Chapter 253: Chapter 255: Rekindling Old Fire
"I’m frightened," she said. "Still. About Aria. About what almost happened." She looked at the window, at the dark glass reflecting the room back at them. "I spent five years being sick, Alexander. Five years of Aria holding everything together while I was falling apart. And I kept thinking....when I get better, I’ll protect her. I’ll be strong enough to protect her. And then I got better and the Vitalis Radix worked and I had my life back." She paused. "And she nearly died anyway."
"She didn’t die."
"She nearly did."
"But she didn’t." His voice was gentle. "She’s in that room sleeping because she’s stubborn and brilliant and she wrote an antidote formula while she was dying. She saved herself, Mei. You raised someone who saves herself."
Mei pressed her lips together. Felt the tears coming and did what she’d done for twenty five years...breathed through them, held them back, stayed composed.
"Don’t do that," Alexander said.
She looked at him. "What?"
"Whatever you just did. Where you decided not to cry." He held her gaze. "You don’t have to do that here."
"I’m fine."
"Mei."
"I said I’m..." Her voice cracked cleanly on the second word. Clean and unavoidable, like something giving way that had been under pressure for too long.
She pressed her hand over her mouth. Felt the tears come properly now.....not the dramatic overwhelming kind, just the quiet steady kind that came from being exhausted and scared and loved and sitting across from someone who had known her when she was young.
Alexander moved to her sofa. Not rushing it. Just closing the distance and sitting beside her and not saying anything at all, which was exactly right.
After a while she dropped her hand and exhaled and felt the particular lightness that came after crying. She didn’t look at him. Just sat in the quiet with him beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him.
"I never stopped loving you," he said.
The words sat in the air.
Mei didn’t respond immediately. She’d expected them....had felt them coming from somewhere in the conversation....but hearing them out loud was different from anticipating them.
"You don’t have to say that," she said.
"I know I don’t." His voice was very even. "I’m saying it because it’s true and because I decided years ago that if I ever had the chance I wouldn’t waste it on indirection." He looked at her. "I’m not asking anything from you. I’m not putting pressure on anything. I just....you should know. After everything, you should know."
Mei looked at her hands.
Twenty five years. Two marriages that had been good and honest and real in their way but had always existed beside this particular absence, this specific shape of something she’d loved and fled and never fully put down.
"I’m afraid," she said finally.
"I know."
"Not of you," she clarified. "Not the same fear. But...." She searched for the words. "Afraid of what it means to open that door again. Afraid of what I might lose if it goes wrong. Afraid of what Aria would think, how it would affect her...."
"Aria would be fine," he said. "She’s more perceptive than either of us. She already sees it."
Mei thought about the look on her daughter’s face last week when she’d caught Mei and Alexander talking in the corridor. The particular expression Aria had..... carefully neutral, which meant she was feeling a great deal and choosing not to show it yet.
"She hasn’t said anything," Mei said.
"She’s waiting to see what we do," Alexander said. "That’s what she does. She watches and she waits and she makes room for people to become who they’re going to be before she responds to them." He paused. "She did it with me. She’s doing it with this."
Mei was quiet for a long moment.
"You have changed," she said. "I want you to know that I see it. Genuinely." She turned to look at him. "The man in this room is not the man I left. I’m clear about that."
"But?"
"But I’m still afraid," she said. "Not of who you are now. Afraid of myself. Of how easy it would be to...." She stopped. Started again. "I loved you so much, Alexander. That was never the problem. It was always how much. How completely. I disappeared inside it." She held his gaze. "I can’t do that again. I won’t. I’ve spent twenty five years finding out who I am on my own and she is someone I’m not willing to lose."
Alexander looked at her for a long time.
"I don’t want you to lose her," he said. "That woman you found on your own .....I don’t want to diminish her. I want to know her." He paused. "Whatever this is, whatever it could be, I want it to exist alongside who you are now. Not instead of her."
Mei studied his face. Looking for the performance in it, the way she’d learned to look for it, the gap between what people said and what they meant.
She didn’t find it.
That frightened her more than anything else, in the best possible way.
"I’m not ready to make any decisions," she said. "I need you to understand that."
"I understand it."
"And I need you to be patient. Genuinely patient. Not the kind of patient that’s actually just waiting for the right moment to push."
Something crossed his face that was almost a smile. "Your daughter said something very similar to me last week."
"She learned it from me."
"I know," he said. "I’m beginning to understand where everything she is comes from."
They sat together in the quiet lounge for a while longer, two cups of bad coffee going cold on the table, the window dark, the hospital doing its gentle nighttime work around them.
At some point Mei’s head tipped sideways and came to rest against his shoulder.
She felt him go very still....not pulling away, not leaning in. Just staying exactly where he was, like a man who understood that this was something to be held carefully and not gripped.
She didn’t move either.
Outside, somewhere down the hall, Aria was sleeping. Her daughter. Their daughter. The person they had made together and raised separately and somehow, against all reasonable odds, found their way back to through.
"Okay," Mei said quietly.
"Okay what?"
"Okay I’m not saying no." She kept her eyes closed. "I’m not saying yes either. I’m saying....okay. We can see."
Alexander exhaled slowly.
"That’s enough," he said. "That’s more than enough."
