Page 156

“I understand,” he said.

“And then there’s the fact that I had to give birth to her alone.” She didn’t look away from him. She’d fantasized about a moment like this in a thousand different ways over time. Sometimes she envisioned furious confrontations, where she denounced him in the strongest possible terms, threw wine in his face, crashed into him on a street—and did any variety of dramatic, theatrical things, because each and every one of them was satisfying.

She had hung on to those fantasies for years now. Sometimes she thought they were what had gotten her through.

But even though he couldn’t remember, and therefore couldn’t defend himself, she didn’t have it in her to shout at him. To call him every name in the book. To read him for filth, as her closest friend at the museum liked to say.

She suspected that the sex had something to do with that, but she couldn’t quite hate herself the way she probably should have. She couldn’t quite get there.

“I don’t think that’s anyone’s dream,” she told him instead, throwing nothing at him. “I cried. I kept your name out of it, as agreed. I was in labor for seventeen hours. It hurt.”

He looked at her, his eyes so intense they made her fight to repress a shudder. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “You should not have had to do that by yourself.”

There was no particular reason that should feel healing, she told herself. He didn’t remember. He was responding out of empathy, not out of guilt or regret. Because any empathetic person alive would say the same thing.

Still, somewhere inside of her, something seemed to unwind.

“I want to stress that I had every possible advantage myself,” she said, because his empathy shook her, and she was suddenly convinced that she needed to be fair. “Your money did that. I can’t deny it. But that didn’t change the fact of having a newborn was hard. I had my parents to help, and nannies and nurses. Yet at the end of the day, whether or not she stayed alive was on me.”

He nodded, and it felt like encouragement.

She blew out a breath. “Motherhood is overwhelming. It’s all-consuming. You push out this infant and you’re suddenly in a new, different body. You don’t know who you are and everything suddenly boils down to feedings, and the way she cries, and how every single part of yourself feels torn out of place and stuffed back together.”

Aeryn kept her eyes trained on his, and to his credit, Vesuvius did not look away. She wasn’t even sure he blinked.

“And all the while,” she said, “the whole time, you’re so wildly in love with this tiny, squalling creature that you can’t breathe right. Motherhood is grief and sorrow and a wild joy beyond the capacity of words to describe it. You give birth to a baby, you bring her out into the world, and nothing is ever the same again. That’s what you missed. That’s what you left me to deal with on my own. Cushioned by your money, I grant.”

Aeryn jerked her head as if to take in the house all around them. The house his money had bought, and furnished, and maintained. The house that she’d made a home because he’d made this all happen, and she’d hated him for that, too.

“And it’s not that I’m not grateful,” she rushed to tell him. “Because despite everything, I am. I’m fully aware of how much harder it could have been on me.” She angled herself in his direction, just a little. She wanted to say this much, at least, directly to his face. “But you didn’t do it to make it easy on me. You did it to make it easy on you.”

And she knew that she’d hit him more surely than if she’d tossed a whole bottle of wine at him. She could almost feel the impact inside her own body, like an echo. Like hurting him only hurt her, too.

“And look at me now,” he said after a moment, though there was something almost shattered in his gaze. Something so dark that she felt it press in against her, like it would be hers, too, in a moment. “It would seem that karma has taken a pound of flesh or two, never you fear.”

“I would never have said these things to you before,” she told him. “Because you could remember everything that happened, then. And you were so good at putting your own spin on it. But there’s nothing to spin about this situation, is there? Two things can be true at once, and they can both be unpleasant.” She nodded toward him. “You might very well have done what was best for your country and your crown. But as for your daughter and me? I will always feel betrayed. And if I have my way, she’ll never have the slightest idea who you are.”

When she said it like this, sitting in this room in this house that she only had because of him—and, if she was honest, considered a pale substitution for what she’d really wanted from him—it sounded less like the confrontations in her fantasies. It landed different.

Something more like a spell. Maybe a prophecy.

She couldn’t bear it. It was as if something inside of her was unspooling, but she could no longer tell if it was grief or joy, or more concerning, both of them at once.

Aeryn gathered up the plates they’d used and turned with them, putting them in the deep sink. She didn’t hear when he stood but suddenly he was there, his hands on her shoulders and that wide, warm wall of his chest at her back.

“V…” she whispered, and then hated herself, because surely he didn’t deserve that nickname now, the one she’d christened him with when she had decided that his name was far too much of a mouthful to be yelling out.

And since she spent so much of her time in his presence crying out his name, she needed an alternative.

She didn’t want to remember that. She didn’t want to remember how painfully happy she’d been with him, always. Even when the separation was long and hard, being with him had never been difficult. Being with him was the easiest thing in the world.

It was everything else that had been hard.

And maybe that was why she simply…surrendered.

To memory. To this impossible present. This night that seemed to go on and on, and get both better and worse as it rolled along toward whatever the morning would bring.

Or maybe she just missed him.