“I should have thought before I—”
“Penelope,” I cut her off gently. “It’s fine.”
We sat quietly for a moment. I considered retiring to bed, retreating behind those boundaries I had been so carefully keeping between us. But something kept me there.
“Why did you never tell me what happened to your mother?” Penelope finally asked, her voice painfully soft.
Normally, I would have snapped an unsavory reply, letting my anger shield my wounds. But then I thought of Melanthius. I did not want to be like him, so consumed by all the ugliness inside me. So I willed that anger to settle as I took a slow sip of wine.
“I try not to think about it,” I admitted.
I could feel Penelope watching me, waiting.
“They sold her,” I continued in an attempt to put an end to that probing gaze. “That’s all there is to it.”
“I am sorry,” she whispered.
“I used to be envious that your mother was dead, you know. I prayed my mother was, too, because at least then I would have known where she was. I would have had answers.” I stared at Penelope, waiting to see a flash of repulsion in her gaze, of anger. But there was none. “I suppose that is rather vile…to have prayed for something like that.”
Penelope rested her chin on her knuckles as she considered my words.
“I think your mother would have understood why you felt like that,” she said.
I shrugged, turning to watch the fire.
“What of your father?” Penelope pressed delicately. “I never see you two together…”
My lips twisted into a tight smirk. “We both have little interest in each other’s company.”
“And your brother?”
“Melanthius can be…hard to reach.”
Penelope was quiet a moment, turning my words over in the stillness.
“Will you tell me what she was like? Your mother,” she prompted, as if she could sense those memories inside me, pooling so close to the surface.
It had been so long since I had spoken of my mother, it was as if I had forgotten how to shape this pain into words. Yet a part of me felt a sudden, powerful urge to talk about her, to let my mother live and breathe in this room with us, even if she could only exist through my voice.
“She was wonderful,” I whispered, throat burning. “She was kind and funny and brave and smart and fierce.”
“She sounds like you.”
I shook my head. “I was her biggest regret.”
I sensed Penelope shifting, moving to sit a little straighter in her chair.
“I do not think that is true, Melantho.”
But it was. I knew it was. My mother had never spoken those words aloud to me of course, but silent truths will always find ways of being heard, and this one had whispered to me since childhood in a language I had not understood until recently.
“I don’t mean to say she did not love me,” I clarified. “In fact, she loved me too much.”
I began tapping a finger against my cup, thetingof bronze the only sound in the room, like a steady, metallic heartbeat.
The heat of the fire made my eyes feel hot and itchy, and I blinked a few times before continuing. “They make it seem like a prize, you know. When they let slaves have babies. That was how they sold it to my mother: a ‘reward’ for her good behavior. She fell for the lie at first. But then my brother and I were born, and I think, in that moment, she realized what she had done. She finally understood. We were notherchildren but the king’s property. She had not gifted us life but doomedus with it. And she always regretted that. Regretted us.”
Fat tears rolled silently down my cheeks, warmed by the firelight. I quickly dashed them away.
