"He accepted us," Vesalia said, after a while, her voice dropping into a different register now, quieter, more careful, the way a person speaks when they've moved from a wound they've already made peace with into one that's never fully closed. "The man I actually loved. When I finally told him about the child — not everything, never everything, only that she existed and that she was not his — he didn't leave. I remember that surprising me, at the time. I'd expected him to. I think some old, wounded part of me had even wanted him to, because it would have confirmed something I already believed about myself, about what I deserved. Instead he simply — stayed. Took her in as though she were his own, in front of anyone who asked, and never once made me account for a history he never pushed me to explain."
"That sounds like a kindness."
"It was." Her voice caught, just slightly, on the word. "It was a kindness I have never fully forgiven myself for failing to deserve."
I felt her gather herself before the next part, the way she'd gathered herself before every hard turn in this telling.
"I couldn't love her," she said. "Not the way she deserved. Not the way he managed to, almost effortlessly, from the very start. I would look at her — this small, entirely blameless creature who wanted nothing from the world except to be held by her mother — and all I could see was the worst night of my life, staring back at me with eyes that weren't even mine, that belonged entirely to a man I'd killed with my own hands and never spoken of again. It wasn't her fault. I knew that. Knowing it changed nothing about the cold that came over me every time she reached for me."
"Did she know? That you—"
"That I couldn't stand to be near her? Children know everything, Eremos, long before they have the language to name what they know. She knew. And she never once stopped reaching anyway." Vesalia's voice thinned, here, more than it had at any point since the confession of the child's conception itself — a different kind of pain, I understood, than the one that had come before it, quieter, more sustained, worn smooth by repetition the way the earlier wound never had been. "I remember — I've tried, over the centuries, to remember less of this, and failed every time — I remember her small hand, reaching up for mine in a hallway, and me simply walking past it, because I could not, in that moment, make myself take it. I remember her leaving small things on the table beside my bed — a flower, a drawn picture, whatever a child's hands can offer as tribute — and me never once acknowledging them, not because I didn't see them, but because acknowledging them meant acknowledging her, and I did not yet have the courage to survive that."
"You were carrying more than any person should have had to carry alone."
"That's generous of you. It's also not an excuse, and I won't let you turn it into one on my behalf." There was an edge in her voice now, not aimed at me, aimed entirely inward, the same precise, controlled fury she must have once turned toward Kaelen and never gotten to spend fully. "She didn't do anything to deserve a mother who flinched every time she came near. She was a child. She wanted, as every child wants, simply to be loved by the person who made her, and I withheld that from her, every single day, for reasons that had nothing to do with anything she had done and everything to do with a wound she never once caused."
"I remember her fourth birthday," Vesalia said, unprompted, before I could ask anything further, as though the memory had simply surfaced on its own and demanded to be spoken before it sank again. "Doran had arranged something small — a cake, a handful of children from the household staff invited to play with her, nothing grand, nothing that should have cost me anything to sit through. She spent the entire afternoon trying to catch my eye across the room, holding up whatever small treasure she'd been given as though it were a question only I could answer. I smiled at her exactly once, when I couldn't avoid it any longer, and she lit up so completely, so entirely, over one single smile, that I had to leave the room to keep from being sick with the understanding of how little I'd been giving her, and how much even that little apparently meant."
"Did you go back?"
"Eventually. I told myself I needed air. I stood outside for longer than air required, and when I came back in, she'd already stopped watching the door for me. Children learn quickly, Eremos, when a hope isn't worth holding onto. I've never forgiven myself for being the one who taught her that lesson, at four years old, about her own mother."
"Did it ever get better? Between the two of you?"
Vesalia was quiet for a long moment. When she answered, her voice had gone very small.
"I don't know," she said. "I've asked myself that more times than I can count, and I've never once found an answer I trusted. There were moments — small ones, brief ones — where something almost softened. A night she couldn't sleep and I sat with her longer than I meant to. A morning she laughed at something and I laughed too, before I remembered to stop myself. But I never let it become a pattern. I was too afraid of what it would mean to finally let her in, after everything I'd built myself around keeping everyone, including her, at a careful, permanent distance. I don't know if she ever felt loved by me. I've spent the whole of my existence in the Between afraid that the honest answer is no, and searching for her anyway, because even if the answer is no, I would rather spend forever knowing it for certain than never find out at all."