Ris exhaled slowly, closing her eyes again. Everything was so easy right now. Everything was so peaceful. He was in a great place. She was working on the future. They had a happy home and were looking ahead to establishing permanent roots in a community they loved. He didn’t need this blowing that all up.Theydidn’t need it.
Curry,she tapped out.
Withholding this from him was the kindest thing she could do. Protection. The purest form of love.Wasn’t it?Yes. There was no need to cut this wound open again when it had already healed.It’s done. Let it be done. Let the ghost disappear for good.
The decision lasted five whole minutes.
She couldn’t do that to him. Shewouldn’tdo that to him. For starters, theirs was a relationship based on trust. Trust and good communication. Talking was what they did best, after all. And if she were to keep this from him . . . Ris closed her eyes,shaking her head, shaking away the impulse to do so. If she kept this from him, she would bekeepingit from him. Curating his reality, deciding for Ainsley what knowledge looked like, what he could handle, what he was allowed to know.
. . . Exactly what Tate had done to him.
Ris dropped her head, pressing her cheek to Fitz’s silky fur.
Tate had been trying to protect him. Ris wasn’t sure whether this was the very first time she’d had that realization in the last five years. Withholding information to protect him, thinking he was doing the right thing. It wasn’t, and he had left a fucking mess in his wake, but, she thought uncomfortably, she understood the impulse behind his doing so.
This wasn’t hers to keep from him.
He’s in a better place now. He’s in therapy. He goes to group. Your relationship is strong. You can weather this together.
She hoped that was true, when he came through the door thirty minutes later, singing to himself, guitar case over his shoulder, his arms full of takeout.
“The curry smelled so good, I got one as well. But you know I’m a slut for noodles, so I got the pad thai, too.” He set the bags down on the table, turning to her with a huge grin. “So we can share.” He spread his hands diplomatically, waiting for her reaction.
When his eyes landed on her at last, the levity left his face, realizing immediately that something was wrong.
“Ris? Baby, what happened?”
Her tears overflowed once more, entirely without her permission. It was a good thing he’d bought extras, she thought, because it was going to be a long fucking night.
“Sit down. We need to talk.”
Part 5
Ever Afters
Silva
“What I’m hearing is that one of your biggest challenges as a couple,” the therapist began slowly, her chin on her knuckles, “is this constant push-pull that you’ve been engaged in since the start. An unwilling dance, if you will.”
Tate had been disappointed to learn there was no minotaur in the practice.
There was a werewolf, but neither of them was entirely comfortable with a human-adjacent therapist. “An obnoxious human for twenty-nine days out of the month,” he’d put it a bit more unkindly. He had wrinkled his nose further at the photo of the goblin she’d scrolled to next, shaking his head. “I’ve got nothing against goblins, Silva. But I would never stop staring at that piercing. I don’t want to hear life advice from anyone who’d do that to their eyelid. I’ve enough eye-related trauma as it is.”
She exhaled in a whoosh, rolling her eyes. He was ridiculous.Hewas in favor of the ogre on the page, but she didn’t want to go to a male of any species. They had settled, at last, on a long-faced troll named Zola, with kind eyes and oversized glasses perchedon the tip of her nose, deciding she was as neutral as they would find.
It was their third appointment.
The first week had been mostly introductory, with each of them telling the therapist about themselves and what had brought them to therapy together.
She’d told Zola about the enclave, about the heavy weight of expectations she’d been born under, and the sharp edges of the community at large. A privileged life, of course. One of ease; without question. But still a life that had never felt entirely her own, mapped out from the day she was born. Silva breathed out a sigh of relief once she was done. She’d started with her own therapist just a few weeks earlier and had done the same exercise, so in this, at least, she was a bit ahead of the curve.
“And why is it that you were hoping your own therapist would have been able to take you on as a couple?” Zola asked, seizing on a comment Silva had made offhand. “Were you hoping to go into this having someone already on your side?”
She blinked. “Of course not.”Of course, she had. She squirmed in her seat, avoiding Tate’s eye. She had already told her own therapist all about their relationship issues, starting from the very first night they met. “I just thought it would be easier, but-but this is fine. Obviously.”
When it was his turn, Silva was surprised by how willing Tate seemed to be to share, giving a highly-edited version of events to keep them from having the authorities called, but largely telling the truth.
She’d winced at his description of his mother when he’d been a child. She tried to imagine him as a tiny boy, a male counterpoint to Aelin, tiptoeing around to avoid setting off a volatile, mentally unstable parent. Silva loved her daughter more than anything in the world, couldn’t imagine a scenariowhen she’dnotbe Aelin’s soft place to land, and the thought alone made her feel a bit sick.
