Two Empires, One Heart

Chapter Ten

Marcus called four times before I answered.

The first call came on a Tuesday morning, while I was still in the kitchen with a cup of tea going cold in my hands, steam no longer rising from the surface, the milk starting to separate slightly the way it does when a drink has been forgotten too long. I watched his name light up the screen against the marble counter and let it ring itself out, standing very still, as though moving might somehow make the sound carry further into the house than it already had, might wake something I wasn't ready to face before I'd had my coffee.

The second call came that afternoon, while I was helping Freya sort through old filing boxes in the study, dust settling over both of us in thin grey layers. I watched her glance at the phone buzzing insistently on the desk between us and then back at me, and neither of us said anything at all.

The third came that evening, while Freya and I were reviewing figures at the kitchen table, the good pen scratching steadily across a page of notes. She glanced at the phone again, then at me, and said nothing at all, which I understood, by then, as its own quiet kind of support, a sister choosing not to fill a silence that belonged entirely to me.

The fourth call came the following morning, earlier than the others, while the house was still mostly quiet, my father not yet down for breakfast. Something in me, tired of running from a sound that clearly wasn't going to stop on its own, finally answered it.

"Selene." His voice had a softness in it I recognized instantly, from the early years, before I understood it was a performance he could summon whenever he needed something from me. "I've been trying to reach you."

"I know." I set my tea down, steadying myself against the counter with one hand. "I saw."

"Can we talk? Not about the divorce. Just, talk. Like we used to, before everything."

"There isn't anything left to talk about that isn't about the divorce, Marcus." I said it evenly, surprised at how little effort the words took, how naturally they arrived compared to two years of carefully chosen sentences designed never to upset him, never to give him a reason to go quiet on me for days.

A pause stretched long enough that I almost thought the call had dropped entirely, the silence filling with the faint hum of the refrigerator behind me.

"I made a mistake," he said finally. "I know that doesn't fix anything. I just needed you to hear it from me, not from a lawyer, not from the papers printing our business for strangers to read over breakfast."

I sat with the shape of that sentence for a moment, surprised at how little of my old anger rose to meet it, how distant the whole thing suddenly felt, like reading about someone else's marriage in one of those very papers he'd just mentioned.

"You didn't make a mistake," I said. "A mistake is forgetting an anniversary, or missing a flight because you left too late. You built an entire second life and hid it inside our marriage for years, Marcus. Don't call it a mistake. Call it what it actually was, plainly, for once in your life."

Silence again, longer this time, heavy enough that I could hear him breathing on the other end.

"I still care about you," he said. "Whatever else is true. I need you to know that, at least."

"I believe that you think you do." I closed my eyes, leaning my head back against the cabinet behind me, the wood cool through my hair. "That's not the same thing as it mattering anymore, though. Not to me."

"Selene, "

"I have to go, Marcus."

"Wait, " Something in his voice cracked slightly, an edge I hadn't heard from him before, not since the office, not since he'd looked at me with irritation instead of guilt that morning. "Is there someone else? Is that what this is?"

The question landed strangely, a man who had spent years building a second life asking me, with something close to outrage, whether I'd found comfort somewhere he hadn't personally sanctioned first.

"There's no one else," I said, which was true, in the way that mattered to the question he was actually asking underneath the question he'd actually spoken aloud. "There's just me, finally, which is apparently something you never once accounted for in two entire years."

I hung up before he could answer, and stood very still in the kitchen for a long moment afterward, waiting to feel something c***k open the way it used to whenever his voice found a way to unsettle me from the inside out.

Nothing did.

I picked my tea back up, poured it out into the sink, and made a fresh cup instead, and thought, pouring the water, how strange it was that the absence of feeling could be its own kind of quiet victory, one nobody would ever write a headline about.

Freya found me there a few minutes later, leaning against the counter with my hands wrapped around the warm mug, staring at nothing in particular through the window above the sink.

"Marcus?" she asked, though it wasn't really a question at all.

"Marcus." I took a sip, steady now. "He wanted to know if there was someone else."

"Is there?"

I thought of a boardroom I hadn't set foot in yet, of a name in a folder that had made something shift in my chest days earlier, warm and unexpected, and shook my head, though something in me hesitated a half second too long before I did, a hesitation Freya's sharp eyes clearly caught and chose, generously, not to mention.

Freya, watching me carefully, said nothing more about it, and simply poured herself a cup as well, and the two of us stood together in the quiet kitchen, saying nothing, needing to say nothing at all, the morning light slowly filling the room around us.