Chapter 242: Seren is coming home
Thought about walking to the door of the Pedro mansion and standing there with whatever apology she had been composing since the trial and knocking and waiting for the face on the other side of it.
Thought about what Amara’s face would do. About whether there were words available that could cover what needed to be covered.
She had not been a sister. She had been, in the most important moments, the opposite.
She did not know if that was a distance that language could cross. Did not know if she had the right to try crossing it. Did not know if Amara, who had been through everything she had been through, had anything left to give in that direction.
She held a ticket for the next train.
The destination board showed several options, and she looked at them and chose the one that was simply away, the direction that was not this city, not this year, not this arrangement of things that had turned out to be built on materials that didn’t hold weight.
She boarded. Found a seat by the window.
Settled the baby against her with the now-slightly-less-incompetent arrangement of someone who had been doing this for forty minutes and had learned several things.
The train began to move.
Verenza moved past the window, the buildings, the streets, the particular colours of a city that had been someone else’s story, and Amira watched it go with the feeling of someone watching something end that should have ended earlier but hadn’t, and was ending now, and the ending was simply the ending, without drama, without ceremony.
Just: done. The baby made a sound against her. Amira looked down.
Those eyes. Still open. Still looking at her with the patient, steady, already-decided quality of something that had selected her without asking permission and intended to keep the arrangement.
"I don’t know where we’re going," Amira said softly. To the baby. To the window. To whatever came next.
The baby’s hand found her finger. Wrapped around it. Held on with the specific strength of very small things that had decided on something. Amira looked at the hand around her finger.
Then, at the blue eyes.
Then at the window where Verenza was giving way to the open country beyond the city, to the fields and the sky and the long uncomplicated view of somewhere that was not yet anywhere in particular.
"But we have each other," she said. "My sweet angel. We have each other." The train moved on.
Verenza fell away behind them.
And Amira, who had arrived in that city with everything and was leaving it with a single suitcase and a baby in a pink blanket and eyes the colour of deep water, felt something she did not have a name for yet but that lived in the vicinity of beginning.
Somewhere ahead of her. Somewhere, the train was going. Something that was not the life she had planned.
But was, perhaps holding the small warm weight of the baby against her chest, feeling the grip of those fingers around hers, watching the open country open further.
Something real.
And in the Vale mansion, Julian stared at the footage one more time. At the incubator with the pink blanket. At the eyes.
And felt the cold frustration of where his daughter had gone.
—
Seb drove to the hospital alone.
No entourage. No assistant. No careful arrangement of appearance and access that he usually deployed when entering spaces he wanted to control. Just him and the car and the particular quiet of a man who had run out of the energy required to perform being fine.
The hospital received him the way hospitals received everyone, with the impersonal efficiency of a place that had seen too much of the human condition to be impressed by any individual version of it.
He signed the relevant forms. He waited while the nurses completed their handover protocols.
He sat in a chair that was the same chair he had sat in in a thousand waiting rooms and stared at nothing specific and thought about numbers, the register, the percentage, the mounting architecture of what was owed and what was gone and what was going and then made himself stop thinking about numbers because Seren was coming through that door in a moment and Seren did not need to see numbers on his face.
She came through the door. She looked better than the last time. Better than the time before that.
The colour that had been wrong was right again, and the movement that had been careful was careless in the way of children who had stopped thinking about their bodies because their bodies had stopped requiring thought.
She was carrying the small stuffed animal that had been on her bedside table since the first day of her admission, and she was looking for him before she was fully through the door.
She found him. "Daddy." He stood.
And whatever was happening with the register and the shares and the empty office and the door Damian had closed, all of it receded. Not resolved. Not gone. But receded to the correct distance, which was the distance at which it had no business being between this man and this child in this moment.
He crouched.
She came to him the way she always came to him, without reservation, without any of the careful approach of children who had learned to check their welcome before committing to it. Completely. With the full trust of someone who had never had a reason to approach him any other way.
He held her.
For a moment, he simply held her and let the reality of her, the specific warmth and weight and smell of her, the small arms around his neck, the stuffed animal pressed between them, be the only thing in the room.
This, he thought. Whatever else. This.
The car ride home was her voice filling the space.
She had opinions about the hospital food. About the nurse who had been kind and the nurse who had been less kind, and the difference between them. About what she had watched on the tablet, what she thought about it, and what she wanted for dinner.
"Noodles," she said. Decisively.
"Noodles," Seb confirmed.
"With the sauce from the jar. Not the one you make."
"The one I make is better."
"I prefer the jar."
He almost laughed. Actually almost laughed, felt it come up through the weight of everything and arrive, briefly, on his face.
"Alright," he said. "The jar."
She was quiet for a moment, watching the city through her window.
"Daddy," she said, in a different voice. The one that meant a question was coming that she had been holding.
"Yes, princess."
"Where’s Mummy?"
