Free Web NovelChapter 175: Mother she never knew - 3
Cixi should have focused on what Olga had just said. The sentence sat between them like a key on the low table, waiting to be picked up and turned in a lock, and Cixi was the woman who had been asked to pick it up.
She did not pick it up.
Her brain, the small treacherous part of it that had decided what the more interesting problem in the room was, had spun off in a different direction entirely. The direction was the man whose silk sheet she had woken up under. It had to have been Cassian. Cassian had been on her phone for twenty minutes before she went out to the terrace. Cassian had been the last person she thought of before the wind found her hair. Cassian had also been in a different building two corridors and one staircase away, and the time it would have taken him to descend three storeys, cross a garden, and put his hands beneath a falling woman was zero, or close enough to zero that her brain refused to accept the maths.
How was that possible?
How had he —
"Cixi. Eat before the food gets cold." Olga’s voice arrived softly from the chair opposite. Cixi blinked. The eggs on her plate were still steaming. The toast had not been touched. "Cold eggs do not taste good."
"Right. Yes."
Cixi picked up the fork. She put a small bite of egg in her mouth. She chewed without tasting. Across from her, Olga lifted her own fork and ate a small precise bite, and looked at the rim of the saucer beside her plate, and did not say anything for a long, careful second.
What Olga was not saying, and what Cixi could not have known, was that watching this golden-haired young woman cut into a scrambled egg on a long silver tray brought back the memory of last night. The sentence Cassian had spoken on the couch the previous night.
I was about to throw the coffee. She stopped me and asked me if she could have it.
Olga’s throat tightened.
She reached for the water. She drank from it slowly. She set the glass down with the practised deliberation of a woman who had decided, on the same couch, that grief was a luxury she could not afford in front of this man, and was now discovering that grief was no easier to afford in front of his daughter.
She lifted her face into her practised smile.
"What do you like to eat for breakfast, Cixi?"
Cixi looked up.
The question did not match the room. The question did not match the night that had preceded the room. The question was the kind of question a mother asked her daughter on the first morning of a holiday weekend, and it was being asked, instead, by the wife of the man who was probably the reason Cixi had been pushed off a railing the evening before, by a woman whose daughter was engaged to the man who had announced from the dinner table that he wanted to marry Cixi.
What kind of game is this woman playing?
"Shouldn’t you be —" Cixi tilted her head. She found the word. "Hating me."
Olga’s fork paused above her plate.
"Why should I hate you?"
"Because of Rafael’s stupid comment."
Olga set her fork down. freewebnσvel.cѳm
"That was his stupid comment. He should not have said it in the first place. For his foolishness, why should I be angry at you, Cixi?"
It was Cixi registered with the small, slow surprise of a woman who had been bracing for a slap and had received a sentence instead, the kind of logical question her mind did not know what to do with.
She tried anyway.
"Because that is what people do. They always blame the female."
"Those people are not innocent themselves. They look at the innocent one, and they blame her, because that is the easiest thing for them to do."
The sentence landed in the room with the soft weight of a thing a mother had said many times before about other people’s daughters and was saying now, for the first time, about her own.
Cixi did not know that.
Cixi only knew, in the small bright part of her chest that had been bracing for sharpness and had been met with warmth instead, that the woman across from her had just said a thing no member of the Crown household had ever said to her, that no one in any class she had ever attended had ever said to her, that no manager and no landlord and no policeman and no boy on the bus had ever said to her, and that the woman saying it was looking at her with eyes that were exactly the same pale grey shade as her own.
Cixi stared.
She had not registered the eyes before. She registered them now. The light from the long window caught them at an angle, and the colour was not blue, and the colour was not green, and the colour was the same particular early-morning grey Cixi had seen in every mirror she had stood in front of for twenty-three years.
She made her face stop staring. She lowered her gaze to the plate. "I like scrambled eggs," she said quietly. "And toast. With coffee."
Olga’s smile, when it came, was small and surprised and far warmer than she had meant to let it be.
"I too like the scrambled eggs," she said. "And toast. With coffee."
Cixi nodded at the plate.
Something in the air between them — the air that had been a careful, professional ten degrees colder than the rest of the room since Olga had walked in — adjusted by a small considered fraction. Olga did not name it. Cixi did not name it. They went on eating.
"Tea or coffee in general."
"Coffee.
"With sugar."
"Two."
"Bread or rice."
"Both. I eat rice in the winter and bread in the summer."
"Vegetables you do not like."
"Beetroot. The smell is something I cannot recover from."
Olga’s mouth twitched.
"Mine is fennel. Anything with fennel, my hand finds the wrong fork."
Cixi looked up.
