The Second Vow

Chapter 5: The Name I Paid to Remember

Josephine's POV

The ache hit before the memory did, low behind my sternum, sharp enough that I put a hand against the doorframe to stay upright.

Something gave way inside my own head, quiet, final, like a page pulled loose from a book I couldn't see the cover of anymore. I didn't know yet what it had taken. I only knew it had taken something, and that the name my father gasped out had cost me for the privilege of almost understanding it.

Delacroix.

A face came with it, half formed, a woman I'd met once at a council dinner years before any of this began, someone my father spoke to too quietly and too briefly for me to have thought anything of it at the time. That was all I got. A face with no context. A debt with no explanation.

"Josephine."

The physician's voice cut through it. "He's stable. For now. You should let him rest."

I nodded, because there wasn't anything else to do, and let Priya pull me back from the doorway one more time. My father's chest rose and fell slowly but steadily under the physician's hands, and some part of me wanted to feel relief at that and mostly just felt hollow instead.

I went looking for what I'd lost.

Griffin's proposal. I reached for it out of habit, the way you touch a bruise to check if it still hurts, and found the edges of it soft in a way that had nothing to do with time. I remembered him kneeling. I remembered my own hands shaking. I did not remember, with any certainty, what he'd said to me, only that he'd said something, and that whatever it was had once meant everything.

I sat down hard on the bench outside the study.

This wasn't a fair trade. Nothing about it had asked to be fair.

"You look like you've been hit by something," Griffin said, and for once there wasn't any performance in his voice at all.

"I have."

He didn't ask what. He sat down next to me instead, close enough that our shoulders almost touched, not quite, and shrugged out of his jacket without a word. He put it over my shoulders like it was the most obvious thing in the world, like he'd done it a hundred times before in a life he hadn't lived yet.

"You don't have to talk," he said. "I'm not going anywhere."

I wanted to tell him everything. All of it. The dinner, the dying wife of a man he hadn't married yet, the note in the dress box, the name my father spent his own breath on. I opened my mouth and none of it came out right, so what came out instead was smaller and truer than anything I'd planned to say.

"I keep losing things," I said. "Pieces of things. And I don't get to choose which ones."

"What kind of pieces?"

"I don't know how to explain it so it makes sense."

"Try."

I didn't try. I let the silence sit there instead, and he let it sit too, which was somehow worse and better than if he'd pushed. The hallway smelled like antiseptic and old wood polish, an ordinary, ugly combination that had nothing to do with any of this and that I would probably remember for the rest of my life anyway.

"My father said a name," I said finally. "Before he went under. A name I've never heard."

"What name?"

"Delacroix."

Griffin went still beside me in a way I felt more than I saw, a stillness with weight to it, and for one long second I thought he was going to tell me something. His jaw worked once. Then it didn't.

"Doesn't mean anything to me," he said.

I didn't believe him. I also didn't have the strength left to call it, not tonight, not with my father's heart barely holding and a piece of my own memory gone somewhere I couldn't follow it.

"Okay," I said.

"Josephine."

"It's fine."

"It's not fine. You just said you don't know what's happening to you, and I'm sitting here telling you a name doesn't mean anything, and we both know that's not the whole truth." He exhaled, long, like the admission cost him something too. "I don't know how to do this the other way. The honest way. I've never had to."

That was the truest thing either of us had said all night, and it landed somewhere I wasn't prepared for it to land.

I leaned into his shoulder.

Not much. An inch, maybe less, was enough that his jacket slid slightly and his arm came up without either of us deciding it, careful, like he thought I might change my mind if he moved too fast. I didn't change my mind. I let my head rest there and closed my eyes and let myself believe, for exactly as long as this hallway lasted, that some of this could still turn out fine.

Here was the truth I didn't say out loud. Knowing everything hadn't saved me the first time. Knowing everything might not save me this time either. But some part of me, tired and stubborn and still half in love with a man who hadn't earned it back yet, wanted this one hallway anyway, wanted his shoulder and his jacket and the particular quiet of two people who both knew more than they were saying.

"Thank you," I said.

"For what."

"For not asking me to explain something I can't explain yet."

His arm tightened, just slightly, around me. Neither of us said anything else. The hallway light buzzed faintly overhead, one of those old fixtures that never got fixed, and I found myself listening to that instead of my own thoughts, grateful for something so small and stupid to focus on.

I could have stayed there.

A guard's boots hit the corridor floor at a dead run, and I was on my feet before I'd fully processed the sound, Griffin a half second behind me.

"What," Griffin said.

"Vivienne Lark." The guard's chest heaved like he'd run the whole way from the east wing. "She's gone. Nobody's seen her since the dinner. We checked her rooms, the grounds, everything."

"Gone where?"

"We don't know." The guard's eyes went to me, then away, quick, like he didn't want to be the one to say the next part. "Two of the kitchen staff say they saw her earlier tonight. Talking to someone in the east garden. Hours before he collapsed."

My whole body went cold before my mind caught up to why.

"Who," I said, though I already knew.

The guard looked at my father's closed study door before he answered, like the answer itself was something that needed permission first.

"Your father, my lady. They're saying it was your father."