Chapter 313: I’m not judging that either
"Yes."
"And?"
Seren folded her hands on the table. She looked at them, then at him.
"She listened," she said. "She heard me. She didn’t forgive me, she said she couldn’t do that yet, but she listened to all of it. Everything I wrote down." She paused. "She tried to give me money. I said no."
Seb closed his eyes for a moment. Something moved across his face that she had no name for either.
"Good," he said. "That was right."
"Daddy." She waited until he opened his eyes. "I need to tell you something, and I need you to hear it the same way she heard me. Without interrupting."
He straightened slightly. He picked up the mug and set it down again without drinking from it.
"All right," he said.
"I remember," she said. "I remember everything now. Most of it, the rest keeps coming." She watched his face.
"I remember whose daughter I am, what Elara told me to say, and what I said." She held his gaze steadily. "I remember what you were doing, and why you thought you were doing it, and I remember what it cost us all."
The kitchen was very quiet.
Seb’s hands, around the mug, were very still.
"Seren, "
"I’m not angry at you, Daddy," she said. "I think I was, when the memories first started coming back. I was angry at everyone, I think. But I know, I know you thought you were protecting me. I know it went wrong. I know what losing Amara did to you." She paused. "I know what losing her did to me."
He looked at the table.
"I need you to find a will to live," she said. "Not for yourself. You can’t do it for yourself yet, I understand that. Do it for me. That’s all. Just for me." She leaned forward slightly.
"I am almost thirteen. I need a father who is here. Present. I need you to be someone I can count on to still be alive in the morning, and that has not always been... " Her voice caught. She pressed forward. "That has not always been something I could be certain of."
The silence after that was so dense it felt structural.
Seb’s jaw was working. His eyes had gone bright in a way that was not clearness but something rawer than that.
"I know," he said. Barely audible.
"I’m not asking you to be fine," Seren said. "I’m asking you to try. That’s different. I know the difference now."
He covered his face with both hands for a moment. She watched his shoulders and waited.
When he lowered his hands, his face was wrecked but present. He was looking at her in the way he sometimes looked at her, like he was seeing her and also seeing all the versions of her at once, every year laid on top of every year, and the weight of that was immense and also, somehow, something he wanted to hold.
"I’ve been trying to stop," he said. His voice was unsteady. "The drinking. I’ve been... I’ve tried. I’ve tried several things, Seren, and nothing has, it’s not as simple as deciding. I want you to know I know that’s not an excuse. But I want you to know I’ve been trying, and it hasn’t. Nothing I’ve tried so far has worked."
"Okay," she said.
He blinked. "Okay?"
"I’m not asking you to have already fixed it," she said. "I’m asking you not to stop trying." She looked at the mug between his hands. "And I know the money has run out."
He looked away.
"I’m not judging that either," she said. "I just know. I’ve known for a while." She took a breath. "What are we going to do?"
Something shifted in him then. She could see it, the old self, the one she caught glimpses of sometimes, the one who had once been very good at solving problems before problems became the thing doing the solving.
"I’m going to get a job," he said.
She waited.
"That’s, I know how that sounds. But I mean it seriously this time." He straightened. Ran his hand over his face.
"I’ve been putting it off because there are reasons, complicated reasons, things I’ll explain when you’re older. But we can’t, I can’t keep, " He stopped himself and started again, more precisely.
"I’m going to sort out a proper name situation. Get to work. Something that pays regularly. We can be fine, Seren. I know we can be fine. I just need to, I need to stop letting the same days repeat."
She studied him. "Promise me," she said.
"I promise you," he said. No hesitation. "A job. Something real. We’ll be fine."
She held his gaze for a long moment, the way she had learned to, this year, measuring not just what people said but how they held the words in their body, whether they lived in their eyes or died in the air.
This one lived. She nodded.
"Okay," she said again. And this time the word was smaller and softer, not a negotiation. Just a landing.
She got up and filled the kettle.
Twenty minutes later, they were both sitting with tea, talking about nothing particular, a teacher she disliked, a bus route that had changed, a television programme he had half-watched the night before, and couldn’t remember the ending of. The ordinary padding of an ordinary evening.
Neither of them mentioned Amara again that night.
But when Seren went to bed, she lay in the dark for a while with her notebook open on the pillow beside her, not reading it, just knowing it was there, and she thought about a woman standing at a window with her hand resting on the sill as if needing to feel the solidity of something real.
She thought about the way that woman had said thank you. She thought about what it meant to give someone the truth as a gift and ask for nothing in return, and how that was perhaps the only kind of giving that could not be taken back.
She closed the notebook.
She turned off the light.
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