Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

Back to work

FARAH

FARAH

Things are different after that.

Not resolved — nothing is resolved, and I’m not naive enough to pretend otherwise. Monroe is still out there. The curse is still sitting between us like a wall with a crack in it. The conscious choice the second passage describes hasn’t been made. I’m pregnant and we’ve spoken about it exactly once and there is an entire conversation still waiting in that space. Nothing is resolved.

But something has changed in the daily texture of things, and I notice it the way you notice a shift in weather — not dramatically, just present, the air different on your skin than it was yesterday.

Breakfast is the clearest evidence.

It’s the same table. The same food. Marcus stealing things from both our plates with the cheerful shamelessness of a man who has decided that the social contract doesn’t apply to him before nine in the morning. But the silence between Caspian and me has changed quality again — easier somehow, more inhabited, like a room that’s been aired out after being closed too long.

He makes a comment about something Marcus says and I respond before I’ve decided to respond, and he looks at me with something in his expression that isn’t quite amusement and isn’t quite warmth and is becoming, I’ve noticed, increasingly difficult to categorise. Marcus looks between us with the expression of a man watching something he’s been quietly rooting for and is wise enough not to say so.

I make him laugh twice in three days.

The first time is accidental — something I say at breakfast that lands differently than I intended, and the laugh surprises both of us, brief and real, and he covers it almost immediately but not quite fast enough. I file it away. I am keeping a very careful internal record of the things that crack his composure and that laugh goes in it.

The second time is deliberate and I’m not ashamed of that.

***

Daria finds me in the training ground on the second morning. She doesn’t announce herself — she never does, it’s not in her nature — she just appears at the edge of the ground while I’m running through forms and watches with the critical assessment she applies to everything.

I finish the sequence. She walks over.

“Your pivot on the third transition is still late,” she says.

“Good morning to you too,” I say.

Something moves at the corner of her mouth. She demonstrates the correction — crisp, exact, the movement so clean it looks effortless, which I know from months of watching her means she’s been doing it so long it lives in her body without requiring thought. I run it again. Better. She nods once, which is her version of enthusiastic praise.

We train for an hour. When we stop, both of us breathing hard, she hands me a water skin without being asked and looks out at the grounds with the particular quality she has sometimes of someone standing in a place they’ve known a long time.

“He’s different with you,” she says. Not looking at me. “Than he’s been with anyone.”

I’m quiet for a moment. “I know,” I say.

“I didn’t like it at first,” she says.

“I noticed,” I say.

Another almost-movement at her mouth. “I don’t dislike it now,” she says, with the careful precision of someone making a concession they’ve thought about. “For what that’s worth.”

I look at her profile. At thirty years of loyalty to a man she loves in whatever way she loves him, standing beside someone who arrived here in a ruined dress and has no business being here except that the universe apparently decided otherwise. “It’s worth something,” I say honestly. “More than you’d think.”

She looks at me then. Something in her expression that isn’t quite friendship and isn’t quite its absence. “He’s trying,” she says. “That’s more than most people get from him.”

“I know,” I say.

She picks up her training weapon. “Again,” she says. And we go back to work.