Free Web NovelChapter 77: Chapter 77 She lost the baby
_Kaelen’s POV_
I went to find Maelis that night.
I know how it sounds. I know what Celeste said and I know what the afternoon looked like from the outside. But there are things you carry that don’t respond to external events the way they’re supposed to. You can be told you’re wrong. You can even know you’re wrong in the part of your mind that processes information clearly. And something else in you can just keep going regardless.
Maelis was in her room with the light low and her legs raised on a cushion, which was how she managed the pain in the evenings. She looked at me when I came in with the expression she had worn my entire life, the one that meant she already knew what I was going to say and had not yet decided how to receive it.
I sat in the chair beside her bed.
"I’m going to get her back," I said. "Rowena. I’m going to go to the banquet and I’m going to bring her home."
Maelis was quiet. ƒгeeweɓn૦vel.com
"I know what you’re going to say," I said.
"I don’t think you do," she said.
"That it’s too late. That she’s moved on. That the decree is final." I looked at my hands. "I know all of that. I know it legally and I know what everyone around me thinks. But I also know that what Rowena and I had was real and that I threw it away because I was young and stupid and I convinced myself that leaving was something she would understand and wait out." I paused. "I never stopped wanting her. I need you to know that. I want to fulfill her mother’s dying wish.”
Maelis said nothing.
"I never loved Virella," I said. And there it was, out in the room, the thing I had been carrying around the edges of for years without ever saying it directly. "I tried to. I genuinely tried. But I married her because she was there and because I was trying to move forward and it wasn’t fair to her and I knew it and I did it anyway."
Just then, I heard the sound from the doorway.
I turned.
Virella was standing there.
She had come to bring Maelis her evening medication, I realized. The small cup was in her hand. She was looking at me with an expression I had never seen on her before, not anger, not hurt, but something that had passed through both of those and come out the other side into something very still and very final.
"Virella," I said.
She set the medication cup down on the table beside the door. Carefully. Like she was concentrating on making sure it didn’t spill.
Then she crossed the room and slapped me across the face.
It was harder than I expected. My head turned with it. I sat there for a moment and didn’t say anything because there was nothing to say that wouldn’t make it worse.
"Two years," she said. Her voice was shaking but not breaking. "Two years I told myself you were adjusting. That you needed time. That the way you looked at her portrait these days was just history and the way you went quiet when her name came up was just complicated feelings from a complicated situation." She was standing in front of me and her hands were at her sides now, tight. "And you sat here tonight and told your grandmother that you never loved me. Not that you struggled to love me. Not that it was complicated. That you never did."
"I didn’t mean—"
"You meant exactly what you said," she said. "You always mean exactly what you say when you think no one important is listening."
Suddenly, she stopped.
Her hands went to her stomach. fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm
The change in her face happened fast, the anger leaving all at once, replaced by something pale and urgent. She pressed both hands flat against her abdomen and made a sound that was small and frightened and nothing like any sound I had heard from her before.
"Virella." I was on my feet before I finished saying her name.
She doubled forward and I caught her before she went down and she was already shaking, her breath coming in sharp uneven pulls, and I was shouting for someone, for anyone, and carrying her out of the room because standing still felt impossible.
The doctor came within twenty minutes.
I stood outside the room and listened to sounds I couldn’t interpret and tried to locate somewhere inside myself the steadiness that I was supposed to have and found nothing but a cold and thorough understanding of what I had done.
She lost the baby.
The doctor came out and told me quietly and I stood in the corridor and the words took a moment to arrange themselves into meaning.
I went back in.
She was lying against the pillows looking at the ceiling. She didn’t look at me when I came in. I sat beside the bed and I didn’t try to take her hand because I wasn’t sure I had the right to.
"I’m sorry," I said. And I meant it differently than I had ever meant anything. Not the reflexive sorry of someone managing a situation.
She didn’t respond for a long time.
Then she said, very quietly, "Don’t go to the banquet, Kaelen."
"I won’t," I said.
"Promise me."
"I promise you," I said. "I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here."
She closed her eyes and cried.
“You’re a fool,” Shade said from somewhere deep and quiet inside me. His voice had none of its usual sharpness. It was just tired. “You have been a fool for so long that you started to think it was a personality trait.”
“Enough,” I told him.
“You almost lost her completely tonight. You still might. And you sat in that room and talked about another woman.”
“I said enough.”
He went quiet. But the quiet he left behind wasn’t comfortable. It was the kind that sits with you and doesn’t let you sleep.
I stayed beside Virella’s bed until she was resting properly.
Then I sat in the chair and looked at my hands in the low lamplight and tried to figure out who I was when I removed the story I had been telling myself about Rowena.
I wasn’t sure I knew anymore.
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_Author’s POV_
Two days later, on the morning of the banquet, Nana Seraphine arrived at the Ashthorne mansion before breakfast.
She came with two cases. Celeste was already there, having apparently also arrived early, and the two of them moved through with the plans of the day. Seraphine grinning from ear to ear.
Rowena submitted to the process with the patience of someone who had decided that resistance would cost more energy than compliance.
She sat still while her hair was arranged. She stood when asked and turned when directed and said yes when shown things that were being considered for her. She looked, by the time they were finished, exactly like what the occasion required: composed, elegant, quietly formidable, the kind of woman that prominent families brought their best sons to meet.
Nana Seraphine stood back and looked at her granddaughter with an expression that was trying to stay practical and not quite managing it.
"You look exactly like your mother did," she said. "At your age."
Rowena looked at her reflection in the mirror and said nothing for a moment.
"Thank you, Nana," she said.
Celeste was already moving toward the door, checking the time, reviewing something on her phone. The guests would begin arriving within the hour. Everything was prepared.
Neither of them noticed the small bag that Rowena had packed and placed in the back of the wardrobe.
The competition was in two days.
Her car would be ready before then.
She had also already decided exactly how the evening was going to end.
