POV: Caroline
The garden bench was cold through my jeans, which I noticed without doing anything about it.
I had been sitting for a while — I hadn't checked, which was itself notable.
Normally I would have been back inside with a document open, the mechanism I used when something was too large to think about directly. I had set it down this morning and not picked it back up.
My hands were in my lap. The garden was doing what gardens did — sparrows on the far wall, the smell of turned earth, light the particular quality of morning after a night without enough sleep.
I was simply present in it, not looking at any of it with intention, which was harder than it looked.
The gate opened. I heard Thalia's step before I looked up — I had learned the rhythm of the people who mattered here — and turned to watch her cross the grass.
She sat beside me without saying anything, without touching my arm. She just sat and waited, the way Kieran had taught her to by sitting beside her in a common room all night.
I let her wait a long moment. Then: "I'm not going to pretend this isn't what it is."
"I know," Thalia said — without adding anything that would make it easier to sit with.
"I'm not leaving," I said. "That's the one thing I'm completely clear on this morning."
"I know that too," she said, with the specific weight she put on things she had already decided.
We sat. A sparrow moved on the far wall. From somewhere in the compound came the sound of morning — the kitchen, a door, the first patrol rotation of the day doing its work.
"He told me everything," I said. "I want you to know that. Not a partial version — everything."
"Kieran told me this morning," Thalia said. "The complete version. He thought you should know."
"Good," I said. "I always prefer knowing — even in cases where not knowing would be more comfortable."
I looked at my hands. They were still. That was also new — my hands were usually doing something, finding a pen or arranging papers or calculating the best approach to whatever was next.
Stillness wasn't natural to them. I was making it happen deliberately, and it was taking effort.
"Four tests," I said. "I never told him — I didn't want to name it before it was real, and then it wasn't real, and now there may be a child in Vancouver and I still haven't told him."
Thalia was quiet, which was the right response, and the fact that she knew it and still managed it told me something about how much she had thought about this before coming to find me.
"I know what that makes me look like," I said. "I'm a lawyer. The hypocrisy is not lost on me."
"That's not what it makes you look like," Thalia said, her voice level and deliberate.
"No?" I said — not a real question, more a placeholder while I worked out whether I believed her.
"It makes you look like someone who was protecting herself from a grief she wasn't ready to name," Thalia said. "Which is not the same thing."
I turned the sentence over. "I've been naming other people's grief for years," I said. "I know every protocol and resource and pathway. I should be capable of naming my own."
"The people you help don't have your training," Thalia said. "Your training doesn't make it easier to apply to yourself. That's not hypocrisy — that's how knowledge works."
I sat with that, turning it the way I turned arguments I wasn't sure I could win.
"Every month I thought, maybe next month," I said. It was the first time I had said it — to the garden rather than to Thalia, to the sparrow on the wall, to the cold through my jeans.
"And now there may be a child who already exists and has his eyes somewhere I can't see, and I don't know what to do with the fact that I'm not angry at the child." I paused. "I'm just — undone by it."
The garden was very quiet after that — the specific quiet of a space in which something honest has just been said. Thalia didn't move.
"Not angry at the child," she said carefully, as though she was handling the sentence with both hands.
"He's just a toddler," I said. "He didn't choose any of this. He exists, and he has Lysander's eyes probably, or his hands, and he's in a care facility in Vancouver and his mother is ill."
"There is nothing about him that deserves anger." I let out a breath. "I know where to put anger. I don't know where to put this."
"Undone doesn't need somewhere to go," Thalia said. "It just needs somewhere to be."
"I'm trying," I said. "That's what this is." I gestured at the bench, the garden. "I usually work. I'm not working."
"I noticed," Thalia said. "That you're still here, in the garden, with your hands still. It's impressive."
"It's exhausting," I said. The honesty of it surprised me into something like a laugh.
We sat with it. The sparrow left the wall eventually. The morning went on doing what it was doing regardless.
"Can I tell you something I've been ashamed of for months?" Thalia asked. She said it like she was committing before she could reconsider.
I turned to look at her. Her face held the expression it had when she was committing to honesty rather than management — the one she used in the war council before something that was going to cost her.
"Yes," I said. I turned toward her and let her see that I meant it. "Tell me all of it."
She told me the whole shape of it — Phoenix running across the yard and me opening my arms before she covered half the distance. The specific quality of not-moving, thirty feet away.
The morning she found Rosalie before seven and told her what she was calling it — jealousy, because that was the honest word.
She told me she had manufactured distance. That she had come to the east wing and told herself it was work.
That she had been watching me with her children from a slight remove, managing what she felt instead of feeling it, because the feeling was ugly and she already had enough ugly things on her record.
She did not soften any of it. She said it to the garden the way I had said mine — to the turned earth, to the cold air, to something that wouldn't flinch.
When she finished, the garden was very quiet — not uncomfortably, but in the way of a space that has just absorbed something that needed saying.
I looked at my hands — still, which still required effort and still surprised me when it worked.
"I felt you pulling away," I said. "These last months. I thought it was something I had done." I paused. "I thought it was my fault."