Chapter Text
In some ways, it's always been likely that Eve is going to die first. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, though.
She takes the news in a very Eve-like fashion. “Fuck,” she says.
The doctor smiles, a thin, apologetic smile, watching her like he’s waiting for it to hit. Like he’s waiting for the inevitable, the crying, the screaming, the rending of clothes.
No one wants to be 56 and told they have less than a year to live.
No rending or tearing for Eve, though. She asks a lot of questions. Symptoms. Signs. End of life preparation. Eve likes to know. She wants a map.
She shakes the doctor’s hand at the end. “Thanks,” she says. “Well. You know. I’m sure you’ll save the next one.”
Later she admits to me that she doesn’t know why she said that.
We walk out.
“No,” I say, stopping in the carpark.
She looks at me with a rictus grin. “How do you think I feel?”
I don’t care, to be honest. Right now, I don’t care how anyone but me feels, because I feel awful. Everything inside me hurts, I think my stomach is trying to chew its way out of my body.
“Eve, no.”
She walks to the car, unlocks it. I bought the car and she complained it was flashy and impractical, but she likes it now, I can tell. She’s admitted before that getting behind the wheel makes her feel like a celebrity.
I’m not following her into the car. I’m just standing in a carpark waiting for the world to fix itself. She looks back and sighs. “Sweetheart, it’s cancer. Bad cancer, the kind they can’t do anything about. Okay?”
I shake my head. It is not okay by a wide margin of error. It is not possible for Eve to die. Eve can’t die. Eve can’t die. Eve can’t—
She comes back, wraps her hand around my wrist and that breaks the loop. She slides her hand down, fingers through mine and they are warm and solid and real, Eve is warm and solid and real. I am solid and real.
She tugs gently and I follow. She manhandles me into the car, then slides into the driver’s seat and bursts into tears.
“Fuck,” she says again, with more force than before and slams her hand on the steering wheel hard enough to hurt.
I reach for her and it’s awkward, but she manages to lean on me across the dash, slump on my shoulder and I rock her and press my face into her hair and call her stupid pet names in French while she cries.
She rubs her hand across her face. “Oh no, I’m getting your designer shirt all wet,” she tries and all I can do is look at her.
Eve, stop. Say this is a joke. Tell me it isn’t happening.
I curl away from her, against the window, and after a minute, she drives. I watch London roll by, an empty city full of empty people. Nothing here matters, I could watch it burn to the ground and be happy to see it go.
We get to our house. “The weird thing is,” Eve says, toying with her wedding ring—it’s a bad habit, she’s almost lost it that way twice. “I don’t feel like I’m dying.”
I don’t, can’t, won’t answer that. I walk into the house.
I break things.
Things I shouldn’t break. Framed pictures from when we went on our honeymoon to Paris. I had to make Eve be in the pictures. She’s cute in sunglasses and, of course, I look amazing. Stupid trinkets other people gave us. A potted plant I know Eve likes, sitting in a window. Dirt and shards of pottery, all over our floor.
“Hey, come on,” Eve says and I’m not even sure how long she’s been there, standing in the doorway, watching me smash our things like I haven’t in years. She spreads her hands when I look at her, gives me a wan smile and—
And I know, okay?
I should be nice and comforting because she’s dying. I should stop making it about me.
Except of course it is about me. I am dying too. I am choking. I can barely breathe. There is not enough air in the room.
Eve, please.
It is useless to beg someone not to die.
I throw our wedding photo to the ground, and stalk into the bedroom, throw myself onto the bed.
I wish I could cry. I lost the trick of it years ago, the spontaneous, natural kind that other people, even Eve, do all the time. I can do it on command, but not now.
Not that it would help. But it sounds nice.
The bed shifts and her fingers are running through my hair and something in my chest squeezes tight, like I might cry, but I don’t, I never do.
Arms wrap around me from behind and I roll into her, I’m shaking, it’s so cold, this isn’t happening, we can fix it, we have to be able to fix it.
Even touching her isn’t helping, not like it normally does, because touching her is the awareness of how much I need to touch her. “Eve, please,” I finally say it out loud. “Please?”
She presses her nose into my cheek. “Sweetheart, I can’t fix this. I would if I could. I wanted to spend the rest of a much, much longer life with you too, I promise.”
“I do not want you to die.”
“You and me both.”
“There could be a treatment…”
Eve shakes her head. “I’m not spending the last year of my life letting people pump experimental drugs into me to try and stretch one miserable year out to five even more miserable years. If there was any chance, any real chance, I’d do it. But it doesn't sound like there is. So we're both going to have to live with that.” She pauses, laughs. "Well. You know. Temporarily."
"Stop," I say. Normally, I like her morbid sense of humor. I like when Eve makes jokes about death. But not about hers.
She cups my cheek, kisses me on the forehead, then softly on the lips.
“You do it,” she says.
“What?”
“You heard the doctor, I’m going to get so much worse.” Her voice is far away, like she’s talking about someone else. She sounds calm. I know she’s not. “I don’t want that. I don’t want to die drooling in a hospital bed, having forgotten my own name.”
“So you do it. Before it gets too bad. Kill me.”
I look at her (she’s lost weight, she’s still so pretty) and she smiles, grim and determined. She’ll get her way on this, she always does when she really wants something, so why fight about it?
“Yes, Eve.”
She kisses me again, soft and sweet. “Thank you. Also, please clean up that mess in the living room. I’m dying, I shouldn’t have to do chores.” She laughs like that’s funny and I want to strangle her.
I know, okay? I do know. She’s scared and sad and grieving too. But I don’t care. It hurts too much to care.
I don’t get off the bed and eventually, muttering, she does clean it up—or maybe smashes more things, there’s some crashing from the other room I don’t get up to investigate.
She makes dinner. “Are you going to eat?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“I am. I’ve got to have something to throw up later.”
She eats, I assume—I can hear the TV in the other room. She comes back to bed and strokes me, lays on me, her hair tickles my cheek.
“Hey,” she says. “Let’s travel. Where do you want to go? I figure I’ve got another couple of months, if I’m lucky, before I can’t.”
“Eve, stop.”
She sighs and flops onto the bed next to me and her not touching me is infinitely worse, so I crawl on her, into the circle of her arms, nestle against her.
“You are really not taking this well, huh,” she murmurs.
I shake my head. I can’t explain, but I think she knows. There is a thing Eve does to my brain that no one else does. It is the difference between assuming you are alive because other people tell you that you are and knowing it.
When Eve is here, I know I am alive.
“You want to do it together?” she muses. “Get really dramatic? Murder-suicide?”
Oh.
Yes.
“Yes,” I say, and feel something relax, something ease. The answer was there all along. I can just die with Eve.
I lean up to kiss her, all concerns gone and she pulls back, looks at me with alarm. “Hey,” she says. “That was supposed to be a really macabre joke.”
I shake my head. “I want to.”
“Too fucking bad,” she says. “You’re not allowed to die.”
I snort, amused. “Eve, you cannot stop me.”
She searches my face, decides by whatever she sees there that I’m serious. “Please?” She leans up and kisses me, like she does when she’s trying to be cute and persuasive.
I could write a book about what it feels like when Eve kisses me. I am not going to. That is mine, all for me. All you need to know is it is very, very good.
“No,” I say when she stops and then kiss her again.
If I can never kiss Eve again, I might as well die.
“Villanelle,” she complains. I’m feeling so much better. My hands slide under her clothes, against her skin and she sighs. “I don’t want you to die.”
“Then live,” I say and she shoves at me, and I catch her wrists and it’s not really a fight, it’s foreplay that looks a little like a fight, and when it’s done, she’s breathless and pinned under me and we have sex.
It’s very good sex, too. If you were wondering.
Then she throws up—she’s been doing that a lot lately. Before she got the diagnosis, she would laugh and say, “Maybe I’m pregnant.”
But we both knew something was wrong.
I pull her hair back while she throws up and bring her water and then she cries on the floor of the bathroom while I hold and rock her.
“It will be okay,” I say, because that is one of the things you can say when comforting someone, even if it is not true.
“Please live,” she whispers. “Come on, baby, do it for me.”
I preen her hair—Eve has amazing hair. “You do not want that. You know what I get like when you are gone for a few days. I would be so much worse if you were gone forever.” I don’t know why I am arguing this with logic, but sometimes Eve does like to argue. Maybe it will make her feel better. “I would start killing people again.”
“Fuck people,” she snarls with a savagery that delights me and I giggle on purpose so she knows I’m amused.
“I will kill some people first, okay? Just for you.”
She shoves me, but it isn’t a bad mental image. Eve, with a pile of bodies surrounding her.
Except I have a hard time imagining her dead. Even in my imagination, she just looks pissed off.
It’s a very cute look on Eve.
“You’ve got to do all the after stuff, you know. Funeral, all of it.“
“Not if I’m dead,” I point out.
“Hey, asshole, I am your wife. You are going to get up, dressed in some ridiculous outfit, and give a really sad speech at my funeral. You can’t get out of that one.”
I make a face at her. “You do not want me to. I will be very mean.”
“Nope. Nice speech about how amazing I was. That’s the least you can do.”
When I have killed people in the past, they begged. I always wondered why. I was going to kill them, I was generally very clear that I was going to kill them, so it was silly of them, the way they kept going on and on, asking me not to, as though it would change anything.
I understand now. I am teasing Eve about how I will reveal all of her darkest secrets in a speech at her funeral. And I am begging, even though it will not change anything.
We go to bed, and lay in the dark without sleeping. “Are you going to miss me?” Eve asks, while I lay curled around her, feeling her breathe.
“Yes, Eve, I am going to miss you.”
“Remember to pay the bills. Water the plants.”
”Eve, stop.”
“Sorry.” Her voice is choked with tears. “It’s just, I really thought—you know, I would have been okay with 70. I was really hoping for 80 plus, but 70-something, that’s a respectable number. 56 is a little—it’s a little low, you know?”
“Yes,” I say. There is not an age I can imagine it being okay for Eve to die at. But I do know. “I wish it were me.”
“Oh god, don’t say that,” she laughs. “I’d be freaking out so bad, you can’t imagine.”
“What would you do?”
“Uh. Probably make you try all those experimental treatments. But you’re younger and, well, I’ve seen your diet, so maybe not healthier, but—it’s different.”
“It is not.”
Eve pauses. “…No, I guess it’s not. But I don’t want to, so thank you for not making me do that. I mean. I’ll look. If there’s anything with real promise out there, I’ll do it, I promise. I don’t want to—“ she chokes on the word and I wrap around her. “I don’t want to die,” she whispers, clinging. “I don’t want to die.”
I know she is begging, too.
The next day, Eve is moody, emotional. She got like this even before she was dying, I am used to it. She throws her arms around my neck, laughing, but it is the way people laugh when they are about to cry.
“Be good when I’m gone, okay?”
I shake my head, touching her hair. She has such good hair. “No, Eve.”
“Hey, come on.” She kisses me, giggles against my lips. “You can do it. You’ve had years of practice.”
I push my fingers through her hair at the roots and shake my head. If I am being honest, I do not know what I will be like without her, but I do not think it will be anything that could be described as good.
“Don’t make me worry,” she instructs.
“You will be dead.”
“I mean now.”
“I thought you did not care about what I do to other people.”
“I’m talking about you. Don’t make me worry about you. ...Hey, I did it. I never got boring. That’s what, almost 14 years, and you never got tired of me. Pretty good, huh?”
I was doing all right until then. Until I have to think about all the anniversaries we don’t get to have, all the stupid little things I don’t get to do with her.
In 14 years, I have never gotten even close to being bored of Eve.
I push her off and go hit the punching bag I’ve hung in our guest room until my arms shake. I’m aware she is there, watching me.
I lean against the wall, take deep breaths until the shaking and the nausea stop.
I sit and she sits and wraps her arms around me. “I know,” she says. “But it will be all right, okay? I promise.”
She is trying to make herself believe that. She wants me to be okay so she can feel better.
I do understand Eve. But I am not okay. “Stop,” I murmur and push her away.
She sighs and lets go and that is, as always, so much worse. She gets up and I have to catch her as she staggers. She leans on me, laughs. “Okay, maybe I feel a little like I’m dying.” She glances up at me. “Hey, come on, don’t sulk the whole time. It isn't that long."
It turns out we don’t get to travel, much. It turns out dying of cancer involves a lot of living with cancer first. Doctor’s appointments. Secondary symptom management. Drugs to treat the symptoms and then more drugs to treat the problems the drugs cause.
“Can you do it?” she asks, as we’re tucked up on the couch, her in my lap. She‘s lost too much weight, she feels breakable against me.
“Do what?”
“Kill me. When the time comes.”
“Yes, Eve, I can do it.”
She glances back at me and smiles in a way that still breaks the world.
“No hesitation. Good.” She kisses me, soft. “I think it will be soon.”
“You are not that bad yet.”
“But I’m getting sicker. And honestly, I’m getting tired of it. Doctors. Drugs. Decisions. And you’re no help, you know, you just go along with whatever I want.”
Being sick makes Eve mean. Being scared makes Eve mean. I do know Eve.
Still, I tug at her hair. It’s still fine, thick. There wasn’t enough time for chemo to save her. And that makes her grin at me, which—
It is very like slowly bleeding to death. Trust me, I have almost bled to death, I should know.
“Okay. Where?”
Eve leans on me and it is the most important thing in the world, to try and remember this feeling.
If I think about that too long, I will go crazy.
“Oh, god, I don’t know. Want to go back to Paris? Russia?” She giggles. “Bletcham?” She pauses and stares up at me. “Is it going to hurt?”
I shake my head. “No. I am very good.”
“You are,” she says it with a kind of self-satisfaction, like my skill is also a matter of pride for her. I’ve always liked when she talks like that. “Hey. Remember, you promised, about the funeral and everything.”
“Yes, Eve.”
“I took care of the plot. I guess I can set the date.” That makes her laugh and it isn't nice, but I want to hit her every time she laughs like that, hysterical, like this were all some terrible joke the universe is playing on us. I don't, I wouldn't, but I want to. “But you have to make a speech.”
“I am not any good at it.”
“Love, you are good at everything you try. Surely you can manage to say something nice about your wife.”
I pretend to think about that, then shake my head.
That makes her laugh, really laugh, and for a moment, she is Eve and I am Villanelle and everything is almost normal between us. “That’s better,” she says, turning to kiss me for real.
Eve is talented at some things and not-so-talented at others, but she is always amazing at kissing me.
“Mm, I can talk about how good you are in bed," I say, when we've come up for air.
“Oh, that’ll be great. In front of my mom and all my relatives.” Eve says, with a shake of her head. “Hey, be good around my family. They’ll probably be assholes.”
“Yes, Eve. I have met your family.” Eve’s family are generally assholes. But I will be nice to them for the funeral.
And after that, it won’t matter.
“Okay, okay, I’m fussing. But you know, I would be okay with dying—not happy about it, but okay—if it weren’t for you.”
“I will be okay,” I lie, trying for convincing. I am getting better at it, trying to say the nice things she wants to hear.
Her expression says I’ve failed at being convincing. “Liar,” she says with a sigh. Her fingers hook through mine, a perfect fit. “I don’t want to leave you,” she whispers and I want to scream, I want to break something, but everything is already broken. All I can do is hold on.
Later, days later, but in the same place, she taps me on the nose. We went out to lunch with friends today and it was nice and normal, but Eve is exhausted against me.
“I know what you’re planning,” she says. “I catch you thinking it now and then. But you’re not allowed to die.”
“I will do the funeral.”
“What about our house?”
“What about it?” We have both slid down, she is lying on my chest, and I am stroking her hair.
She huffs. “The one with all our stuff? All our pictures? You are not leaving my family to handle it.”
I do not care. Those are all things. I shrug slightly, careful not to dislodge her.
“Hey, I mean it, I am going to be pissed if you off yourself and leave someone else to clean it up.”
“Oh no, Eve, what will I do if you are angry about it?”
She laughs, shaky but not hysterical, then buries her face in my shoulder. “Hey, listen, I don’t care who you kill or what you do—maybe that’s selfish, but I’m dying, I can be a little selfish. Just live. Please?”
“Why does it matter?”
Eve thinks about it. “Because I don’t want to be the reason you died. Because I don't want you to be dead.”
“You will not know.”
“But it matters to me.”
“I will be unhappy.”
She leans up and pecks me on the lips, a little off-center. She's been having trouble with her vision. “Try not to be.”
“Eve, that is not how anything works.”
She sighs. “Is it really that bad without me?”
I nod.
“Really?”
“Yes, Eve, really.”
“Hey, you can fall in love again.”
I shake my head. “No, I cannot.”
“Don’t be like that. Try, okay? There are a lot of people in the world. Kenny will make you database by hair type, if you ask nicely.”
I shove her for that, not very hard, but I still regret it. She feels so fragile under me, all skin and bones.
It delights her though, and the way her eyes sparkle threatens to break me open. “There we go, that’s better. You’re so patient with my bullshit these days, it’s no fun.”
“Only because you are dying.”
She sighs, collapses bonelessly against me. “You know what? Dying sucks.”
“Yes, Eve.”
I hear her, on the phone to her mother. “I know. Yeah, if you want. No, I told you what the doctors said—I don’t give a fuck what Young-Soon from your sewing circle said—Mom, listen. I’m dying. I am really, truly dying. Please stop correcting my language, please stop trying to fix it. Please just—tell me you’re sorry. Please just be my mother.” She listens. “No, I know this is hard for you too. I know. No, I told you already, Oksana will take care of the funeral. I don’t care how you feel about it, she’s my wife.”
When she’s done, she comes out and wraps around me and sobs in my arms. I rock her, wrap my whole body around her.
Finally, she rubs at her eyes and looks up at me, her expression fierce. “If you die and let that woman plan my funeral, I will never forgive you.”
I don’t point out that she would never know. All I can say is, “Yes, Eve.”
“Do you believe in an afterlife?”
I shake my head. Anna had been a good Christian, but despite her efforts, she never managed to convert me.
“Me neither,” Eve sighs. “It sounds nice, though.”
“Yes,” I agree. “It sounds nice.”
Niko comes over. We still hate each other, but it’s a cordial, comfortable kind of hate now. He’s been remarried for years. He has a kid. He and Eve still meet up now and then for coffee.
Yes, I hate it every time.
They sit at the kitchen table and talk. They both cry. I leave them alone, because Eve asked and Eve is dying, so she can have anything she wants.
“I still hate you,” I tell him when he leaves.
That’s practically a hello between us. I can hear Eve snort from the other room.
He looks at me for a long time. “Take care of her, okay?”
I want to say, I don’t know how. I’m out of my depth. What am I supposed to do? I am not the right person for this.
I’m not saying that to Eve’s ex-husband though, so all I say is, ”Of course I will.”
“Grief isn’t really my specialty,” Martin says.
I look around for something to throw at him and he raises his hands in instant surrender. He’s easy. I flop back on his couch.
“How do you feel?” he asks.
“Bad. Eve is dying.”
“Yes. I imagine you would feel, well. Bad. Stupid question.” He studies me. He wants to ask something, I can tell, but he is afraid I won’t like it.
I wave a hand at him. He can ask, he can say anything. I don't even know why I am here, except I wanted to talk to someone and Martin is easy to intimidate, so I can sometimes talk to him.
“After she’s gone—there isn’t really a delicate way to—that is to say, are you going to—“
I twist around to look at him. “Martin, you are worried I am going to start killing people again?”
He flinches. “Sorry. I did mention I wasn’t the best at grief. My specialty--this sort of thing doesn't generally come up."
“Maybe, mm? Maybe I will start with you.”
He doesn’t look scared, which is very insulting of him. “I just know how important she is to you.”
“You don’t.”
He pauses. “No. I don’t."
“I want knives,” she says.
“Knives hurt.”
She gives me a jagged, exhausted smile. “Everything hurts. I like knives. I want knives”.
“Yes, Eve.”
She gets emotional, at the end. She picks fights. She screams at me.
It is fine. Eve screaming at me is so much better than the alternative.
“Soon,” she says.
“Yes,” I agree.
“We can’t do knives,” she says.
“Why not?”
“It’s illegal. It’s murder.” She sighs, disappointed. “You’ll end up in jail.”
“I do not mind.”
“I do. You do too, you hate prison. Can we do poison? Make it look like an overdose.”
“Yes, Eve.”
It gives me something to do, at least. Researching a painless way to kill her with what we have on hand.
She gives me a letter. “When I’m dead. And don’t get upset and shred it or something, it will haunt you forever.”
Eve knows me, too.
Plans and poisons. In the end, none of it matters. She dies peacefully in our bed and I wake up next to a corpse.
I sit with it for a while, but I know the difference between a lump of meat and Eve.
I take off her wedding ring and put it on my other hand.
They take her away.
I make phone calls. I tell our friends, her family. I arrange the last bits of the funeral.
I don’t feel anything.
Soon.
In the movies, they always tear up their planned speech and say something authentic, something emotionally honest. But I am not that good with words. There is nothing emotionally honest I can say about Eve, nothing that would capture Eve, except that I wish she weren’t dead.
I give my practiced speech. It is very good. People cry. I can hear Eve laughing.
Bullshit, she would say.
Soon.
I want to kill all of them. It occurs to me I could.
I listen to some cousin of Eve’s pratter on instead. Let Elena sob on my shoulder and pat her on the back.
Soon.
I walk back into to our house. Our photos, on the wall.
Martin told me once that our relationship was ‘lovely but perhaps a touch unhealthy’. Codependent.
I could kill him if I want to. Nothing could stop me, except that I don't want to. There is only one thing I want to do.
I hold Eve’s letter and I do want to shred it, to scream at it. I open it instead.
Hi love (sweetheart, hon, darling, it kills me I’m never going to get to call you stupid pet names again),
Listen, I know this sucks. It isn’t fair. I know this is hardest for you (well, it’s hardest for me, but by the time you’re reading this, I’d better be dead or I’m going to be really pissed).
I decided, though. You’re not allowed to kill yourself.
I know that seems arbitrary and cruel, but fuck it, I’m dying, I get to be whatever I want to be. If there’s one thing I regret, it was how long I spent pretending I was someone else. I wasted a lot of years that way.
I can hear you rolling your eyes and thinking, Eve can’t tell me what to do, she’s dead, but we both know I can, right? You always did everything I ever really wanted.
Please?
I know you think you can’t be happy without me and not in the normal way people mean, but in your own special fucked-in-the-head brand. And I don’t know what it’s like to be you. No one does.
But I refuse to believe that I’m the only thing that can make you feel this way. I don’t think you even knew you could feel this way until you met me, so I don’t think you know that either. So try, okay? Try. And I swear, I promise, if you ever fall in love with anyone else, I will not be even a little jealous.
That’s a lie. I will be insanely jealous. Do it to spite me. I’m the asshole who died and left you behind.
Sorry, baby.
Forever your wife,
Eve
PS. Don’t kill people? Maybe? At least not anyone we like.
…Yes, Eve.