed past him, bumping into him with my shoulder a little.

"Take Pawsten with you," he called after me, and in spite of myself, I glanced back. He faced the pond, hands in his pockets. The last thing I heard him mutter was, "He always balked at the waves."