“We’re all blind to the faults of our parents.” Cullen could speak from experience. “We never want to see them as who they are. It means admitting their shortcomings… Even for those who had the best of parents, that’s still the moment you realize that they aren’t the paragons we once imagined them to be, and accept that you can’t depend on anyone but yourself.”
Eira hummed, supposing it was true. Part of her had been holding out hope that her parents would prove her expectationswrong. Even though, at every turn over the years, they had shown her exactly who they were.
“But I honestly don’t care about them. How areyou?”
“I’m all right.” She was grateful he didn’t contradict her because she meant it. “It feels…done. They’re not shut out of my life forever. But they’re not a part of it either. They hold no power over me—I don’t need them. But that also means I realized I don’t need to shut them out entirely, either. It’s…”
“Complicated,” he finished for her.
“I imagine you must feel similarly about your father.” Every word was spoken as though it were cradling fine, blown glass. Eira glanced at him from the corners of her eyes. His face was stony, but not grimacing or crumpling.
Cullen nodded. “Part of me hoped he’d be there. But another part of me…” He made a noise of something like disgust. “Thinks it’s for the best he wasn’t. I’ve begun to wonder what I might say to him if I’m ever presented with the opportunity. How he might see me now.”
“And?” She was, admittedly, achingly curious.
“I’ve a lot of choice words.” Cullen chuckled darkly, eyes shadowed and gaze intense toward the distant horizon. “But, at the end of it, I made my own choices. I should have been more of a man and stood up for myself. I can’t blame him for everything.”
“Look at you, accepting responsibility.” She nudged him with her shoulder.
“I know, what a shock.” Cullen hung his head and glanced her way through strands of hair that had fallen loose from its usual part.
“It was, once.”
“Once,” he repeated, and a disbelieving smile carved across his face. She wondered if he, too, was thinking about just how far they’d come.
The talk of family—of surviving and not—had Eira’s thoughts wandering back to Noelle. The back of her throat was saltier still from all the tears she’d refused to shed today.
“It’s unfair that we’re both here—that my parents, of all people, managed to be here—and she’s not.”
“There are a great many things that are unfair about her death.” Cullen straightened, looking back over the city. “She would’ve loved it.” The words were barely more than a whisper on the wind, carried over the rooftops toward the distant horizon, where the watercolor sky blended with darkening sea.
“She would’ve told us how much better Norin was.”
Cullen snorted, stifling a laugh. For a while, even smiling had felt like a betrayal to her memory. Laughing was practically forbidden among them. But all ice thawed eventually, it seemed.
“She would’ve,” Cullen agreed, looking out again once he’d managed to compose himself. “Totally convinced she was right to the point that we’d all agree.”
“Absolutely.”
A silence stretched on for what felt like eternity. Amid the sunset, she could almost hear his thoughts. It wasn’t until lights from distant buildings began to flicker on, mirroring the early stars overhead in the twilight, that he spoke again.
“You know, it wasn’t your fault,” he whispered.
“Don’t,” Eira said firmly, straightening to look him in the eyes. “Don’t,” she repeated, gentler, but as unyielding as steel. “You keep her death and her memory in your way; let me keep it in mine.”
Cullen seemed poised to object but thought better of it when a pointed look from her silenced any retort. He turned his face back toward the sprawling city with a sigh. His voice carried a surprising conviction when he said, “Let’s go out.”
Eira made a surprised noise and lifted her brows.
“We’re in a new city, for the first time in weeks we don’t have any kind of stink, and our pockets are still heavy with Adela’s gold.” He grinned. “Why not go out?”
“We need to stay focused.”
“On what?”
Agitation tugged on the corners of her lips at the question. “We need to ensure our ship will be cleared to sail when next we want. That it’s properly repaired and restocked so we have all we need. And anything else we can do to ally ourselves with Qwint so they return to Meru’s aide.”
Eira counted on her fingers as she spoke, listing off everything she wanted to accomplish.
