Chapter 252: Chapter 254: Mei and Alexander
MEI’S POV — EVENING, ONE DAY BEFORE DISCHARGE
It started the way most things between them had always started.
An argument.
Not a loud one....they were in a hospital room with Aria sleeping ten feet away, so the argument happened in the corridor in hushed voices with controlled faces, which was somehow more exhausting than shouting would have been.
It had begun simply enough. Alexander had arrived with Thai food as promised, and Mei had already been there with soup from the place near her apartment, and for a moment the three of them had looked at the collection of food on the small hospital table and Aria had pressed her lips together very hard in the way she did when she was trying not to laugh.
"I’ll eat both," Aria had said pleasantly. "I’m recovering. I need the calories."
She’d fallen asleep an hour later mid-conversation, between one sentence and the next, the way exhausted people did....here and then suddenly not. Damien had stayed until nine, then Marcus had called about something that required his attention and he’d kissed Aria’s forehead and left with the reluctance of a man peeling himself away from something he needed.
Which left Mei and Alexander.
They’d sat on opposite sides of Aria’s bed for twenty minutes in a silence that was not entirely comfortable, and then Alexander had said, very quietly, that Mei looked tired, and Mei had said she was fine, and Alexander had said she wasn’t sleeping properly, he could tell, and Mei had told him that was none of his business, and then they were in the corridor.
"You don’t sleep when you’re worried," he said. "You never did. You’d stay up all night and then insist you were fine in the morning."
"I’m aware of my own habits, Alexander."
"I’m not criticizing them. I’m observing them." He looked at her steadily. "When did you last sleep a full night?"
"When did you?"
He paused. "Fair."
They stood in the corridor outside Aria’s room, the hospital quiet around them at this hour, and Mei looked at this man she had spent twenty five years carefully not thinking about and felt the particular exhaustion of someone who had been maintaining a position for too long.
"Come and sit down," she said finally. "Standing in a corridor is unnecessary."
They went to the small family lounge at the end of the hall. It was empty at this hour....two sofas, a coffee machine that looked like it had seen better years, a window overlooking the parking structure. Not a beautiful room. Not a room designed for the kind of conversation that was apparently about to happen.
Mei made two cups of coffee from the machine because her hands needed something to do, and sat down, and Alexander sat across from her, and they looked at each other.
Twenty five years.
She’d been twenty three when she left. Younger than Aria was now, which she found almost impossible to comprehend when she thought about it directly. Twenty three with a two month old baby and a fear she hadn’t had adequate language for yet, just the knowledge...bone deep and absolute....that she had to go.
He looked the same in the ways that mattered. The eyes. The way he held himself. The particular quality of his attention when it was directed at you, like you were the only thing in the room worth looking at. That had always been the dangerous part....the feeling of being fully seen by him. She’d been twenty years old when she’d first experienced it and it had rearranged something in her permanently.
"I owe you an apology," he said.
"You’ve apologized."
"Not properly." He held his coffee in both hands, looking at it briefly before looking back at her. "I’ve said the words. I haven’t....I haven’t actually explained what I’m apologizing for. And I think that matters."
Mei said nothing. Let him continue.
"I was controlling," he said. "Not occasionally. Systematically. I monitored who you spent time with, what you did, where you went. I told myself it was love. That I was protecting you." He paused. "I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in the last few years understanding the difference between protection and possession. I didn’t know the difference then. I know it now."
"What changed?"
"Therapy," he said simply. "A great deal of it. And losing you. And spending twenty five years understanding what I’d done to make you run." He looked at her. "And finding Aria. Watching her refuse to be managed by anyone, including me. Understanding where she got that from."
Mei smiled despite herself. "She gets it from both of us."
"She does," he agreed. And something in his face softened at that....the shared ownership of it, the strange pride of recognizing yourself in someone you made together.
The coffee machine hummed in the corner. Somewhere down the hall a phone rang twice and stopped.
"I never hated you," Mei said. "I want you to know that. I was afraid of you. That’s different."
"I know."
"Afraid of what I became around you. Afraid of how much I needed you to be okay." She looked at her cup. "That kind of need is dangerous when the person you need is also the person who scares you."
"I scared you," he said quietly.
"Yes."
"I’m sorry for that." He said it simply. No performance in it. "More than anything else. More than the control, more than the surveillance, more than all of it...that you were afraid of me. That someone who was supposed to feel like safety felt like a threat. I’m sorry for that, Mei."
She looked at him for a long moment.
He’d said her name so carefully. Like it was something he’d been storing carefully for a long time and was only now allowing himself to use.
"You’ve changed," she said. Not a concession. Just an observation, accurate and honest.
"Yes."
"The man I left wouldn’t have said any of that."
"No," he agreed. "He wouldn’t have."
"He wouldn’t have been able to." She set her cup down on the side table. "He would have made it about himself. About what he’d lost. About what I’d done to him by leaving."
"You mean I would have done that."
"You know what I mean."
"I do," he said. "And you’re right. I would have. The man I was at twenty six would have sat in this chair and told you about his pain without once asking about yours." A pause. "I’m asking now. For whatever it’s worth after all this time. How are you?"
It was such a simple question. So direct and unguarded.
Mei felt something in her chest move that she’d kept very carefully still for a very long time.
