Chapter 244: I’m very sorry for your loss
"Mummy! Mummy!"
The voice came through the phone like the weather. Like a window opened suddenly on a cold day, not comfortable exactly, but vivid, and real, and waking.
"Seren." Amara sat up straighter. Felt herself smile before she had decided to. "How are you? How are you feeling?"
"I’m fine, Mummy, I’m home, Daddy made me noodles..."
"He did?"
"With the jar sauce, I told him to..."
"Smart girl..."
"And my fish is still alive, Daddy fed it every day..." Amara laughed. A real one. Small and surprised and real because that fish had died the day she turned 6, but of course, Seb made sure she never remembered any of that.
"Did he?"
"Every day! He told me." A pause. The brief pause of a child switching registers. "Mummy."
"Yes, baby."
"How is my baby sister? When can I see her? I miss you so much." The voice changed on the last sentence, the bright informational tone giving way to something underneath it, the thing that lived beneath Seren’s cheerfulness that was simply love. Pure and direct and not interested in being complicated.
Amara felt her eyes fill.
"Very soon," she said. Her voice was steady with the effort of keeping it that way. "Very, very soon. You’ll meet her very soon. And she already knows about you, Seren. I’ve told her about her big sister."
"You have?" The delight in it.
"I have."
"What did you say?"
"I said she has the best big sister in the world." Amara wiped her eye with the back of her hand. "And that she’s very lucky."
"Oh." Seren absorbed this. "Good. That’s good." Then: "I love you, Mummy. I can’t wait to come. I’m going to eat Daddy’s noodles now, they’re going cold, and then kiss my sister for me, bye Mummy!"
"Bye, my.."
Click.
Done. Complete. Gone back to the noodles with the total commitment of a child for whom each thing was the whole thing while it was the thing.
Amara held the phone.
"Bye," she said again. To the empty line. To the sound of Seren’s voice still filling the room, even though the call had ended. To the particular ache of loving a child who was not hers in any legal sense and was entirely hers in every sense that actually mattered, even after everything.
She put the phone down. Looked at the cradle where the girl slept.
At the boy in his, making the small sounds of someone dreaming already at five days old, working something out in the language of the very new.
She thought about Seren eating noodles across the city. She reached over and touched the edge of the boy’s cradle. Gently. A small contact. Checking.
He stirred slightly. Settled.
—
"Seren. Shower time. Bed."
Seb said it with the practiced ease of the evening routine, the words worn smooth from repetition, the tone that was not quite a request and not quite a command but the comfortable middle ground of a parent who has said the same thing enough times that it has become its own kind of language.
Seren was already off her chair.
He took the plates to the sink. Ran the water. Did the small domestic acts of clearing up after a meal with the automatic hands of a man whose mind was somewhere his hands weren’t?
He was not thinking about the company. He was trying very hard not to think about the company.
The water ran, and the plates were clean, and the jar went back into the cabinet, and he kept his eyes on what was in front of him: sink, plates, the specific ordinary task of a kitchen being tidied and refused, deliberately, to let the numbers come.
Then the phone rang. He didn’t look at it.
It rang again.
Company, he thought. More news I can’t do anything about. More board members I have no answers for. More documents to sign on the way to something I cannot stop.
"Daddy." Seren’s voice from the table. "Your phone is ringing. It says Unknown caller."
He heard her cross the kitchen. Heard her pick it up. She appeared at his elbow and held it out with the straightforward helpfulness of a child who had not yet learned that some calls were worth letting go to voicemail.
He forced a smile. Dried his hands. Answered.
"Is this Sebastian Creed?"
Unknown number. Formal voice. The voice of an institution rather than a person, the specific register of someone tasked with making calls they had been trained to make.
"Yes," Seb said. "This is him."
"Mr. Creed, your mother was hospitalised earlier this evening following an incident. We believe she was the victim of an attack. She sustained significant injuries." A pause.
The particular pause of someone who had been told to allow the person on the other end a moment. "She passed away this evening, sir. I’m very sorry for your loss."
The kitchen continued to exist.
The sink still dripped. The window above it still showed the evening outside. The jar sauce cabinet was still slightly ajar.
Everything in the room remained exactly as it had been ten seconds ago in all its ordinary, unchanged specificity.
Seb stood in the middle of it, and the world rearranged itself into something he did not recognise.
His mother. He thought of her voice.
The particular quality of it, not warm, never especially warm, but there. The voice of a woman who had survived things she never fully described and had transmitted that survival into a kind of toughness that Seb had spent his whole life simultaneously resisting and relying on.
He thought of the last time she had called him. The money she had asked for.
Her debts. The people to whom she owed them. The request that he had passed to Demian to send her something, handle it, had then been filed in the category of handled because that was easier than the category of attending to.
Had Demian sent it? Demian, who had walked out of his office. Demian, who had left before. Oh God. The phone fell.
He didn’t feel it leave his hand. Just heard it hit the floor, the sound of it, distant, below the larger sound of his own breathing, which had become strange to him, too loud, too uneven, not performing the function breathing was supposed to perform.
He was on the floor.
He didn’t know when that had happened either.
The kitchen floor was cold through his trousers and the ceiling above him was the ceiling he had looked at every evening of the last year and it meant nothing, none of it meant anything, his mother was gone and she had died owing money to people who collected debts in the way those people collected debts and he had not sent the money because the money had not been sent because Demian had left and he had not.
She died because of him.
