Two Empires, One Heart

Chapter 4

I woke in my old room to the smell of pepper soup, and for one merciful half second before memory caught up with me, I was seventeen again, nothing broken yet, nothing given away.

Then it came back all at once, the way these things do, and I lay there staring at a ceiling I used to know every c***k of, feeling the weight of two years and one morning settle back over me like a blanket I couldn’t kick off.

My father hadn’t asked a single question the night before. He’d made up my old room, sat with me while I cried myself empty, and gone quiet when I finally stopped, patting my hand once before leaving me to sleep. I loved him for that more than I had words for. I also knew the questions were coming. Men like my father didn’t forget to ask. They only knew how to wait until you were ready to answer.

I found him in the kitchen, and I found Freya at the table.

I hadn’t expected her. I don’t know why not, she still lived here, this was still her home too, but seeing her in one of my old chairs, sipping tea like any ordinary morning, made something in my chest go tight and strange.

We hadn’t spoken in almost two years either.

“You’re up,” my father said, sliding a bowl toward the seat across from Freya, which meant I had to sit across from her whether I wanted to or not.

Freya didn’t look up right away. When she did, her face gave away exactly nothing, the same careful nothing I remembered from every family dinner we’d survived together, a girl who’d learned early that showing too much cost her more than it ever earned.

“Selene,” she said, like my name was a fact and not a greeting.

“Freya.”

Our father filled the silence by pretending to be very busy with the stove, and I understood, watching him, that this was deliberate, that he’d likely planned this breakfast the moment I walked through his door the night before, two daughters he loved and had lost in different ways, sat down at the same table whether they liked it or not.

“How’s the company,” I said finally, because someone had to say something, and because it was the only question I could ask that didn’t require either of us to say anything true.

“Fine.” Freya turned her cup slowly on its saucer. “Growing. Your father’s advice still works, even secondhand.”

There was no venom in it. I almost wished there had been. This was something else, flat and careful, a woman handing me facts instead of feelings because feelings weren’t a currency she trusted me with.

“That’s good,” I said.

“Is it?”

I looked up at her.

“You gave it to me,” Freya said, still turning the cup, “and then you disappeared for two years. I never knew if I was supposed to be grateful or guilty. I still don’t.”

My father set a pot down harder than he needed to, and neither of us acknowledged it.

“I wanted you to have it,” I said. “I wanted, “ I stopped, because the sentence I’d prepared, some version of I wanted to prove I could love someone without needing anything, sounded exactly as foolish out loud as it had been in practice.

“You wanted to prove something to a man who’s currently kissing his assistant in his office,” Freya said, an edge in it now, quiet but real. “I read the papers this morning. Word travels fast in this city.”

I set my spoon down. My face must have done something, because for the first time since I’d sat down, something shifted in hers too, not softening, exactly, but adjusting, like she’d swung harder than she meant to and felt it land.

“I’m not trying to hurt you,” she said, after a moment. “I’ve had two years to be angry at you for leaving me everything and never once calling to see if I was drowning in it. I didn’t ask for the Ashworth inheritance, Selene. I didn’t ask to be the version of you that stayed.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” She finally met my eyes fully, and there it was, the thing she’d been keeping behind that flat, careful face. Not resentment, exactly. Something lonelier. “You gave me everything you had and none of yourself. I got the company. I got the house. I never once got a sister.”

The kitchen went very quiet.

Our father had stopped pretending to cook. He stood with his back to us, and I understood, watching his shoulders, that he’d heard this from Freya before, maybe many times, across two years of dinners with only one daughter at the table.

“I didn’t know how to be your sister,” I said, and it was the truest thing I’d said since walking through that door. “I didn’t know how to be anything except what he wanted. I gave you everything because it was easier than figuring out how to keep any of it and still be someone he could, “

“Disappear a little,” Freya said quietly. “I heard that line before. From your own mouth. At your engagement dinner, you said it like it was the most romantic thing you’d ever heard.”

I hadn’t remembered saying that. Hearing it now, in her voice, in this kitchen, it sounded exactly as sick as it should have.

“I was wrong,” I said.

“I know you were.” Her voice cracked, just once, the first real c***k I’d heard in it. “I just needed you to know it too.”

We sat there, the three of us, the pepper soup going cold, two women who had spent two years being sisters in name only, finally being honest in the same room.

“I don’t want the company,” I said, after a while. “I never wanted it back. I just want, “ I looked at her properly, really looked, the way I hadn’t let myself look at anyone in longer than I wanted to admit. “I want to know you. If you’ll let me.”

Freya studied me, her walls visibly deciding whether to hold.

“That’s going to take longer than one breakfast,” she said finally.

“I have time now,” I said. “I gave everything else away. That’s the one thing I have left.”

Something in her face moved, not quite a smile, but close enough that our father, still turned toward the stove, finally let his shoulders drop.