Bound By Blood - A Dark Romance

Ninety Days

The days found their shape.

Mornings in the kitchen, the two of them on the same side of the counter with the coffee and the newspaper and the garden outside where the wild tree was beginning to show the first pale suggestions of new growth as the season shifted toward something warmer. Sienna had started reading parts of the newspaper aloud, the things she found interesting or absurd or worth discussing, and Damian listened and responded with the seriousness he brought to everything and occasionally said something that made her laugh and then looked pleased with himself in the quiet way he had.

She collected those moments the way she had been collecting his laughs. Carefully and for keeps.

The working room in the afternoons. The false data feed running steadily in the background, Zara dropping in twice a week to check the transmission integrity and update the board and drink considerable quantities of coffee and occasionally correct something on the eastern network map that was bothering her. She had become a fixture in the house in the way that useful people with no particular respect for conventional boundaries sometimes did, and Sienna found she didn't mind.

The evenings were theirs.

She had stopped thinking of that as a remarkable thing. It had simply become true, the way the kitchen had become hers and his side of the counter had become her side too and the wild tree in the garden had become something she looked at every morning the way you looked at something that belonged to the texture of your life.

They were in the sitting room on a Wednesday evening in the fourth week when she told him about her mother.

She had not planned to. They had been talking about Prague and Vera and the way the mid-tier network there had developed differently from Velmora's because of the specific history of the city and she had said something about how the networks she understood best were the ones she had learned through people rather than through structure and he had asked her who had taught her to read people that way and she had said her mother before she had thought about whether she wanted to.

He waited in the way he always waited, complete and unhurried.

"She left when I was eight," Sienna said. "Not dramatically. She just decided one morning that the life my father had built was not the life she wanted and she went. I came home from school and she was gone." She looked at the lamp on the side table, the warm circle of it. "My father never talked about her after that. Marco told me years later that she had gone to live with her sister in another city. That she was well. That she had made a different life."

"Did you ever contact her," he said quietly.

"Once. When I was twenty three. I wrote a letter." She paused. "She wrote back. It was a kind letter. She asked about my life in general terms and told me about hers and said she hoped I was happy." Sienna looked at her hands. "It was the letter of someone who had made a decision and was at peace with it and didn't want the decision complicated."

"So you didn't write again."

"I didn't write again." She looked up. "I understood it. I didn't like it but I understood it. Some people are not built for the world they find themselves in and the honest thing is to leave it rather than stay and be broken by it." She paused. "I chose differently. I chose to be built for it."

He was quiet for a moment. "You were eight," he said.

"I know."

"You didn't choose anything at eight. You survived."

She looked at him. At the open expression and the steady attention and the man who kept the things she told him with the same care he kept everything that mattered.

"Yes," she said. "I survived. And then later I chose." She held his gaze. "I'm still choosing."

He reached across the space between them on the couch and took her hand and held it in the simple direct way he did things that mattered, without performance, just the warm weight of it in hers.

She let herself feel it completely.

Outside the city moved through its Wednesday evening and the house held its quiet and the lamp made its circle and inside it two people sat on a couch and held hands and the story of an eight year old girl who had come home to an empty house sat in the room and was witnessed and that, she thought, was what it meant to be known by someone.

Not fixed. Not rescued.

Witnessed.

She turned her hand over and held his back and they sat in the lamplight until the evening became late and neither of them was in any hurry for it to end.