The vicar continues speaking, but his words blur behind the roar in my head.
She’s pregnant.
And I have no idea if she’s even alive.
What if my father’s men already found her, what if they already disposed of her and I’m searching for a body that’s already buried.
My stomach twists so violently I have to brace a hand on the back pew. I press my fist against my sternum. The ache there is relentless, not grief anymore, but something more primitive. The sensation of a bond stretched so thin it could snap at any moment.
Carollers begin singing at the front. Their voices rising to the ceiling arches, echoing through centuries of stone, and I straighten, swallowing past the lump in my throat, pushing down the bile, forcing my eyes to open.
“God rest ye merry, gentlemen. Let nothing you dismay…”
Nothing you dismay.
Everything dismays me.
My chest tightens as another wave of grief slams into me, sharp, cutting, unrelenting. It feels like someone is carving out my ribs and leaving the hollow space raw.
I rub my palms together, trying to shake the cold that hasn’t left me since the day she disappeared. The ignorance is torture. Not knowing if she still breathes. Not knowing if our child stilllives. Not knowing if she ran because she feared The Obsidian, or because she fearedme.
I bow my head.
I don’t pray.
It would be blasphemy.
But I’m desperate.
I’ll try anything.
But even if I wanted to, I don’t know how.
The candles flicker, and the bells toll again, and despite everything, I understand something with a clarity that cuts so deep I fear I’ll bleed out all over this church floor. If I find her, when I find her, I might have to let her go.
Not drag her back.
Not trap her in a cage.
Not chain her to a future she didn’t choose.
I might have to watch her from a distance. Keep her safe without ever letting her know. Live in the shadow of her freedom, even if it kills me.
Like I had done for the twelve years that separated us.
Never knowing why I was ever sent to her in the first place.
Why me, why then, why there, why her.
But I know the ‘why there’, and the ‘why her’ now.
‘Why there’ because that’s the house that Clara, the woman Nellie slaughtered before our union, who also, it turns out, is,was,my mother’s sister, told Milus he would find her.
And the ‘why her’, because she is my mother’s stolen daughter.
It’s the ‘why me’ and ‘why then’, I still can’t figure out.
Regardless of my findings, something Mother had requested of me almost two years ago now; to find her only biological child, it doesn’t change anything.
