Forced To Marry My Dead Fiance's Brother

015 What I wasn't ready For

Christabel

I didn't know what to do with what I just heard.Jane has started talking.

Jane was still pressed against the window, pointing at snow that had just started drifting past the glass in slow, lazy spirals, completely unaware that the word she'd just used had detonated something in the room behind her. Sebastian hadn't moved either. Neither had I. We just stood there, two adults frozen by a four year old's accident of a sentence, while the world outside kept snowing like nothing had happened at all.

"She didn't mean it like that," I said finally, my voice coming out smaller than I meant it to. "I mean, she probably did, but she doesn't understand what it means, not really, she's just—"

"Christabel."

"I'm not trying to take anything from her. From Elena. I would never want her to think I'm trying to replace—"

"Christabel." Sebastian's voice was quiet, but it cut through my spiral cleanly enough to stop it. "You don't have to apologize for a four year old loving you."

"I'm not apologizing. I'm explaining. There's a difference." Though even as I said it, I wasn't entirely sure there was, not in that moment, not with my heart going so fast I could feel it in my throat.

He crossed the room slowly, stopping close enough that I had to tilt my head up slightly to meet his eyes, close enough that I could see the exhaustion etched into the lines around them, a night with no sleep and a morning with Evelyn and now this, all of it sitting heavy on his face.

"I've spent a year trying to get her to say one full sentence," he said. "One. I would sit at the edge of her bed and beg, not out loud, but in every way that mattered, please, just talk to me, just let me in. And she gave her first one to you, without even trying, in the middle of an argument with my ex-girlfriend, over snow."

"That's not a competition, Sebastian."

"I know that." Something raw moved behind his eyes. "I'm not upset about it being you. I want you to understand that. I'm upset because it made me realize how much of my daughter I've been failing to reach, and how easily you managed it without even meaning to."

"You haven't been failing her."

"Haven't I?"

"No." I reached up, without fully deciding to, and rested my hand against his jaw, the first time I'd touched him with any real intention behind it, and felt him go very still under my palm, like he wasn't sure what to do with gentleness aimed directly at him. "She watches you when you think she's not looking. She saves the drawings she thinks you'll like best for your desk. She's not choosing me over you, Sebastian. She's just finally found someone safe enough to practice on, and I think, somewhere underneath all that fear, she knows you're still there waiting for her."

His hand came up and covered mine, holding it against his face instead of pulling away, and for a long moment neither of us said anything at all, the space between us shrinking without either of us officially deciding to let it.

"Christabel," he said, low, rough, my name sounding different in his mouth than it ever had before.

"Yeah."

"I don't know what I'm doing anymore. With any of this."

"Neither do I." My voice had gone breathless in a way I didn't fully recognize. "I think we're just supposed to figure it out as we go."

He leaned in, slow, giving me every chance to step back if I wanted to, and I didn't, I stayed exactly where I was, my heart hammering so loud I was sure he could hear it, and his mouth was maybe an inch from mine when Jane's small voice broke through the moment, still pressed against the glass, oblivious to everything happening behind her.

"Papa, look, someone's outside. In the garden. He's just standing there."

We both turned at the same time.

I don't know what I expected to see. A gardener, maybe, a delivery person who'd wandered off course. What I actually saw was a figure standing at the edge of the property line, too still, too deliberately positioned in the falling snow, facing up toward the window like he'd been waiting for exactly this moment to be seen.

Sebastian was moving before I'd even fully processed it, crossing to the window, pulling Jane back from the glass with one hand while reaching for his phone with the other, and by the time I looked again, the figure was gone, nothing left behind but footprints already filling in with snow, and a cold, creeping certainty settling into my chest that whoever it was had wanted us to know they'd been there at all.