Chapter 108: i think i love him
Elara had made the soup without being asked.
That was how Fiona knew her mother had been worried. Not the kind of worry that announced itself, not the hand-wringing, not the pointed questions Elara’s worry was always quiet and practical, showing up as food on the stove and the good throw blanket pulled from the closet and draped over the back of the couch before Fiona even arrived. By the time Fiona let herself in with her spare key that Saturday afternoon, the apartment smelled of lemongrass and ginger and something deeper, something that had been simmering for at least an hour.
"You didn’t have to cook," Fiona said, dropping her bag by the door.
"I know," Elara said from the kitchen, not turning around. "Sit down."
Fiona sat.
She had been doing a great deal of sitting lately. Sitting with things she couldn’t say out loud. Sitting with the ring on her finger that felt more real every morning and the baby moving inside her and the particular, complicated ache that had taken up residence somewhere below her sternum and refused to be named cleanly. She pulled the throw blanket over her lap and watched her mother move around the small kitchen with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had been cooking in small spaces her whole life, and felt something in her chest loosen just slightly, the way it only ever did here.
Elara set a bowl in front of her. Sat down across the table with her own mug of tea and both hands wrapped around it, and looked at her daughter for a long moment without saying anything.
Fiona picked up the spoon. The soup was perfect, of course. It was always perfect.
"The Voss thing is getting worse," Fiona said, because it was the safest place to start, the outermost layer of everything sitting on top of her.
Elara nodded. "Riley texted you?"
"Yes She’s trying to keep me informed without alarming me, which means she’s actually quite alarmed." Fiona stirred the soup slowly. "They’re treating it like it’s confirmed. The leak. All of it. As if the engagement is the proof they needed."
"People will believe what makes the best story," Elara said. "That’s not new."
"I know." Fiona set the spoon down. "It just sits badly. I built something real at Voss. I worked hard there. And now every person on that floor thinks I was performing loyalty while secretly feeding information to the competition. To my own fiancé, apparently, which is almost funny given that I’d never spoken to Caleb before Moonshine hired me."
Elara’s expression stayed steady, the way it did when she was listening rather than preparing her response. It was one of the things Fiona had always loved about her mother and occasionally found unbearable: Elara never rushed to fill silences. She let them breathe until the person across from her found whatever they actually needed to say.
Fiona looked down at the bowl. "I feel guilty," she said, and then stopped, because that sentence had more directions than one and she wasn’t sure yet which one she meant to follow.
Elara waited.
"About Caleb," Fiona said. The words came slower now, the way they did when she was navigating something she hadn’t fully sorted out for herself yet. "Not in the way you might think. He knows the situation. He walked into this with his eyes open. But I find myself thinking about him differently lately and it scares me, because I don’t know what to do with it." She paused, looking at the ring, the way the light caught it at the edge of her vision. "He’s kind, Mom. Not performed-kindness, not the kind that wants something back. Just quiet, steady, real. He notices things. He adjusted the seat warmer in his car before I even knew I was cold. He remembers that I like lemon in my water, not lime. He read three articles about second trimester nutrition and never once made a point of mentioning it, I only found out because I saw the browser tabs." She exhaled. "I wasn’t supposed to fall for any of that."
Elara’s expression shifted into something soft and knowing. "And yet."
"And yet," Fiona agreed.
They sat with it for a moment. Outside the window the afternoon had gone gray, clouds moving in off the bay, and the kitchen felt warmer for it, more contained.
"I think Caleb is exactly what he looks like," Elara said. "I’ve been watching him carefully, you know. Not suspiciously. Just the way a mother watches someone who is standing close to her daughter. And what I see is a man who chose this fully. Not out of obligation. Not out of strategy. He looked at your situation and your life and the whole complicated mess of it, and he decided you were worth standing next to." She sipped her tea. "That is not a small thing, Fiona. That is actually a very large thing. You are allowed to feel it."
"I know I’m allowed to feel it." Fiona pressed her lips together. "That’s not the part that scares me."
Elara looked at her steadily. She already knew, of course. She always already knew. But she let Fiona find the words anyway.
"Martin," Fiona said quietly.
The name landed between them the way it always did, with a particular weight neither of them acknowledged out loud anymore because acknowledging it fully every time would make it impossible to get through a single conversation.
"Not the feelings," Fiona added quickly, shaking her head. "That’s not what I mean. I’m not I don’t sit around thinking about him that way. It’s not that." She pressed her palm flat against the table, looking for steadiness. "It’s the fact of him. He exists. He’s out there, and he doesn’t know, and every time I let myself feel something genuine for Caleb I am simultaneously aware that the baby Caleb is going to raise, the baby he reads nutrition articles for and already loves in this quiet, undramatic way that baby has a father who has no idea. And Martin is not some nobody, Mom. He is a powerful, sharp, observant man who was already my boss once, who already looked at me across an office and saw things I wasn’t trying to show. If he ever finds out "
"When," Elara said.
Fiona looked up.
"When he finds out," Elara said, gentle but clear. "Not if. These things have a way of surfacing, my love. You know that. We’ve talked about it."
"I know." Fiona’s voice was barely above a whisper. "I know we have."
"Which is why what you’re building with Caleb matters so much," Elara continued, leaning forward slightly, both hands still wrapped around her mug. "Not as a shield. Not as a cover story. But because when that day comes, and it will come, you need something real underneath you. Something that can hold weight. A legal arrangement entered into strategically will not survive the kind of pressure that secret carries. But two people who have genuinely chosen each other?" She tilted her head. "That stands a better chance."
Fiona was quiet for a long moment. The soup had gone slightly cool and she ate a few more spoonfuls without really tasting them, more for something to do with her hands than out of hunger.
"I feel that i love him," she said finally. "At the lake, after the proposal. And I felt it in that moment. It wasn’t a performance. But I also don’t know what kind of love it was yet. Whether it’s the kind that grows into something you build a life on, or the kind that belongs to a specific night when everything was overwhelming and he was the steadiest thing in the room."
Elara smiled. "Do you know that those two things are not mutually exclusive?"
Fiona looked at her.
"The steadiest thing in the room," Elara repeated. "You say it like it’s a smaller thing than the other kind. As if being the person who holds steady when everything is falling apart is somehow a lesser quality in a partner." She shook her head slightly. "Your father was not the most romantic man I ever met. He didn’t write poetry or show up with grand gestures. But for twenty-three years that man was steady. He was present. He paid attention. He showed up." Her eyes held Fiona’s with a quiet intensity. "I would choose that over fireworks every single time. And I think, deep down, so would you."
Fiona felt the familiar sting behind her eyes. She pressed them briefly shut, not wanting to cry again, already tired of the ease with which tears arrived these days. She touched the ring with her thumb, a gesture that had become habitual in the past few days, unconscious and oddly comforting.
"I just don’t want to hurt him," she said. "If any of this comes out. If Martin ever surfaces and the whole story unravels. I don’t want Caleb to look back and feel like he was only ever holding someone else’s secret."
Elara reached across the table and covered Fiona’s hand with hers. Her grip was warm and certain, the grip of a woman who had held her daughter through more difficult things than this and intended to keep doing it for as long as she was needed.
"Then don’t let that be the only thing you give him," she said simply. "Give him the real thing too. You already are. You just haven’t let yourself call it that yet."
Fiona looked at their hands on the table. At the ring. At the small roundness of her stomach visible now even under the loose sweater she’d chosen this morning, the bump that had started to make itself undeniable in a way no amount of careful dressing could fully contain.
"Susan knows something," she said after a moment. "She came here. She was asking questions. I almost told her everything, Mom. I was right there, and then you walked in."
Elara’s jaw set slightly, the one tell her mother had that wasn’t fully controlled. "I know. She’s not going to stop."
"No."
"And when she pushes again?"
Fiona looked up at the window, at the gray afternoon pressing against the glass, at the faint lights of boats on the cove just barely visible through the clouds. "I don’t know yet," she admitted. "I need more time. Caleb and I need more time before anyone else gets to have an opinion about what we’re building."
Elara nodded slowly, accepting that for what it was. Not a solution. Just the honest shape of where things stood.
She stood eventually and took Fiona’s bowl to reheat it without asking, because that was the kind of woman she was, and when she set it back down in front of her daughter it was steaming again, perfectly hot, exactly right.
"Eat," she said. "The baby needs it."
