“In me?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“The same hunger she buried.”
The word made my throat tighten.
Hunger.
It was too raw. Too accurate.
“That’s why she’s asking about him?” I asked, nodding faintly toward Cassian.
“She doesn’t know him,” Aunt Mabel said. “But she knows the type. She hears it in your voice. Sees it in the way you’re moving through the world right now.”
My mother heard it in my voice?
“She’s not angry,” Aunt Mabel added. “She’s unsettled.”
That felt worse.
Unsettled implied recognition.
Unsettled implied memory.
“I didn’t tell her anything,” I said quietly.
“I know,” Aunt Mabel replied. “But mothers don’t always need details to understand patterns.”
Silence settled over the table again, thick but not hostile.
I became acutely aware of Cassian’s presence beside me—the steady heat of him, the quiet gravity he carried even in someone else’s kitchen. He did not interrupt. He did not insert himself into the narrative.
He allowed it to be mine.
“You knew,” I said to him without looking up.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“A woman like your mother doesn’t close a chapter like that without leaving traces,” he replied evenly. “In herself. In the people around her.”
“You didn’t think I deserved to know?”
“I thought it wasn’t my story to tell.”
The echo of Aunt Mabel’s earlier words irritated me more than it should have.
“Everything else you control,” I said, keeping my voice low. “You decide the pace. You decide how far we go. But not this?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because this choice is yours,” he said quietly. “Not mine.”
