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“How marvelous,” he replied, though she saw the light of something like challenge in his gaze. “I’m sure I’ll love every bite.”

She didn’t know if that was true, but he did try all of it. He was not convinced by the popcorn, a local staple. He seemed to find the hot dog a surprise, in a good way. The SpaghettiOs also seemed to be a surprise, in not such a good way.

And he unabashedly loved the Fluffernutter sandwiches. A delicacy she doubted very much had ever graced the mouth of a member of the Lianderoan royal family, and wasn’t that a shame. Aeryn didn’t know what kind of life a person was living if they’d never had a peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich. Not one worth living, as far as she was concerned.

It occurred to her as she thought these things that she was getting a little bit punchy. As it was well past three in the morning.

“Tell me, Aeryn,” he said, as he swept up the last of the marshmallow fluff and licked his own finger. Something she should not have found so breathtakingly hot. “What has it been like for you here? It looks to me like you have created a good life. Is that not so?”

“I’m the luckiest person I know,” she told him. She felt herself smile, and though she wouldn’t have said she felt bitter, she thought there was some kind of bitterness in the curve of her lips all the same. “I would never claim otherwise. Sometimes I think that makes the loneliness worse.”

She realized she was braced for him to react to that. The way he’d always reacted to things she might say about their situation that cast it in anything but a favorable light. And Vesuvius had been much too good at talking her into believing almost anything if it kept things good between them. In her more charitable moments, she thought maybe he’d been talking himself into believing those things too.

Anything to keep doing what they were doing, acting as if there was no ending in sight, ever.

But he didn’t react.

Aeryn felt something like…relief, or its neighbor anyway, work its way through her. He couldn’t remember, she reminded herself. She didn’t have to protect him while she was telling her own story. He didn’t know either way.

So she sat there on a stool in her own kitchen, in this house that he had paid for with his guilt money, and she told him.

“Leaving you, pregnant and pretty much hopeless, almost killed me,” she said. She didn’t pretty it up at all. Because it was nothing short of the truth. “You had made a lot of financial gifts to me and the child we hadn’t had yet, but I didn’t want them. I didn’t want what they represented, a payment for walking away from you. I didn’t want to be the kind of person who would accept them, because I had never considered our relationship like that. You ending it in the way you did, so decisively and without recourse, made me reassess everything that had gone before.”

And it had led her to thinking too much about what she would be subjecting her child to if she continued with him.

It had been crushing.

She had a bowl of SpaghettiOs herself, and moved her spoon around in it, but she didn’t take a bite. “I had always believed that what happened between the two of us was magic. But on the other side of it, after sitting in unwelcoming rooms with packs of attorneys, signing documents that described our relationship in cold-blooded language that made me feel sick, it was impossible to keep believing in anything like magic.”

Aeryn pushed back from the counter. And she waited for him to interrupt her, the way he’d always done when she’d expressed doubts or overwhelming emotions about the relationship before. She expected him to make assurances, to try his best to smooth it over.

But all he did was gaze across the countertop at her, as if holding the space for her to share their story was the most important thing he could conceive of right now.

She had to remind herself that he didn’t know who he was. That he didn’t know that he was Vesuvius. That if he did, he would never be capable of such a thing as holding space. It wasn’t in his nature.

Then again, she would have said that another thing that wasn’t in his nature was sending her away, or ignoring the birth of his child. If asked, she would have said that those things were anathema to who he was. Yet he had done them.

“Once I got back to Chicago, reality set in.” She smiled to herself. “Or, I should say, my father helped me reacquaint myself with reality. He has always been like that. Salt of the earth, I think they call it. That’s my dad.”

She thought a curious expression moved over his face then, and she wondered if he’d had some memory then. Something connected to his own father, who had died before she’d met him. It couldn’t be her father, who he’d never met either—though she’d showed him pictures.

But he didn’t offer anything, so she kept going. “I thought of your payments as blood money,” she told him, matter-of-factly. “My father helped me think about what they meant for my daughter, and once I was able to consider things in that light, I was also able to think about what kind of life I wanted to give her.” And he couldn’t remember, so he wasn’t really Vesuvius, and so she didn’t feel any need to protect him from what she said next. “I wanted to give her every possible advantage so that she wouldn’t be as easily swept off her feet by a smooth-talking man as I was.”

“Is that how it happened?” he asked, quietly.

Maybe too quietly. But she didn’t answer him.

“So I suppose I should thank you,” she said instead. “I picked my favorite neighborhood in my favorite city. Walking distance from the museum, which never could have happened any other way. She has nannies, and she’ll start daycare in time, and I can make sure that she has the very best of everything ever after. So she can be whoever she wants, and do whatever she likes, and grow up strong and independent and free.”

And, hopefully, a lot smarter than her mother had been.

“And what you’re telling me is that I prevented you from living that way?” Vesuvius asked, mildly enough.

Aeryn considered that. “I have spent a lot of time blaming you. But as far as our relationship goes, if I’m being entirely honest, I suppose you did the best you could. If I take everything you told me at face value. It’s the never seeing your daughter, and writing her off, literally, that makes me angrier now than it did then.”

Vesuvius considered her, or maybe he was letting what she’d said sit on him a moment. “Is it possible that cutting her off made her safer?”

“That’s a practical question,” Aeryn replied. “But we’re not talking about a practical matter. We’re talking about our daughter, who you’ve never met.”