Lurielle 2.0 had been replaced after she had met him, once she got serious in therapy. Lurielle 3.0 had been shed once they married. Motherhood had introduced the 4.0 model.And now what? Will you still be the same Lurielle with two?She didn’t know how many versions of herself she could install before the original operating unit broke down.
“I love you, darlin’.”
“I love you too,” she confirmed, his lips finding hers in the darkness. “And I’m going to need you to remind me of that in a few months when I can’t see my feet.”
“You don’t need ‘em.” His mouth was hot, and his hand tightened around hers. “Because I’m here to carry you.”
Silva
Every good theater knew when it was time to bring down the final curtain. Every play came to an end, eventually, and any marionette worth her strings knew when it was time to pack them in, cutting herself free.
Silva arrived at that realization perhaps a bit too late, but better late than never.
Despite her months of reparations with her in-laws and at their club, despite two years of hard work, putting up with their amateurish drudgery, the cracks in her performance began to show the instant she returned home to the wasteland with Tannar, baby in tow.
There was an art to creating the artifice of perfection, but every discipline had its limits.
Lookingthe part was easy. Motherhood put a blush on her cheeks, made her eyes permanently soft, a half-smile taking up residence on her face as though it had purchased real estate there. Her hair was shinier, her nails strong, and there was never a moment when she wasn’t humming softly, gazing down at the only thing in the world she ever wanted to look at again.
She did not need topretendto be completely enamored with the soft little bundle she brought home from the hospital, nor did she need to stretch her acting skills to convince anyone that she was entirely devoted to being a mother.
A bittersweet happiness was still happiness, Silva reminded herself.
If she never did anything again, beyond rocking her sweet baby girl in the chair that had belonged to her great-grandmother, Silva would have been happy. Staring down at her tiny face, being stared at steadily in return, a little arm stretched as far as she could reach to place her palm against Silva’s cheek. Everything she had needed in the world was once in the apartment above the black-bricked pub. And now, everything she needed in the world was right here. If she could not have him home with her, his child safe and sleeping in her arms was the only substitution she would accept.
Perfection had been missing that very first night, when her little one came rushing into the world, but there was beauty in the chaos.
The delivery had been a frantic race to the finish line, like something out of a movie. The busser from the Pixie who had found her had panicked, screaming for help until the bar back and Thessa had both appeared beside them in the alley. Greenbridge Glen stood between Cambric Creek and Starling Heights at a near equal distance, and when Thessa had demanded to know where she wanted to be taken, Healers had been an easy choice.
Silva was convinced she was going to give birth right there in the backseat of the tiefling’s car as Thessa violated every traffic law on the books, her pedal to the floor, careening around other cars, cursing out the window and laying on the horn, having insisted that she could get Silva to the hospital faster than any ambulance. She hadn’t been wrong.
When Thessa helped her through the emergency room doors, shouting that they needed help, Silva had been mid-contraction, the sound coming out of her a cross between a scream and a sob. She was already crowning, practically popping out the baby in the middle of reception.
The delivery itself was over quickly, the easiest part of the entire pregnancy by far. It hadn’t mattered that she was alone. It hadn’t mattered that she didn’t have her own doctor attending. Hadn’t mattered that she had no family there, that Tate was gone, unaware of the piece of himself she was bringing into the world. Nothing in the world mattered at all once they placed that squalling little bundle on her chest.
She had gone silent, instantly.
Silent and staring with an intensity that didn’t seem normal for a newborn, not that Silva had any experience with newborns.
“Aelin,” she whispered, tasting her baby’s name for the first time out loud, the tears overflowing at last.
She’d decided, weeks and weeks earlier, that she wanted the name to honor her grandmother. Her grandmother andhisgrandmother both, whose name she had learned during one of the short, erratic phone calls with his mother that had become a monthly occurrence. Analie and Aoife. She’d looked at websites, scrolled social media, not liking any of the names she saw that began withA.
Now that she was here, though, the name had arrived as well, birthed into existence at the same moment. Almost as if her little wing had decided it for herself.
She was perfect.
Silva scarcely stopped weeping the entire time she was at Healers, for each time she would find control, a nurse would be putting the baby back in her arms, and her tears would start anew. A perfect little button of a nose, perfect little ears, long and tapered, ten perfect little fingers, ten perfect little toes. Herskin was as soft and sweet as lilac petals and the same pale purple color, with honey-gold eyes like tiny whorls of smoke.
“Most newborns have light-colored eyes,” the amphibious nurse had told her cheerfully. Their true color will come in within a few months.”
Silva had nodded with a soft smile, already knowing this was the color they were and this was the color they would stay. A tiny piece of him.
She cried because her baby was perfect. Cried because she felt guilty overhowshe’d obtained this little miniature version of herself. Cried because she was exhausted, two years of worry gnawing at her insides, two years of grief and pain, two years without him, but nowshewas here, and she was perfect.
There is a kiss of fate upon you.If her baby hadn’t been born the same night she chose to abandon her search for him, Silva couldn’t be sure that she would ever have stopped.
They stayed suspended in that perfect little bubble once she left the hospital. Aelin cried little, and every time she was in Silva’s arms, whether she was nursing or being sung to, being rocked, or simply lying on the bed beside her, she stared unblinkingly into Silva’s eyes. Silva had no complaints. All she wanted to do was stare back, marvel at the tiny, perfect creature she had created with her body, painstakingly, for far longer than anyone realized.
