Chapter 312: How is your father?
"I know," Seren said simply. "I know you can’t give me that. I just needed you to hear it. From me, I just needed you to hear it the way it really was."
Amara’s throat moved.
She looked out the window for a long moment. The pewter sky had darkened slightly, clouds thickening at the edges.
"How is your father?" she said. Not Sebastian. Not your dad. Your father. The way she said it had something cautious inside it.
"Trying," Seren said. And then: "He tried to reach you. I know you know that."
"I know."
"I’m not here about him," Seren said. "This is mine. This is separate."
Amara looked at her again, and for just a moment, the careful professional face was simply gone, and what was underneath it was something much more tired and much more human, a woman who had loved a child and been gutted by it and had rebuilt herself carefully and was now standing in the rebuilt version of herself watching that child walk back toward her across the rubble.
"Sit down," Amara said.
Seren sat down. Amara sat down across from her, not behind the desk. In the chair beside it. The one for clients.
Outside, the pewter sky broke open, and rain came down against the window, the way rain does when it has been waiting all day, suddenly, completely, all at once.
They sat in the sound of it for a while.
"Tell me what you’ve been writing," Amara said, and her voice was careful still, but not armoured the same way, and she nodded at the notebook in Seren’s hands. "If you want to." Seren looked down at the notebook.
Then she opened it to the first page. She began.
When Seren was done reading, the rain had slowed to something quieter against the glass. She closed the notebook and set it on her knees and looked at her hands.
Amara had not interrupted her once.
That was the thing Seren would remember most, later. Not what Amara said or did not say. But the quality of her silence, the way she listened with her whole body turned toward Seren, not performing patience, just genuinely, completely there. The way she had always been.
She listened the same way she always listened, Seren thought. Nothing changed that in her.
That thought broke something loose in her chest, and she had to breathe carefully for a moment to keep it from becoming something larger.
Amara looked at her for a long time after she finished. Then she stood, walked to her desk, and opened the top drawer.
"Here," she said, turning back. She was holding money, a fold of notes, not a small amount. She held it out toward Seren.
Seren looked at it. Then she looked up. "No," she said. Quietly but without hesitation.
Amara’s hand stayed extended. "For transport. For whatever you need. You’re almost thirteen, and you’ve been taking the bus here three times."
"Mother." Seren shook her head. "No. Please."
A pause. Amara lowered her hand. She looked at the money for a moment, then set it back on the desk, not in the drawer. As if she hadn’t quite decided what to do with the gesture yet.
"Then what do you want?" she asked. Not unkindly. Genuinely.
Seren stood up and pushed her notebook back into her bag. She pulled the strap over her shoulder.
"I wanted you to hear me," she said. "You heard me." She held Amara’s gaze for a moment. Her eyes were wet but she wasn’t crying, not the way she had been afraid she would be. "That’s enough. That’s all I came for."
She moved toward the door.
"Seren."
She stopped.
Amara was standing very still beside the desk. Outside, the last of the rain moved across the window like a curtain being slowly drawn back.
"Thank you," Amara said. "For coming back. A third time."
Seren nodded once. Small, quick. The way you nod when saying anything more would undo you.
She opened the door and walked out.
In the corridor, Ms. Adelaide did not look up from her computer. But when Seren reached the end of the hall, she heard the soft scrape of a chair behind her and the quiet, deliberate click of a drawer being opened and then gently, firmly closed.
She did not look back.
She walked down four flights of stairs and out into the late afternoon air, which smelled like wet pavement and something that might have been distant cooking smoke, and she stood on the front step of the building for a moment with her face tipped up toward the sky.
It was not a good feeling, exactly.
It was not the kind of feeling she had imagined it would be, no lightness, no sudden unburdening. She had watched enough films to expect that telling the truth was supposed to feel like putting down a heavy bag.
It felt more like finally looking at a wound. Still there. Still hers. But visible now. Accounted for.
She pulled out her phone and texted her father. On my way home. Can we talk? His reply came in under a minute.
I’m here.
The Creed mansion was different from how she remembered it in her earliest recovered memories, smaller, somehow, or maybe just emptier of the things that used to fill it.
The good furniture was gone. The bookshelves had gaps. The kitchen still smelled faintly of something sweet and stale underneath the washing-up liquid, a smell she had learned not to name directly but knew the source of.
Seb was sitting at the kitchen table when she came in.
He was thirty-six, though he looked older than that in the evenings. He had her grandmother’s jaw and eyes that, when they were clear, were the kind of dark that felt warm.
Tonight, they were somewhere in the middle, not the worst she had seen them, not the best. He had a mug in front of him that held tea, she could smell it, and she allowed herself to feel a small, careful relief about that.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey." She dropped her bag by the door and sat down across from him.
He studied her face. He had become, over the past year, very good at reading her face. It was one of the things he did now instead of asking too many questions.
"You went," he said.
Comments