Catherine’s face does a thing I can’t read. She closes the book.
“I’m not here about the children,” I say. “I’m here about you.”
The garden goes quiet. The lavender moves in a breeze I can’t feel. Catherine’s hands settle in her lap, the book closed, and she watches me with an attentive, prepared stillness.
“I don’t know how women handled things in your day,” I say. “Ididn’t grow up with etiquette lessons and calling cards. I grew up poor, and then I fought in a cage for money and bought contaminated blood from people who didn’t care if it killed me. So I’m going to do this my way, which is direct, and if it’s not elegant enough for your era, you’ll have to live with that.”
“I’m listening.”
“Good.” I lean forward. Hands on my knees. “I know what you’re doing. The hallway. The crying. The compound gossip. The pregnancy concern you planted through the staff. The window comment you fed me in the medical wing. The training floor where you pull every strike and pretend you don’t know how. The briefing-room intelligence that was genuine and also happened to put you at the table with my husband. I’ve been watching you build it, piece by piece, for weeks. And I understand why.”
Her chin lifts. A gesture that looks like it costs her, the kind of composure that runs on pride when everything else has been spent.
“You survived something no one should survive,” I say. “You were held by a man who builds weapons out of people’s love. You came out of that room and the only thing you had left was the memory of a man who couldn’t say he loved you and put a blade through your heart, and you’ve been reaching for that memory since you got here, and I understand that.” I don’t look away. “But what you’re reaching for doesn’t exist anymore. The man you knew isn’t the man I married. He’s the same person, but he’s different, and the difference is me, and reaching for the version of him that existed before I was here is reaching for a ghost.”
“He loved me first,” she says. Quiet. Hard.
“He did.” I don’t flinch from it. It’s true and she’s earned our truth. “He loved you, and he lost you, and it nearly destroyed him. I’ve been inside that grief through our bond. I know exactly what it felt like. I’m not going to stand here and pretend it wasn’t real.”
Her eyes are bright. The mask is intact but the cost of it shows, the tension in her jaw, her hands gripping each other in her lap.
“But, he doesn’t love you now,” I say.
The sentence costs me nothing to speak and everything to mean. It’s not cruelty. It’s cartography. I’m drawing the map of the world as it exists, not the world Catherine lived in, and the map has changed, and she needs to see the new borders.
“He loves me. And I love him. And we’re having two children, and we’re fighting a war, and every piece of energy he spends navigating whatever you’re building in this compound is energy he can’t spend keeping this family alive.” I let it sit. “So I’m asking you to stop. And I’m telling you that if you don’t, I’ll stop it for you, and I won’t be elegant about that either.”
“You don’t get to decide what he feels.”
“No. I don’t. But I get to decide what happens in my house, around my family, and this is my house, and you are in it.” I stand. “I’m not your enemy, Catherine. I’m the woman who opened your door. I could have left you in that room for Marcellus to process as an asset and you’d be in a holding cell right now getting debriefed. I opened it. I found your face in my husband’s blood and I said your name and I brought you home. I’m asking you to respect what that cost me.”
She stands too. We’re the same height. Her eyes are wet and her jaw is locked and the mask is cracking.
“What would Maximus think,” she says, “if he knew you were talking to me like this?”
The card she’s been saving. The appeal to authority. The suggestion that the husband would override the wife, that the man I married would choose Catherine’s comfort over my judgment. The card is designed to make me hesitate, to introduce doubt into a conversation I’ve been running without any.
The card is also wrong. Wrong all the way down.
I almost smile. Almost.
“If he doesn’t like it,” I say, “I’ll kick his ass too.”
The beat stretches. Catherine looks at me, and I look at her, and for one second we are just two women standing in lavender-scented air, each of us left with a wound Maximus gave us, and the difference between us is that mine is healing and hers is not, and I can’t fix that, and I won’t pretend I can.
“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” I say. And I mean it. “I’m sorry for every year in that room. I’m sorry he couldn’t save you. I’m sorry nobody came. But I can’t be sorry for what I have, and I won’t apologize for protecting it.”
She doesn’t answer. The book is forgotten on the bench. The security lights hold her composed and still, and I don’t stay to watch what happens to the composure.
I leave her there.
The night air follows me from the garden into the corridor, bringing lavender and the cooler scent of the stone walls. The residential wing is quiet. The staff have gone to their rotations. The children Simone tends are sleeping in their temporary rooms, safe behind doors that don’t lock from the outside, and the silence they sleep in is the silence of safety, not captivity, and the difference between those two silences is everything I’ve spent this war fighting for.
My hands are still. My heartbeat is even. My voice was level in the garden and my eyes were dry and the composure didn’t crack from the first sentence to the last, and the calm is real. It isn’t performance.
That’s done. Whatever comes of it, that’s done.
Maximus is awake when I come in. He always is. He reads my face and his eyes narrow a fraction, and I cross the room and sit on the edge of the bed and take off my boots and tell him about thechildren, the basement, the six-year-old who doesn’t speak, the nine small bodies carried into clean vehicles.
