Mourning something you'd never had proved itself to be an impossible cruelty. The kind that tormented the soul deep into the night and refused to give back the part of yourself you hadn't realised you'd lost until you suddenly found yourself grieving it so deeply, time slips away.

In some ways, it felt like trying to catch snow in your bare hads only to have it melt the moment the icy substance makes contact with your warm flesh.

Realistically, she knew it was okay to feel the intense loss that she'd encountered fourteen days ago, but there was something in the back of her mind telling her she didn't have the right. It wasn't like something had been taken from her. She never had it to begin with.

But that's the thing about hope, it clings to your body like an uninvited shadow and makes a fool out of optimism.

The hours seemed to drag along. While her days hadn't really changed in the grand scheme of things, it now felt like the lights had been dimmed, as though the sun was taunting her from outside the world she lived. Things she thought she knew suddenly made no sense, plans she had made fell flat and in an instant, the future she'd envisioned for herself no longer existed.

Motherhood wouldn't have been the only factor in life she'd define herself with, but God, had she wanted it. The thought of growing her baby, keeping it safe within herself until it was ready to show the world the beauty it would bring had been her dream for so long, she couldn't have imagined a life where it didn't happen.

Years prior, when she was only a child heself, she was that little girl, the one who would carefully carry a baby doll around in her arms at all times and care for it as though it was real. Older generations would look at her and smile, giving a condescending, "aww, she'll be a great mom when she's old enough."

At the time, it felt harmless. Now when she thought about it, her insides ached with a pain she had never known existed.

She wanted to be a mother so bad, it physically hurt.

When she started dating Michael, back in 1982, she's never imagined life would turn out this way.

For a start, she hadn't known his fame would sky rocket the way it had. She'd known him to be talented and expected great things, but being the most famous person to exist, second to Jesus Christ himself, felt like a huge reach, but it was true.

His name rang across the globe. He didn't just have fans, he had subjects, people who were willing to do anything and everything for him just to spend a moment in his company.

Their realtionship was deep and complex. They understood one another in ways others didn't. She saw beyond the fame and got down to the man behind the curtain. He saw a women who had so much to offer the world and encouraged her to spread her wings. The first few years of knowing each other, things had been turbulent. Their paths intertwined and then veered off path, only to circle back around until they found each other once again.

A delicate balance of on and off until a year an a half ago when Micharl had decided he couldn't do it anymore. So scared of losing her and despising the idea of living a life without her, he had gotten down on one knee in the flower gardens of Neverland and asked her to take his surname and become his wife. No more breaks, no more, "when the time is right."

They'd gotten married shortly after and it had been the best decision she had ever made. Loving Michael came easily. He was everything she every wanted. Kind, driven, loyal, but above all else, he loved children just as much as she did. So when he requested they start trying for a baby on their honeymoon, she'd immediately agreed, eager to begin a family with the man she loved.

Envisioning a child with his eyes and smile, there was nothing she craved more. She hadn't even flinched when he droned on and on about the huge family he wanted. She wanted it too and for a while, it felt as though that dream was in reach.

The then waiting came.

One week. A month. Two. Six. A year.

Something wasn't right. It didn't matter what they did, how many times he had buried himself her, what position they laid in or what old wives tales they tried, every single test came back negative and with each negative result they recieved, a piece of her heart broke along with it.

Unable to live without answers, they'd both taken the medical route, subjecting themselves to rigorous testing for any fertility issues and holding one another at night, whispering soft echoes of reassurances to each others ears to rid themselves of any negative thoughts before the results came through.

Then it dropped.

The bomb that dismantled her from the inside out.

Asked to return back to the medical facility, the couple held hands as they were told the cause of their problems. Michael was perfectly okay. On paper, he could and should be able to do his part in crafting life.

She was the issue.

The words sank in at an alarming rate, so much so that even a fortnight later, she would still recite them in her darkest nightmares.

"Missus Jackson, your infertility issues appear to be linked to several factors." The doctor has spoken in a cool, matter of fact tone. "The scans suggest polycystic ovary syndrome, this is something that can disrupt ovulation, and there is evidence of scarring in one fallopian tube from a past infection. We also found small uterine fibroid that may also be affecting implantation."

The world fell silent in that moment, the air that had once been warm and inviting suddenly fell into a icy chill. If it wasn't for Michael's hand clutching desperately onto her own, she wasn't entirely sure she wouldn't have broken into a thousand tiny shards.

The doctor had continued to talk, but after that diagnosis, nothing else sank in. She caught the back end off the conversation before they left.

Basically, they could keep trying, but with everything stacked against her, it was incredibly unlikely she would ever be able to conceive children of her own.

Returning home that night had been particularly odd.

For a while, neither of them said a word. Then, seemingly out of no where, the silence had been broken by a deverstaing roar of tears.

Michael sat on the sofa, sobbing a deverstatingly painful cry into her lap, clinging onto her like he would lose her if he'd dare to let go. The hope of the future they both thought they'd have was suddenly so different and so she comforted him through the tears, unable to process the news herself as she sat there completely numb.

In bed that night, he held her tight, like he was terrified at any moment someone would rip her from is grasp or as though his love alone could somehow change their fate and they'd wake up the next day to hear from the doctor that they'd mixed up the results and she actually could carry children.

Obviously, that hadn't happen.

When they woke up the next morning, the same outcome greeted them.

Two weeks later and not much had changed.

They hadn't spoken about it. Not really.

Moments of sadness lingered, where they would look at each other on occasion and remember the crux of their problems. Neither knew how to address it, so they simply didn't.

Standing in the full length mirror of her closet, looking back at the reflection that reminded her so much of a women who was once blinded with a sense of hopefullness, now she only saw a void. A faux expression forced upon her face so no one could see the cracks beneath.

She hadn't told anyone. No one other than Michael and he's supported her. So much of their lives had been sensationalised by the greedy media. This couldn't be something they let slip. Not right now.

Closing the clasp on the dainty gold necklace around her throat, she had failed to notice the bedroom door opening. Completely in her own world as she flattened the metallic pendant against her collarbones, she was only alerted to another presence in the room when she heard the familiar dip of the mattress springs.

In the mirror, tired eyes lifted to the sight behind her. Michael, already dressed in some fine collared shirt, the gold and red detailing against the dark obsidian of the base material giving him a regale elegance she would find pretentious in any other man, yet for him fit perfectly.

Their eyes met and he offered her a small, soft smile, the kind that told her everything would be okay and like always, she felt compelled to believe it.

They'd gotten his far, hadn't they?

His knees parted, arms held wide and with a small crook of his fingers, he requested her presence.

"Baby, come here." He spoke, less like a demand and more like a plea. "I want to talk to you about something."

With no reason to object, she gave one last glance at her reflection, sighing at the dull sight that greeted her and then crossed the carpeted floor towards him.

Michael didn't hesitate one bit. The moment she stepped into his orbit, his arms fell around her waist and tugged her closer until her hands fell against his shoulder. They hadn't been intimate since the news, but the affectionate way he looked up towards her as her gaze flickered down hadn't changed.

"Is everything okay?" She asked, not all too worried when he was looking at her that way.

Embarking on his Dangerous world tour in less than a month, her assumptions quickly fell to the technicalities that regarded such planning.

While true he loved his fans, Michael absolutely detested touring and it was no secret to those that surrounded him.

After the Bad tour reached it's conclusion, he'd been insistent that he would never tour again. It wss too much. The travel, the sleepless nights, the energy and perfomances. Not to mention fans fainting every night, the lack of stability and perfectionist in him screaming in his mind when one simple thing didn't go right.

He couldn't subject himself to that again.

Then one day, he decided he absolutely would.

Not for himself, but to raise money for disadvantaged children.

Every cent he earned from the Dangerous world tour would go straight into his Heal The World foundation to help people across the globe.

Naturally, her mind ran to that. With the opening night fast approaching, she assumed his nerves had started to surface and with an gently stroke of her fingers against his broad shoulders, she attempted to sooth his aching muscles.

"You can tell me anything." She assured after a moments silence.

Brown doe eyes fell towards the plush carpet before he dared look back at her and when he did, his hold on her waist tightened a fraction.

"I've been speaking to Debbie Rowe." He began, noting the confusion on her face. "You know, she said she'd be willing to help."

Head tilted downward, she strained to hear his voice. The more he spoke, the less things made sense. Brows pinched together, mouth opened in a subtle act of perplexity.

She knew the name. She'd met the women. But what the hell did she have to do with touring?

"Debbie Rowe..." she spoke, her words lingering in the air around them. "your nurse?"

"Yeah."

"Willing to help with what exactly?"

His gaze softened, his fingers leaving smoothing patterns beneath the knitt, blue sweater she'd stolen from his closet earlier than morning.

"You know... our problem."

His eyes widened a fraction and thought it was a blink and you'll miss it moment, she noticed the way his gaze subtlety dropped to her stomach making this whole conversation much clearer than any words he used.

A wave of nausea washed over her and immediately her own hands fell from his body.

This wasn't a simple conversation. This was torture on a level she had never imagined he would subject her to.

"What do you mean? You've been talking to your nurse about this?" Hardly able to believe the words that left his mouth, she stepped back and as she did, his touch fell from her waist, leaving only coldness where his hands had been.

His face fell, lips curved downwards into a frown the second she rejected his grasp, like he had physically burnt her skin with the palm of his hands.

"I mean, she's a friend too and I was just looking for someone to talk to, you know?" His words fast in pace, in a quick attempt at rationalising what he'd uttered. "Air out my frustrations and-"

"Your frustrations?" She cut him off, scoffing at the lack of empathy in which he chose to show.

"Yeah... you know, about the whole... infertility thing."

A firey ring of anger bubbled in her stomach, rising up as his words settled around her. Suddenly, any fraction of rationality escaped her mind and pure outrage took its place.

It felt like an insult, like he was mad at her for something she had no control over.

"You're frustrated I'm infertile?"

The venomous way she spat the words hit him square in the heart and his eyes widened once again, mouth dropped with words he wanted to say but failed to reach his tongue.

Michael had realised the error in the way he approached the conversation, he never had been good at explaining himself, but it was too late now. They were in too deep and he needed to get this off his chest.

"I didn't mean it like that. I meant it like... I'm sad."

Any other time he used that excruciatingly deverstating tone, she would have bucked and rushed right over to console him. She'd only ever wanted things to work out for them, but now she felt the cracks in the ice they stood on starting to form and it was only time before they were plunged into the frigid depths below.

She laughed, actually laughed out loud, but there was no humour in the sound as it reverberated off the walls of their home.

"You were sad." She repeated, rolling her eyes like she was amused by the situation. "So what? You're trying to find some miracle cure here?"

"No." Running a large hand over his face, Michael tried hard to stay calm. "But Debbie... she'd be willing to have my kids."

"What?" She exploded, eyes narrowed in disbelief, her entire body frozen in shock.

"Not how your thinking! No! Nothing like that. Never!" Michael rushed to his feet, hands falling to her upper arms, seemingly almost repulsed by the insinuation. "You know, through a doctors office. She'd be a surrogate."

She wanted to scream until her voice gave out. She wanted to throw herself on the floor like a stubborn toddler, kicking and screaming until she got her own way.

How could he have done this to her?

Breathing heavy, her vision began to cloud through the sheen of tears she swallowed back.

This couldn't be happening.

He looked at her with so much hope in his eyes, willing her to answer so they could start the process and he could finally have everything he wanted. His body so close to her usually only providing her with comfort, but now his presence repulsed her.

Time was relative, but she thought that even he would realise how much of a sore spot this would be for her.

"It's been only been two weeks..."

Her voice soft quite, she hadn't known if he'd heard. The only sound she could hear was the fast pace thumping of her pluse in her ears. His touch lingered, but she no longer felt any peace with it.

"What?"

"Two weeks ago, I found out I can't have children." She uttered in debelif, shaking her head like she still couldn't believe it and stepping back once again, only to watch as his arms fell to his sides.

"Baby-"

Michael tried to reach for her again, but she recoiled, talking over him and trying hard not to sob over his stupid decisions.

"I haven't even processed it properly yet." Voice weak, as though the conversation was physically draining the energy from her with ever word spoke.

"I know."

"I haven't told my family."

"I know." He repeated.

Each 'I know' doing little to sooth the terrible ache rushing through her body.

"...and you're already planning happy families with another women."

The realisation hit her like a bullet to the back. So cruel and sudden, she practically stumbled on her from the impact.

She didn't care that they wouldn't be intimate in order to conceive. She cared that he hadn't even taken her into consideration before asking another women he was seemingly too close with, to carry the children that up until a fortnight ago, she thought would be hers.

"That's not true!" Michael's voice raised, rushed with an effort to assure her that wasn't even close to what he wanted. He loved her. "We'd still be together."

"Together?" She laughed, running a frustrated hand through her hair and huffing in irritation as strands tangled around the diamond of her engagement ring.

"Yes."

"While another women is pregnant with your child."

"It won't change anything." His answer automatically, like he'd already planned this conversation.

For the first time since he dropped the bomb on her, she forced her eyes to meet his. An almost vulnerable look looming within the darkest depths of his gaze and she didn't know if he was actually dumb enough to believe what he had just said, or was simply hoping she was.

"You're not that naive." Stepping into his personal space, she didn't once break eye contact. Not until he looked down at the floor and forced her hand. "A baby changes everything!"

"Why does that have to be a bad thing?"

He didn't understand and why would he? It wasn't him awake throughout the night, cursing the very body he was born with for failing to give him the one thing he so desperately desired. He wasn't questioning his worth as a human being or as a partner.

A piercing gaze spared her way. Now that he was no longer sitting, he no longer had to look up at her in order to see her face. Part of her wanted to run and hide, but she'd vowed for better or worse and this was easily her at rock bottom.

"I know your family." The murmur of her voice broke through the silence, arms folded over her chest with a hand resting against her jaw. It was all getting a little too much now.

Furrowing his brows, Michael tilted his head and shuffled carefully on his feet. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, I know you've separated yourself from the Jehovah's Witness lifestyle, but your folks haven't." She sighed heavily, feeling the searing heat of his gaze. "We both know your parents want you to be married to the women carrying your children."

She'd been there when Michael struggled through the guilt of leaving that faith behind. While his belief in God never swayed, his thoughts on that particular practice did have him questioning life.

Still, she saw how it still plagued him, how he made decisions based off the life he was raised in. It's why he still hadn't celebrated Christmas and why he'd yelled at her when she'd splashed out on a particularly fancy watch for his thirtieth birthday.

It wasn't a lack of effort that kept him going back, it was the guilt that threatened to swallow him whole every time he tried to dip a toe into something he'd been taught to believe to be a sin.

Where his siblings had managed to break free, Michael was still somewhat attached.

"That won't matter..." he tried, voice trailing off. "It's surrogacy."

"You don't believe that and I don't believe that it'll just be surrogacy."

She willed him to see reason, to understand where she was coming from, but Michael shook his head in return. Stubborn in nature and used to getting what he wanted, he couldn't let this fall through.

"That's just your mind playing tricks on you." He insisted, burying his hands into the pockets of his black slacks.

"Okay, so tell me this." She began, gaze unwavering in an attempt to decipher every micro expression sitting so pretty across his face. "When Debbie is carrying your baby and your mother is holding the ultrasound pictures... who do you think she's going to call the mother?"

Katherine Jackson was an absolute saint of a women. If heaven was a real place, she was surely an angel sent down to Earth to protect one of God's greatest creations. She absolutely adored the women and always looked to her for guidance.

All this aside, Katherine was of a certain generation, one set in their ways. She wouldn't mean to cause harm, but the moment she heard someone else would be carrying her grandchildren, things would be different.

"No. She wouldn't. I'll tell her-"

With a wave of her hand, she didn't allow Michael to finish. "And once she's pregnant, you'll have Debbie move in..."

"Well, of course." He nodded like it was obvious, like she was foolish for even needing clarification. "I'll have to keep a close eye on her."

She didn't know what he meant by that and she didn't want to find out.

Sharing her space with the women who could do the one thing for her husband she couldn't, all the while knowing it's the only he thing he really wanted would deversate her.

"And that changes things!" She yelled.

"Girl, you're talking crazy."

She's never been a violent woman, but in that moment, she seriously considered lunging forward and strangling him right then and there.

Pacing the floor back and fourth, wearing the carpet thin and bitting down so hard on her lower lip, the blood rushed forward. Every thought in her mind begged for this to be a mistake.

Maybe she was still dreaming or perhaps she had misheard.

Stepping forward, Michael pressed a large grounding hand to her shoulder to stop her steps. Slowly she turned to face him and only then did she see a wash of disappointment paint the sharp contours of his face.

"I need to be a dad!" He admitted, leaving no room for argument.

"I know." She had never wanted to deny him of that.

"No, I don't think you do." It was his turn to get angry. Michael scoffed, stepping away and turning his back to her only to face her again, this time his cheeks red with irritation. "That's all I've ever wanted. For as long as I can remember, that's been the only thing that kept me going. I'm going through with this! There is no other reality for me!"

He didn't shout. He didn't have to. Michael had the ability to speak perfectly calm with authority and when he did, he became the most terrifying person in the room. He wasn't aggressive nor violent, but he knew how to scare people.

The heavy weight of his words lingered in the air and she was forced to confront them, because right now, he wasn't giving her an option. He was demanding something she no longer felt like she was a part of.

"So then, what am I?" Boardering on a whisper, eyes glistening with unshed tears.

"Huh?" His face screwed up in confusion, not understanding the gravity of the question she's thrown his way. "What?"

"What am I if I can't give you that."

The clarity hit harder than he imagined and with a distinct huff, his hands fell against his narrow hips. "You're my wife."

"Am I?" Voice high pitched, eyes wide in debelif. "It sure as hell doesn't feel that way. You're planning on moving another women in without so much as consulting me."

"Stop putting words in my mouth. You know I love you."

"No, actually, I don't." She saw the way his face dropped at the admission, but couldn't allow herself the luxery of stopping long enough to care. "You couldn't even give me a month to wrap my head around this. You instantly found someone else to replace me with and what, I'm supposed to be fine with it."

"You're acting like I'm betraying you."

"You are." She spat, not once feeling sorry for it.

If he'd been wise enough to leave his dark curls down, she knew he would have been hiding his face behind the curtain of black. Unfortunately for Michael, he'd used one of her hair ties this morning and created a low hanging ponytail of sorts. Soft tendrils had fallen loose, but certainly not enough to disguise his expressions.

"No, I'm not." He fought back, hating the accusations thrown at him. Hands moving between them in a frustrated motion. "I'm finally doing something I want."

"Why her?" Unable to hold the question on any longer, it had been plaguing her the moment he uttered those words.

Because that was the thing, Debbie wasn't just another women. She was someone he'd let in. Someone he's gotten close to and trusted.

There weren't many people Michael had in life that he could consider a real companion, someone to guard his secrets and share part of his soul with. Maybe she'd been naive not to question her place in his life. Had she known Debbie had shifted from a nurse into something much more threatening to their marriage, she would have acted sooner.

"What?" Michael almost laughed.

"Why Debbie?" She snapped, no longer dancing around the situation.

Throwing his hands up, it was his turn to start pacing now. "Why does that matter?"

"Because out of every women in the world, you picked her."

"I didn't pick her." He groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose between elegant fingers.

"Yes, you did." She spat through gritted teeth. "Plenty of women would offer to have your babies. You're Michael Jackson for crying out loud."

She wasn't saying it was a good idea, God no. If surrogacy was a route they would ever go down, there would be a lot more planning than picking a random fan off the street, but this wasn't a rational conversation and she had a point to prove.

"I know."

"You went to her. You cried to her, told her things you should've been telling me." Heart heavy with the reality crushing their realtionship, holding back tears had never felt so hard. "You've been talking to her about our marriage."

"I wasn't talking about our marriage."

"You were talking about me! My diagnosis!"

And somehow, that was worse because it wasn't about confiding a secret to a friend. It was complaining about a medical mishap, something she couldn't control that had changed their lives forever without her permission.

Not just that, but the women he'd so carelessly trusted with her secret was a women she didn't know and the realisation that he had gone to someone else rather than approach his own wife wouldn't be something she could easily forget.

"That's different." But even he knew that was a weak excuse.

"No." She sniffed. "It really isn't."

"She's my friend." He muttered through a shaky breath. "I need someone to talk to."

And that was it, wasn't it? In his time of need, he hadn't seeked her out, but rather looked for the comfort of another women. It didn't matter if they were intimate or not, because all it proved was that he no longer trusted her to be cautious with his emotions.

She couldn't shake the idea off. The series of events that lead him into the arms of someone that wasn't her. The thought of him crying against someone else's shoulder, clinging to them with flushed cheeks and tear filled eyes as this other women rubbed his back and soothed him until he calmed down. The image made her sick.

"You had a wife! I'm right here." She whispered, her voice barley there.

"You haven't exactly been easy to communicate with."

Time stilled.

Physically, the world continued to spin, but here in the shared space of their home, in the bedroom they had spent so much time loving one another, everything froze.

Her lungs no longer held any purpose, breathless from the cynical spite he'd thrown her way and the worst part is, part of her believed it.

"Wow." She muttered, no longer able to fight back the single tear that left a damp trail along the curve of her cheek.

"I didn't mean-"

"No." For what felt like the tenth time that night, she cut him off. Eyes sharp as a knife and focused in his direction. "Please, don't take it back now. Let me hear it."

"Baby-"

"Tell me, Michael!" She insisted through the heartbreak, slamming her foot down in a demand for answers.

Seeing the torment on her face and her need to actually hear his side of things, he couldn't deny it, no matter how bad he had felt saying it out loud.

"You shut down." He sighed, head in hand. "I tried... you wouldn't talk about it."

Conveniently, it seemed as though he'd forgotten about the night they recieved the news, how she latched onto him and allowed him to cry desperately in her arms for hours while still trying to process the reality of their situation herself.

She knew she wasn't perfect. Maybe he really had tried to speak to her about these things and she had dismissed him. A vague image flickered in her mind two days after the results. He'd cornered her in the kitchen, his arms wrapping around her waist as he mentioned something about starting a family anyway. She'd tuned out. It felt too sudden.

Though she understood Michael was sensitive. At the time, she hadn't thought much of it. Now she realised he probably saw it as a rejection she hadn't intended on giving.

Anger returned.

"I got told I could never carry a child!" She reminded her husband, gritting her teeth and clenching her fists. "Forgive me for needing a while to come to terms with that."

"Yeah, well I was told I'd never be a father."

That wasn't the case at all and he knew it, but Michael wasn't beyond manipulation in order to get what he wanted and what he wanted was to start a family, by any means necessary.

Throwing her hands up in the air, she scoffed in defeat, eyes trained to the ceiling, like she was praying for answers she would never get. "I can't believe this."

"What now?" Michael sighed, kicking the carpet beneath his sock covered feet.

"You think this happened to you." She accused with a subtle understanding laced within each syllable.

"It did happen to me!" He snapped.

"No! It happened to us!" She practically screamed, needing him to see that he wasn't the only one feeling lost. "We could have dealt with it together, given us space and time to come to terms with it and then, maybe we could've looked into adoption or surrogacy... we could've done it together." Without permission, a sob broke through her lips. "But somehow, you've made yourself the victim here."

"I lost something too, you know!" The vulnerability in his words had him shudder.

"What did you lose?" She asked, at a loss with this conversation.

"My children."

"You don't have children." She huffed, rolling her eyes at the poor excuse he conjured up.

"You know what I mean."

It felt as though they were going around in circles, neither person understanding the others point of view and her heart cracked at his ability to be so unknowingly cruel.

"No, actually, I don't think I do." She breathed out a silent cry, wrapping her arms around her stomach like she could physically hold herself from falling apart in front of him. Her pride would never recover. "Because from where I'm standing, the only thing you've actually lost is your faith in me."

"What's that supposed to mean?" He enquired, eyes softening with how utterly defenceless she appeared.

"It means, two weeks ago, I recieved a news from a doctors office that broke my heart. " She laughs though the conversation was void of any humour. "Five minutes ago, my husband did the exact same thing before he let me recover from the first injury."

"Stop making me the bad guy." Michael pleaded, wanting to reach out and hold her, but knowing better.

"Then stop acting like one."

"I'm trying to fix this!' He insisted, eyes widening a fraction.

"Fix this?" She questioned, eyebrows arched and mouth settled into a solid line.

"Yes."

"I'm not fucking broken, Michael!" She yelled, holding herself tigher as the pieces threatened to fall. "I'm a person with thoughts and feelings and you're so quick to replace m-"

"I'm not replacing you." He insisted through a heavy breath, tangling his fingers in his tied up hair.

"The second you found out I was infertile, you started imagining another women pregnant with your baby."

"That's not what happened." He shook his head.

"Then tell me how it started."

He said nothing. Not a single word and somehow, that was worse. A look of guilt etched against the soft features his face, something he could probably mask from anyone else, but she had spent ten years loving him. She knew every face and up until now, this one had never really been directed towards her.

Like a stone sinking in her gut, dread filled her from the inside out. He didn't have to say a word. She knew.

"Oh my God." She gasped, hand falling to her mouth. "I'm an idiot."

"What? Don't say that." His voice dropping in tone, quiet and sympathic in a way it hadn't been the entire conversation. "You're not."

The room fell silent for a moment, until she found the courage to speak up.

"You were talking to her before the diagnosis, weren't you?"

The heavy weight of her words only paralleled by the heavy ache in her heart. Her lips quivered and all the while, she watched as he refused eye contact, looking anywhere but at her.

"W-what?" He stuttered. "Of course not."

"Don't stand there and lie to me!"

"I just..." The words trailed off, he couldn't finish the sentence.

"You just what, Michael?" She snapped, tears falling freely now and she had no intentions of wiping them away. He could see exactly what he'd done to her. "Finish the sentence."

Here, he looked less like the legendary pop star the world had come to know and more like a scared little boy, hiding from the bad things that go bump in the night.

Only, he wasn't a child anymore. He was her husband and she could hardly look at him without seeing an act of betrayal as it played out so plainly in front of her.

With a heavy sigh of defeat, he gave in. Tired eyes lifted and the look of anguish on her face was enough to steal the breath from his lungs.

He stepped forward, knowing that if she just let him hold her, he could fix this, but with every step he took upwards her, she took one back. No longer wanting to feel like a predator hunting its prey, he stood still and answered with a guilty nod.

"I was worried, okay?" And he had been, it was just never meant to go this far. "We'd been trying for over a year and the tests... they all came back negative."

A year of failed attempts was enough to exhaust anyone, that she understood. What she would never understand was rushing off to a friend the moment things get bad and planning a whole other life so carelessly.

Her heart cracked inside her chest, breathing became a difficult task. She'd never imagined the person she loved the most would be the one the ruin her so deeply.

"So you already had a backup plan?" She spat.

"No!" Michael combed his fingers through his hair, groaning in frustration.

"You already had her!" She yelled and with a look of shame, neither of them could deny it anymore. The color drained from her face and with the last of her energy, she managed to whisper. "You did."

He knew what he'd done was wrong, but some part of him refused to acknowledge it. Michael wasn't dumb, there was a reason why up until now he'd kept this whole thing under wraps, but it wasn't how she was thinking.

"It wasn't like that." He spoke, eyes locking into hers, just willing her to take a leap of faith and believe in him. "I just needed to know this could happen for me... that I could have children."

"Yeah..." She whispered into the void, wishing for nothing more than to wake up from this nightmare. "you had her waiting in the wings, preparing for the perfect moment to spring this on me."

"Stop."

His usually soft eyed look had hardened. He couldn't take this anymore. The constant back and fourth was enough to drive anyone to the brink of insanity. Every second that moved between them, he could feel the agonising weight of their love story resting on his shoulder. Shallow breathing falling from his rounded lips just to keep him from toppling over and falling to the ground.

"While I was praying." She started, her voice cracking with sadness bleeding into her words.

"Stop!" He repeated, only this was a painfully curated plea more than a soft request.

"Hoping... sitting in waiting rooms." She continued, only torturing herself more as the conversation lingered like dead weight in the air.

"Please, baby..."

"And it only took you two fucking weeks to picture a different women carrying your child." If something heavy had been sitting near by, she would have thrown it across the room just to rid herself of the anger she felt bubbling to the surface. "You couldn't even give me a month."

Scratching the back of his neck, Michael felt the moment his cheeks flushed as embarrassment began to rise to the surface. "That's not fair."

"A fucking month!" She continued, in that same aggressive tone. Frustration lingering like an unwanted compainion, threatening to break free and destroy all that they had built between them.

"Baby-" His fingers flexed on instinct, reaching for her hand and then deciding against it.

Staring at nothing in particular, feet planted to the floor. She caught her lower lip between her teeth, chewing on the delicate flesh, unable to process the absolute mess that had become of them.

Worry flooded Michael. Seeing her angry, that was something he could work with. At least then, he knew what she was thinking, how she was feeling and could give her space until she calmed down enough to talk rationality about whatever issues were clouding her judgement.

"Ten years." The words left her mouth, but she barley registered it. All the fight leaving her body now she'd been presented with all the facts.

"What?" Genuinely perplexed, brows furrowed and mouth downturned into a deep frown.

"I've loved you for ten years." She clarified, chest heaving and voice wrecked from the earlier shouting. Utterly defeated as she thought back to a simpler time in life when she truly believed they could get through anything so long as they stayed united. "Yeah, it took us some time to get here, but I thought once we got married, that would be it. We were bound together. Ten years in the making..." crying felt redundant, but she had nothing more to give. "and it took you fourteen days to imagine a future without me in it."

Panic began to set in as he watched the women he'd vowed to protect crumble before him. Her nose pink, eyes unfocused, like if she chanced a glance in his direction, she'd fail to exist within the scrutiny of his gaze.

"I never imagined a future without you." His voice barley that of a whisper, but his eyes urged her to look back and show some sign that she understood his point of view.

"No?" She let out a small laugh, fingers wrapped around the golden pendant sat between collarbones. "Just one where another women plays the part I can't."

Michael physcially recoiled like she's burnt him. He hadn't meant to make her feel like she was easy to replace, but it was obvious he had. Intentions didn't matter when the person you cared for the most suddenly began to look at you like you were a stranger.

"I still want you." He confessed, struggling to understand why she wouldn't see reason.

"No!" She shook her head in protest. "You'll tolerate me. You want the kids more."

"That's not true." But even as he said it, he knew it to be a lie.

"And if Debbie disappeared tomorrow... or I didn't want to go through with surrogacy or adoption. If children were completely off the table forever..." stepping forward, she could finally feel the heat of his body. So close, she could touch him, but couldn't convince herself she should. "would you still choose me?"

The question hung between them and suddenly the air started to feel stale. Her eyes finally found his, his lack of communication prolonging a hefty silence between them.

She didn't need him to say anything. Funnily enough, the words he didn't say communicated more than he ever could.

"Oh." The word fell from her lips without permission and she recoiled, creating more distance between them as she stepped back because finally, she understood.

This wasn't going to work.

As he stood, partially paralysed, watching the life leave her eyes. He knew she was only seconds away from allowing his dumb need to always control the world around ruin everything they'd built in the past decade of life.

"Baby, don't-"

"You're acting liie this is something I want." She scoffed, arms winding around her waist, eyes cast down to the floor.

"I did this for us!" Michael snapped, though his anger was completely misplaced. His desperation to keep her near provoking a side of himself he never wanted to show.

"No." She didn't yell. Her voice perfectly still. "You did this for you."

"Why does it matter? You want kids to. You've always said you couldn't wait to be a mom." Each word spoke with perfect diction, clear and precise. Hands held outwardly to get his point across further and desperation clinging to him like a second skin. "Why are you making this an issue now?"

"Because I needed time to heal... to understand what's going on with me and how to move forward." She wasn't even angry more, crying for the life thought she'd be living instead of the hell she was faced with. "I wanted some input into these huge, life altering decision. I get to decide what's right for me, for our marriage and you just... fuck." A sob broke free and cracked her open. "You took that away from me and maybe it wouldn't hurt as much if you'd been thinking about surrogacy with a stranger, but Debbie?"

"Come on." Michael sighed, tired of repeating himself. "It's not like that."

She said nothing, she barley flinched at the harsh tone of his voice. The world moved around her, but she didn't notice. Feeling like a ghost in her own home, she could no longer deny the distance between them.

Two weeks might has well have been two decades. He didn't see her the way he used to. She wasn't some new, shiny thing he saw for himself in the future. She was something worn down and broken that he was willing to drag along.

For a second, she remained perfectly still, hand held out in front of her and eyes fixed on the beautiful rings decorating her finger. Two bands that had once made her feel so warm and cared for now felt foreign on her skin, a reminder of all the things she could no longer have and the lengths her husband would go to in order to continue living the live he envisioned for himself.

They weren't a unit anymore. They hadn't been the moment he stepped back and discussed plans of impregnating another women behind her back, long before either of them had been tested for any infertility issues.

Having been with him through the good and the bad, she'd seen him at his lowest, sobbing over the vindictive rumours tabloids so carelessly threw his way. She'd seen him overjoyed, his beaming grin so bright it rivaled the light of the sun. She'd held him when he was lonely and cried with him when he was sad. His victories had become her own and his losses hurt her soul so deeply, you'd have thought they were one.

Now standing in front of him, listening to his act of betrayal, she no longer felt like they were bound as man and wife. Physcially, he was in reach. If was wanted to, she could push forward and hold his hand. Emotionally, he'd never felt so distant.

A heavy sigh of defeat past her lips and with a decision made, she watched herself slide the gold engagement and wedding band off her finger.

"No." Michael gasped in a panic, eyes wide and heart thumping frantically in his chest. "No! Don't do that."

"I can't do this." She whispered, placing the rings in his plam, flinching subtly as their fingers made contact and pulling away fast like his touch had scolded her flesh.

"Put them back on." He urged, trying to hand them back, but she moved away, backing herself into a corner just to prevent any further touch. His face fell, crippled with an emotion he couldn't name.

"I can't stay married to a man who makes decisions like this without me." She insisted, her voice so matter of fact, it scared him.

Michael's eyebrows raised high, teeth worrying his lower lip. "I wasn't making a decision. I was enquiring with a friend."

"You found a surrogate... you're planning on having a baby with a women who knows you intimately." She scoffed, eyes wet and unfocused.

"You're making it sound dirty. I'm not trying to hurt you." And he sounded so sincere, but she couldn't bring herself to believe it anymore.

Crossing the line into her personal space, Michael no longer cared about valuing her comfort as he desperately pulled her arm up and placed the wedding band back into her hand.

"Don't do this. Put it on." He persisted, eyes wild and voice raw. "Don't leave."

"Take it back." She uttered.

"No. I don't want it." Michael argued, holding her fingers over the ring in a desperate act to make her reconsider. "I brought this for you. To show you what you mean to me, to show the world you're mine... in every way that matters."

"That's doesn't mean anything right now."

Michael felt the wetness on his cheek before he realised what it was. Crying at the thought of losing her and aching because he knew on some level, he already had.

"It should." His voice cracked, doe eyes wide with terror. "You're my wife."

"I was your wife." She corrected, pulling her wrist from his grasp, the weight of the rings feeling heavier than ever.

Michael's eyes pooled with tears, mouth opened in horror at the subtle correction. He could feel his heart giving out, the loss of physical contact no longer the only barrier between them.

"No." He shook his head, breathing heavy and crying right alongside her. "Please. No. Don't- don't do this to me."

Ignoring his request, she continued to talk as though those particular words hadn't left his lips at all.

"You know what hurts the most?" She asked, but didn't want for answers. "Not that you talked to Debbie, or that you even found a surrogate. It's the fact that it never, not once, occurred to you to ask me. You didn't come up to me and ask 'what should we do now.' You just decided what you wanted and thought I'd go along with it."

"I thought I knew best." He whispered, staring at her face under the florescent bedroom lighting.

"That's your problem... you always think you know what's right, but you never stop before you jump ahead."

"We can still start a family." Michael desperately clinging to the dream had to try just once more.

She laughed bitterly, wiping under her eyes with the back of her plam. "Listen to yourself." She mocked. "This isn't working."

"I love you." He uttered in blind hope that it might make her stay.

"Stop saying that like it's going to fix anything." She spoke, eyes rimmed red and irritated from the steady flow of tears.

"I made a mistake." He finally admitted with a firm nod. "I understand that."

"A mistake is forgetting our anniversary, or forgetting to call while you're on the road." She clarified, refusing to be moved by those big Bambi eyes looking at her in fear. "You made an active choice here and it's not something easy to forgive."

"I can fix it." He promised, taking her hand and watching as it fell limp in his desperate hold. "I'll tell Debbie we're not doing it. I'll stop talking to her all together if that's what you want... just tell me what to do."

His pleas were earth shattering and part of her wanted to throw her arms around him and tell him everything would be okay, they could figure this out together. They'd been through a lot in their realtionship and this was just another obstacle life had thrown there way.

But it wasn't that easy. It wasn't a vase he'd broke, but her trust and that was an entirely different conversation he wasn't ready to have.

"You can't undo this." She ignored the soft whisper of her name as it fell from his lips, looking over at where his hand clutched her own in a move of solid desperation, her skin sunken in from his harsh grasp.

"After my diagnosis..." she began, looking him straight in the eye even if it hurt to do so. "I looked over at you in the doctors office. It killed me, but I thought to myself, 'at least I have Michael.' Turns out, you weren't thinking that way about me, because if you were, you would've held my hand and let me grieve, you would've asked me what I wanted."

"I know." His shoulders slumped and he wiped his face as a result of the onslaught of tears. "I was wrong, but please don't go."

"I have to." She told him straight, not wanting to prolong this painful heartbreak further.

"We can get through this." Michael promised, squeezing her hand with his own.

"Maybe." She watched as hope flashed across his face, but she couldn't focus on that while pulling her hand out of his tight hold. "But not today."

His face crumpled, awful and pale like he was about to throw up if she took another step from him. For her own sanity, she had to.

Stepping away, she ignored his cries as she crossed the room, placing the rings he'd tried to give her back on the nightstand beside the lamp he used for some late night reading.

She didn't look back, she couldn't. She considered herself to be a strong women, but for Michael, she was weak as a kitten. If she chanced a glance over her shoulder, she ran the risk of turning back and allowing him the victory of winning her back.

Wasting no time, she left the room with the door closing tight behind her.

Michael stood, head in his hand, sobbing over his own mistakes and wondering if he would ever be able to make this up to her or if he really had just lost the only women he'd ever truly loved.

While your new husband was kind-hearted, you had heard the future Lord of Oldtown was a Hightower of a different stripe—a true son of his father.

Then, Ormund turned his gaze to you, his lips curling into a crooked smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “And to you as well, Princess...”

His dark gaze wandered, raking down your face to your bust, before returning to meet your eyes unabashedly.

“The songs do you a disservice, Your Grace. You are a far lovelier sight than what they claim.”

There was something in the way he appraised you that made you uncomfortable. It was your first encounter with the infamous son of the Lord of Hightower, and yet you knew instantly what sort of viper he was.

Gwayne’s arm, still resting over your waist, tightened subtly—a silent warning for him, also a reassurance to you.

“She has my heart, Ormund, and my sword,” Gwayne replied smoothly, his eyes flashing with a protective warmth as he looked down at you. “The realm has never seen a more beautiful bride, and I am the luckiest man in the Seven Kingdoms.”

“Why, of course. You have done our house a great service today, Gwayne, and I’m certain you’ll make a fine husband,” he said with a careless shrug, his crooked smile not wavering. He raised his goblet in a mock toast. “May the Light of the Seven bless your union.”

With a final, lingering look at you, Ormund turned on his heel and melted back into the sea of lords and ladies.

“Don’t mind him,” Gwayne hissed under his breath.

The moment his cousin was out of sight, you leaned closer to your groom, noting the sharp clench of his jaw. Sensing your concern, however, he immediately masked his irritation and turned to you with a reassuring smile as he drew you securely against his side.

Yet, as the music surged back to life around you, you couldn’t deny the chill that still prickled your skin. Ormund Hightower would remain at court for the rest of your wedding festivities—

And you had a foreboding feeling you would soon see him again.

The first day of your wedding celebration finally drew to a close. With the feast over, the princess and her new husband were left in the confines of their marital chambers, and—

The time has come for this marriage to be consummated.

A nervous flutter stirred in your chest. Gwayne had given explicit instructions for your handmaidens to leave after removing your headpiece, saying he would take care of the rest.

And try you might to look away as a proper lady should, your eyes kept drifting towards him as he began to undress— all the while bracing yourself, expecting the shift from chivalrous knight to demanding husband.

“If you’re stealing glances at me like an innocent maiden does her first love,” he suddenly remarked with an amused grin, “you’re truly going to make me blush.”

Heat rushed to your cheeks, and you averted your gaze, suddenly finding everything more appealing than him.

Left in just his loose linen shirt, Gwayne had a meaningful smile on his face as he stepped behind you, his fingers reaching out to you to unlace the stiff bodice of your gown.

Oh, this is really happening, is it not?

“We...” You suddenly found it hard to breathe as the heavy layers of your dress came loose. “Are we—”

“Yes, darling?” he chuckled softly, his dimples deepening in the firelight. He clearly found satisfaction in how flustered you had become all of a sudden.

You merely looked down, biting your lip to keep yourself from stammering. Your face felt hot too as his large palm traced the contours of your body— from the line of your ribs to the curve of your waist, and the dip of your hips.

After all, you were inexperienced. You had heard stories of how hurt the first night could be— how rough the men liked it, and how comfort was the last thing a woman should expect.

As his arms circled your waist from behind, pinning you gently against him, you choked out:

“Could you be gentle... at least?”

“Hm?” he hummed, smiling against your skin, his breath warm as he pressed a kiss to your shoulder.

Who could have known that the stern princess could be so shy? Gwayne indulged himself, trailing a path of kisses up the sensitive nape of your neck, savoring the way you shivered beneath his touch.

Precious thing, she truly is.

With a knowing smile, he lifted you effortlessly into his arms, and you gasped, clinging to his shoulders.

He laid you down upon the silk sheets, climbing in above you, and leaned down— immediately pressing his lips to yours in a searing kiss that tasted faintly of sweet wine.

“Mmh...” His mouth moved against yours with hunger, tangling his fingers into the locks of your hair. He kissed you until you felt the room spin— each time he pulled back a fraction of an inch, it was only to catch his breath before leaning down to devour your lips again, deeper and more bruising than before.

His toned hips pressed down firmly against yours, pinning you into the silk sheets. Through your thin linen shift, you could feel the hard, growing length of his bulge pressing against your thigh.

A quiet moan caught in your throat as he started rolling his hips, the friction sending a wave of unfamiliar heat straight to your core. Your fingers grasped the nape of his neck, and he groaned, a low vibration that you felt as much as you heard.

“Do you even know—” he rasped against your lips, still grinding against you, his voice tinged with unbridled desire, “how badly I want you?”

Just as the tension stretched to a breaking point, Gwayne suddenly went still. With a ragged exhale, he pulled away, leaving your lips tingling. He leveled his dark gaze on you, watching you panting for breath.

Lowering his head to rest his forehead against yours, he made no move to strip away the rest of your linen shift. He simply anchored his weight against you.

“Ser Gwayne…?” You blinked up at him, confusion clouding your eyes.

He let out a low chuckle, his fingers tracing the curve of your jaw.

“We have just survived the court of vipers today, my darling. Both of you and I need rest, nothing more.”

“But—”

His eyes then crinkled, his smile softened, looking at you as if he knew clearly what were currently going through your mind.

“What did I vow to you before the Seven?”

Wide-eyed, spellbound, with swollen lips of his making. Gwayne found his princess bride really endearing. Looking at you as he would a treasure, he recited the words he had spoken before the High Septon:

“I pray that my days will be long at your side. May your hand be in mine, by sun and by night...”

His dark blue eyes bored into yours with sincerity that made your chest tighten.

“Let our breaths twine and our blood become one, and even when our bones return to dust... may I find your soul still sworn to mine.”

Once again, he caught your heart with his sweet devotion. The way he was pure in his affections for you made you almost tear up.

Is this what it feels like to feel completely safe?

“There is no rush.” He traced a finger on your lips. “My only desire is to cherish you. With me, you are free to speak your mind— and as I am yours, you are entirely mine.”

He flashed you another sweet smile before rolling onto his side. He reached down to grasp the velvet blankets, pulling the covers all the way up over you both to block out the chill—tucking you securely under his arm and pulling you against his chest.

When you clung to him, he let out a giddy laugh, his hold instinctively tightening around you.

“Thank you, husband,” you whispered against his broad chest, nuzzling your face closer to him.

You received a tender kiss on the crown of your head in return.

For the most part, you were the happiest bride in the Seven Kingdoms.

Everyone in the realm, from the lowly stableboys to nobles, had offered their felicitations, your knight’s devotion was absolute and his tenderness behind closed doors a sanctuary against the court.

Yet, you hadn’t missed the way Ormund Hightower, the heir of Oldtown and Gwayne’s cousin, had eyed you at each and every turn.

His morning greetings had felt entirely too personal for your comfort, and the way he boldly stared at you made your skin crawl. You hadn’t seen fit to tell your husband just yet, choosing instead to give his cousin the benefit of the doubt.

Now, with the last day of your wedding festivities concluded, the gates of Red Keep were open as the lords and ladies of the realm prepared their wheelhouses to leave King’s Landing. Seeking an escape from the noise, you ducked into a cloistered walkway near the Godswood.

But you weren’t alone.

A shadow fell over the stone floor, and before you could turn, Ormund stepped out from behind a carved pillar, blocking your path in the deserted corridor.

“Your Grace,” he greeted with a cold smile.

“Ser Ormund.” Your voice adopting the icy tone you had practiced for years, as you began to question what he was truly after. “Should you not prepare to return to Oldtown? I imagined you would want to be ready for the long journey back to the Reach.”

Ormund didn’t answer right away. He closed the distance between you, tilted his head, a patronizing smile touching his lips.

“Preparations can wait. I merely wanted a private moment to bid my farewell to you.”

“You have had seven days of feasts to bid your farewells,” you retorted.

His smile only deepened. Instead of moving away, he stepped closer, trapping you between his frame and the pillar.

“Now, Princess... You know it as well as I do that we play a less than pretty game here.”

His gaze dropping to your collarbone before lifting to pin yours, with a look of a man who knew how much you weighted before the Iron Throne.

“Everything you lack in birthright is amply compensated by that pretty face of yours.” His blue eyes narrowed. “With a face like that, you could bewitch knights and lords across the Seven Kingdoms. A tragic shame... If only the timing had been right, you could have chosen me instead.”

A wave of disgust rushed through you. “You would do well to remember yourself. You are already wed.”

“A man never knows,” he replied in a sultry whisper, “when he might find himself in need of another wife.”

Ormund chuckled at your horrified expression. He leaned in closer, his eyes boring into yours with a terrifyingly casual entitlement, and in that moment you caught a striking smell on him.

Incense? Pomander? It was a potent smell, but surprisingly and jarringly pleasant.

“Why him?” he sneered, placing both arms against the wall on either side of your head. “An easy prey, is he?”

“He is kind,” you spat, your gaze hardening with defiance, willing yourself not to tremble before him. “A kinder man than anyone could ever be. Now I command you to let me pass, as I will not suffer you insulting my lord husband, Ormund Hightower.”

“Kind, is he now...? My cousin is the very paragon of a gentleman, and you thought you could bend him to your will, no?”

He leaned even closer to your ear that you could feel his breath—his scent filling your being, his blue eyes narrowing and burning into you with cold certainty.

“A word of counsel,” Ormund warned, his voice dropping to a menacing purr. “Gwayne remains a Hightower. The blood of Oldtown runs thick in his veins, and whatever sweet words he whispers in your bed… In the end, he will never betray his own house.”

The words echoed in your mind, striking a sudden chord of doubt— before nausea and fury flared within you.

With a sudden surge of strength, you shoved hard against Ormund’s chest, breaking his hold and causing him to stagger.

Without giving him the satisfaction of another word, you spun on your heel and swept past him, leaving him alone in the shadows of the corridor.

Throughout the seven days and nights of your wedding festivities, Gwayne Hightower had been a man utterly besotted, and he wasn’t reluctant in showing it before the court.

These were, without a doubt, the best days of his life. A dizzying happiness bestowed upon him by the Gods.

And patience was a virtue he possessed and would gladly practice if it meant your comfort. He had no wish to rush you and would like to give you as much time as you wanted, because after all, he knew deep-seated worries a new bride had regarding the marriage bed.

To that end, he had been standing by the hearth for a while now, stoking the coals so the chamber would be warm. When the heavy oak door finally creaked open and you stepped inside, Gwayne turned, already expecting you.

“Well, hello again, darling,” he greeted, an easy smile instantly gracing his features. “Are you ready to retire for the night?”

“Oh—!”

A startled gasp escaped you, and you nearly jumped out of your skin, completely caught off guard to find him waiting. Even from across the room, he caught the rigid hunch of your shoulders and the panic in your eyes. It took only a second to realize how you were shaking.

His smile vanished, replaced by a sudden, sharp concern.

“You look unwell,” Gwayne noted, frowning. Immediately letting go of the poker, he stood and crossed the chamber to you.

However, you were always a quick thinker. Meeting his gaze, you forced a placating smile. “No— It is just the wind, husband, and I am weary. I shall summon my handmaiden to help me undress and get ready for bed.”

Now there really was an unsettling weight gnawing at his chest. It was something he realized recently, but you were actually a wretched liar when caught unprepared. And now, you looked fragile, as though you desperately needed comfort.

“Has something happened?” He closed the remaining distance, his hands sliding up to catch you gently by the arm, drawing you closer to him.

His first instinct was to unquestionably provide you that comfort, and he was just about to pull you into the safety of his arms when—

His nostrils flared as he caught the fragrance clinging to you— and the air left his lungs. It was a scent he loathed with a visceral hatred, yet one he recognized almost instantly.

Gwayne went rigid, the blood turning to ice in his veins. A dark, sickening realization settled over him in a matter of seconds.

How?

Just how close had you been... to carry his scent so clearly upon your skin?

His gentle demeanor hardened into a sudden steel, and his voice dropped:

“Were you with Ormund?”

. . .

You wanted nothing more than to collapse in his arms.

You were really going to when suddenly you noticed how his face darkened. Gwayne’s blue eyes locked onto yours, demanding the truth you were trying to hide.

“Why were you with him?”

That striking smell, you realized. “No, I wasn’t—” you stammered, the words catching in your throat as panic flared inside you.

But Gwayne was far from convinced. He immediately let go of you, stepping back as if your very touch burned him. The sudden loss of his warmth made your heart ache with a sharp pain.

He looked utterly lost now, unable to look you in the eye. And worst of all, he looked terribly hurt.

“Nothing happened between us!” you blurted, desperate to bridge the sudden chasm between you. “We just exchanged a few words—”

“Do not lie to me. Ormund has a certain pomander he prefers—a blasted scent I would know anywhere. To carry that scent, you must have been so near to each other, so close that...”

He couldn’t even finish the sentence. The compromising image of you and his cruel cousin choked the words right out of his throat, his jaw clenching as he fought back the raw betrayal burning in his chest.

You, however, wouldn’t allow him to believe the worst. You forcibly threw yourself into his arms, desperate to mend the fracture between you—

“Gwayne, I swear this upon my mother’s name: I would never hurt you in such manner.”

You wrapped your arms around him tightly, burying your face against him. In that moment, even you found a fleeting peace in his warmth and listening to his erratic heartbeat. At first, his entire frame went completely stiff under your touch.

But as your vow settled over him... the tension broke, and he melted into your embrace in surrender, holding onto you with a crushing grip.

Oh. Such a sweet man, he is. The clarity almost made you cry—even when he thought he was in his darkest moment, he silently chose to believe you.

The two of you stayed like that for a while until a sudden, dark terror seemed to occur to him. His eyes snapped back to yours, searching your face for any sign of ruin.

“Did he force himself upon you?” he asked then, his voice uneven, almost trembling with rage at the mere thought. “Because if he did— if he laid a single unwanted hand on you, I will—”

“No!” you fiercely rejected the notion. “Nothing happened! I— I might have incited his displeasure, yes, but nothing more!”

Gwayne let out a relieved sigh, cradling your face with both of his hands to anchor himself, looking down at you like a lovelorn man. The ache in his chest subsided somewhat, and for a moment, he contemplated hearing more.

Ormund was not a kind man. He knew that better than anyone, having spent his childhood under his whims. And Ormund was ruthless and cunning— so if he had approached you, he undoubtedly had a purpose.

It might prove him a fool, and it would cost him another piece of his soul, yet Gwayne chose faith. Just as he had done a hundred times before.

“Whatever transpired between you, I do not wish to hear of it.”

You blinked at him, only to find him staring back with a grave expression.

“Just do not come near him again,” he warned, his voice a low, commanding growl. “Can you do that?”

You barely nodded when Gwayne leaned down and captured your lips in a punishing kiss—one born of relief, jealousy, and a fierce need to erase every trace of his cousin from your skin.

His hands, usually so practiced in their courtesy, lost their gentleness as he crushed you against him. He groaned against your mouth, breaking the kiss only to drag his wet lips down your throat, his teeth grazing the sensitive skin over your pulse point just roughly enough to make you gasp.

The sounds of your mingled breaths and sensual sighs filled the room. Your thoughts burned away by the sudden, suffocating heat of him. He backed you towards the high, velvet-curtained bed, and then swept you off your feet—

“Oh! Ser Gwayne!”

Just like your first night together as man and wife, he laid you down on the marital bed, but this time, he came down over you—his hands tearing at the laces of your dress, his breath hot on your jaw.

“Princess, I can’t—” His voice broke into a growl as he lost it, capturing your lips in another senseless kiss.

Somewhere in the feverish haze, he shrugged off his own shirt, letting out a grunt when he felt the burning touch of your fingertips wandering across his bare skin.

With a single, fluid pull, he rid you of your dress, and only then did he draw back, his dark eyes wide and dilated as he drank the sight of your naked form.

Every inch of you... is dazzlingly woman. How had the heavens deemed him worthy of a wife so breathtaking?

A primal urge flared within him— he had to mark you, to write his name upon your skin. Every lord in the Seven Kingdoms should know that he alone was husband to the princess.

Gwayne buried his face in your chest, suckling your breasts, swirling his tongue around the aching peaks until you arched off the mattress, breathless.

Fuck patience.

He roughly parted your thighs next to devour your sweet cunt with his mouth and lips, making you squirm to hold back your lewd moans. Within minutes, the intense coil inside you burst, your fingertips clawing at the bedsheets as your climax tore through you.

Fuck virtues.

Your head were still spinning in a daze as he proved just how masterful he was in pleasuring you. Before you could properly recover, Gwayne parted your knees wider and settled his weight over you.

“Will it hurt?” your voice came in a whisper, laced with such raw innocence when you realized what was to come that it immediately softened him.

“The first time always is,” Gwayne answered truthfully. “Scratch me, bleed me, scream if you must. Tell me if the pain outweighs the pleasure, and I will stop.”

He aligned himself against your entrance and with a push, inched himself inside you. You winced, a sharp cry escaping your lips at the foreign intrusion, your nails digging into the skin of his back.

“Hush, darling... I have you,” he whispered thickly. He held you tight, anchoring you against the mattress as he drove himself deeper. You trembled beneath him, half in tears and choked by little gasps of pain, your body struggling to accommodate his sheer size.

So tight. Gwayne really was on the verge of losing it when he realized he had broken your maidenhead. Still a maid, and I have claimed her.

When he sheathed himself completely, your body stretched against an agonizing fullness and more tears fell from your eyes. Gwayne held himself perfectly still, giving your body a moment to adjust to his length, before pressing a tender kiss to your lips to soothe you and beginning to move.

As his hips drove into yours with bruising thrusts, the initial sting quickly melted away, replaced by a deep, rolling friction that felt incredibly good, drawing whimpers from the back of your throat.

You looked sinful beneath him. His hands slid up from the mattress to cup your face, his thumbs wiping away the stray tears at the corners of your eyes even as his lower body dictated a merciless pace.

There was only the heat, the slick friction binding you together, and a man utterly possessed.

“You are mine,” Gwayne rasped against your skin, his voice a ragged edge of pure devotion and dark triumph. “From this night... until my last.”

The pleasure wound tighter and tighter within you— until the dam broke, shattering you in a blinding release. You cried out his name, your body clamping tightly around his length.

Fuck.

The pulsing squeeze of your walls was the final blow to his restraints— your husband groaned aloud, as he thrusted into you one last time, before collapsing against you and spilling his seeds inside your womb.

You awoke before him.

With the morning light filtered through the velvet curtains, you observed your husband’s serene, sleeping face. Free from his courtly mask and the heat from the night before, Gwayne looked peaceful, almost like a boy.

Even in sleep, he had one arm on your waist. His red hair was a mess against the sheets, and the blanket barely covered him, exposing the impressive breadth of his back—and the faint red marks where your nails had scratched him last night.

Sweet man, and he’s all mine.

A wave of tenderness washed over you, a deep-seated realization sank that you were truly his woman now. Reaching out, you gently cupped his jaw, the pad of your thumb tracing his cheek.

At your touch, his eyelashes soon fluttered. His eyes blinked open, unfocused with sleep.

“Good morrow, husband,” you fixed a sweet smile, and he blinked blue eyes at you, staring at you in a hazy daze for a moment as his mind worked to bridge the gap between his dreams and reality.

Then, a soft sigh escaped him. He reached out, his strong arms wrapping around your waist to pull you against him, burying his face into the crook of your neck.

“Forgive me,” he murmured in a drawl, his voice muffled against your skin.

You blinked. “What for?”

“I have conducted myself in a manner entirely unbefitting of your husband.”

“Oh?”

“I was far from gentle with you,” he mumbled into your neck. “When you have asked it from me.”

He really thought that? A giggle bubbled up from your chest, the light sound causing him to curl into you even further, hiding his face like a guilty boy.

“I am perfectly well,” you laughed, hugging him close to your chest. “A bit sore, perhaps, but quite intact.”

You stroked his red hair, and he clung to you a little tighter, as if you were the only anchor he needed. However, you were in the mood of being mischievous.

“Although, I must confess, I never knew you had that side in you, husband.” Your lips curling into a smirk as you looked down at him. “I must admit I doubted its existence.”

Gwayne went utterly still in your embrace. Slowly, he pulled back, looking at you with an expression of pure despondence. Then as though he couldn’t bear to look at your face, he groaned, clenching his jaw.

“I am glad my utter lack of composure is a source of amusement for the princess.”

His cheeks had started to redden, and your heart swelled. Reaching out, you caught his jaw with one hand and stole a quick kiss, catching him off guard.

“Am I not your wife?” you teased. “What is there to be so flustered about?”

“Are you secretly a wanton?” Gwayne fired back, a dimpled, shy smile breaking through his lingering embarrassment. “You certainly seem fond of kissing me first.”

Would a man so devoted to you not choose you, when he is faced by the impossible choice between his wife and his house?

Mayhaps that was a question that would find its answer in the years to come.

“This is how you kiss, darling.”

And with that, he leaned in and captured your lips in a chaste yet deep kiss. The shyness that had flushed his cheeks moments ago vanished, replaced by the effortless grace of a man who knew exactly how to cherish his wife.

When he finally parted from you, he didn’t pull away far. He rested his forehead against yours, his breath mingling with your own as the early morning sun caught the rich blue of his eyes, and his grin was the sweetest as he gazed at you.

What is that light shining through the window? It matters less, because you are the sun, and you are in his arms.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ㅤㅤ⋆ㅤㅤ January, 1994.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ╰ㅤ An Undisclosed Location - Los Angeles, California.

Two weeks after the divorce papers arrived, (Name) found herself standing in the back corner of a Rite Aid, lingering near the pharmacy counter with a basket hanging loosely from one arm. Nothing particularly special in it; a little bottle of ibuprofen and some pads. Things that made this visit feel a little more normal. She was wearing a baseball cap pulled low over her eyes and a pair of oversized sunglasses, and scarf wrapped loosely around the lower half of her face.

It was funny. She’d become strangely good at blending in during the years she was with him. Michael had turned disappearing into an art form: fake noses, oversized jackets, wigs, and absurd disguises that left them both giggling in parking lots of a grocery store. She indulged him in all of it—somehow beneath all of it, they felt freer than they ever did as themselves at times. It was nice. But this visit didn’t feel that way.

Her managers would’ve insisted on sending an assistant if they’d known where she’d gone. Security would’ve cleared the counter and surrounding areas before she ever reached the pharmacy. Hell, someone else would’ve picked up the prescription, tucked it into a brown bag, and spared her the errand entirely.

But no one knew the perscription existed, and she intended to keep it that way.

Two weeks ago, a stranger in a suit had handed her a stack of papers and it felt as though something had climbed off the page, and directly into her body the moment she’d touched them. It burrowed through her the way an illness does, until it had rooted itself in places she couldn’t reach. It seeped into her bloodstream, threaded itself through her nerves, and nested behind her ribs.

The symptoms hadn’t arrived all at time, they spread slowly.

It fed on sleep and turned the simple act of hearing her own phone ring into something her heart interpreted as danger, taking several minutes to recover. Her appetite disappeared. Her pulse developed a mind of its own even when she was resting. She’d lie awake convinced something terrible was about to happen, only to realize the terrible thing already had.

It was astonishing how quickly grief could colonize a body.

She couldn’t scrub it off in the shower or outrun it. It had settled into the wiring beneath her skin, quietly rewriting instincts she’d trusted her entire life. Silence became suspicious. Even breathing sometimes felt like work.

The prescription was proof that whatever had entered her that afternoon had progressed far beyond heartbreak. A doctor had looked at her and seen something treatable. The shock of the impending divorce had lingered long enough to leave a trace in her nervous system and soil it, leaving behind disorder that wasn’t there previously.

The papers were still sitting somewhere in a drawer, she hadn’t signed a single one or read even a page. Yet somehow they were already changing her from the inside out. Truth be told, she physically couldn’t look at, touch or even be in the vicinity of the documents. Staff handled them that afternoon, locking them in a secure room because they seemed to be a trigger. Understandably so.

The woman beside her was buying children’s cough medicine and cartoon bandages. An older man stood quietly comparing two different bottles of vitamins before deciding on one. Somewhere near the greeting cards, a little girl begged her mother for a chocolate bar while the cashier laughed and told her she’d have to ask permission first. It was painfully, offensively ordinary. The world had gone on with its errands and grocery lists, with all the beautifully mundane rituals of ordinary life, as though her life hadn’t split neatly in half just fourteen days earlier.

(Name) stood among strangers holding the little numbered ticket she’d been handed at the counter and when her name was finally called, she walked forward on legs that didn’t quite feel like her own.

The pharmacist never looked up long enough to recognize her. He simply asked for her date of birth, confirmed her address, and then disappeared briefly before returning with a small amber bottle sealed inside a white paper bag. The exchange lasted less than two minutes. He explained the directions carefully, his voice slightly deadpan from saying the same sentences hundreds of times a day. Take one as needed. It may cause drowsiness. Avoid alcohol while taking this medication. Contact your physician if symptoms worsen. She nodded at all the appropriate moments, signed where he pointed, thanked him with a smile and accepted the bag with both hands.

As she turned toward the exit, her eyes drifted down to the bottle visible through the folded paper.

Twenty seven.

Twenty seven years old, and she was walking out of a pharmacy with medication because she could no longer convince her own body that it was safe. How pathetic is that? Because somewhere between her husband’s legal troubles, hospital visits, rehabilitation, to weeks upon weeks of silence, Lisa Maria, and an envelope full of legal documents meant to separate her from the love of her life, her hands shook for no reason at all. Sometimes she forgot to breathe until her lungs forced her to remember. The physician had called them panic attacks in the same exactly manner someone might use to diagnose seasonal allergies. He’d spoken gently, kindly even, explaining that her nervous system had been under extraordinary strain for a very long time. There was no shame in needing help, he’d said. Plenty of people needed help. She’d nodded then, too.

But there wasn’t a dosage for losing your husband.

There wasn’t a pill that could make her forget the sound of his laugh echoing through hallways he no longer walked. Nothing printed on that prescription label could explain how to wake up in a bed built for two people and remember, every single morning, that only one of the was laying in it. No pharmacist could fold that kind of grief into an amber bottle and slide it across a counter.

She placed the paper bag on the passenger seat beside her and drove home in silence.

That evening, after Aladdin had finally fallen asleep and the house settled into the stillness she had grown to despise, she wandered into the living room carrying a dusty cardboard box she’d pulled from the back of a closet. Inside were home videos she hadn’t touched in ages, each cassette labeled in her own pretty handwriting. Christmas. Aladdin’s birthday. Neverland. 1990. Valentine’s day. Paris. Wedding. Her fingers lingered over the last one before she carefully slid it into the VCR. The mechanical click sounded into the room, followed by the soft hiss of static before the image steadied into brilliant color.

There he was.

Happy. Smiling. Alive in a way that had nothing to do with breathing at all—it feels like watching a dream.

He turned toward the camera for only a second before looking back at her, his entire face brightening with that shy little smile she’d once believed she would spend the rest of her life watching. She saw herself laughing beside him, adjusting the sleeve of his tuxedo before he leaned down to whisper something that made her throw her head back with another laugh. The footage wobbled as the cameraman moved, catching fleeting moments no photographer ever could. His hand finding hers beneath the table. The sweet way he looked at her when he thought no one else was paying attention. The gentle brush of his thumb across her knuckles while guests applauded somewhere in the background.

On the coffee table sat three things.

The remote.

The small amber prescription bottle.

A bottle of vodka.

She stared at them as the television continued playing. Michael fed her a bite of wedding cake before laughing at something she couldn’t hear over the music. She remembered exactly how it had tasted. Sweet vanilla. Buttercream. The kiss they’d shared afterward, both of them giggling because they could still taste the frosting. She remembered believing with complete certainty that this was what her forever looked like.

Her thumb found the rewind button.

The tape whirred backwards.

She watched it again.

Then again.

Every replay felt less like remembering.. and more like searching. She thought that if she studied his face closely enough she’d find the exact frame where everything that came afterward had already been waiting. Some tiny hesitation. Some shadow behind his eyes. Some warning she’d somehow missed.

There wasn’t one.

Only a man hopelessly in love with his wife.

Only a woman who looked back at him as though nothing in the world could ever separate them.

The room grew darker as the evening wore on, lit only by the glow of the television. The prescription bottle opened, as well as the bottle of vodka. They sat side by side beneath the flickering light like two different promises, both offering relief in their own quiet, dangerous way. (Name) rested her elbows on her knees, her tired eyes fixed on the screen as tears slipped silently down her face.

She pressed rewind one more time.

Inside the television, Michael smiled at her as though he still couldn’t believe she’d said yes.

Outside of it, she couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked at her that way at all.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ㅤㅤ⋆ㅤㅤ February, 1994.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ╰ㅤ Spago Restaurant - West Hollywood, California.

It had taken nearly three weeks before anyone managed to convince (Name) to leave the house. Not for a recording session, an interview or for a rehearsal. Just lunch. Her manager had called it a ‘change of scenery’, speaking as though she were balanced on the outside of a twenty story window ledge, and they were all desperately pretending the conversation was about the weather. He’d gently suggested that four walls and perpetually drawn curtains weren’t doing her any favors anymore. Elizabeth had agreed immediately, squeezing her hand across the kitchen table and telling her that the world hadn’t ended just because it felt like it had. A few other members of her team quietly echoed the sentiment, though no one pushed very hard. They’d all learned over the past few weeks that this situation had made her extremely fragile. One wrong sentence and she’d retreat upstairs for the rest of the day, emerging only to check on Aladdin before disappearing behind another closed door. Eventually, more out of exhaustion than willingness, she’d nodded. Arguing required energy she simply didn’t have anymore.

Getting dressed felt very odd considering for the past few weeks, she’d only changed clothes out of basic necessity, and even then, it usually took gentle encouragement from one of the older women on the Neverland staff. She’d knock softly before letting herself in, lay out fresh clothes, and patiently coax (Name) through the motions of showering and getting dressed. The same woman reminded her to eat most days, lingering at the kitchen table until she’d managed at least half of whatever meal had been placed in front of her. Somewhere along the way, she’d stopped feeling like an employee and started feeling more like the maternal presence everyone assumed was needed due to the situation at hand.

(Name) stood in front of her closet for several minutes before reaching for an oversized cream sweater that used to fit comfortably, only to watch it slip a little loosely over her shoulders now. The sleeves swallowed part of her hands which was the normal fit but the neckline rested lower against her collarbone than she remembered. She caught sight of herself in the mirror for only a second before looking away again. Her cheekbones had become a bit more angular. The gentle fullness that had always softened her face had disappeared a bit, replaced by a hollowness she hadn’t noticed was there. Makeup covered the worst of the dark circles beneath her eyes, but it couldn’t disguise the fatigue settled deep behind them. She tucked loose strands of hair beneath a baseball cap, slipped on oversized sunglasses despite the gray afternoon sky, and reached for a scarf.

As she stepped downstairs, someone offered a gentle, well meaning, ”Miss! You’re getting out? You look nice.” Someone else remarked without thinking, “Oh! ..You’ve lost a little weight..” And the room fell awkwardly silent. (Name) only smiled politely, adjusted the strap of her handbag and pretended she hadn’t heard the comment. She would be back later she said.

The restaurant had been chosen carefully, tucked away from the busiest streets behind rows of old palm trees and expensive storefronts where celebrities occasionally managed an uninterrupted meal if they were lucky. It wasn’t impossible to find, just inconvenient enough that most photographers didn’t bother waiting outside on speculation alone. For a little while, the plan actually worked. Warm afternoon light spilling across white tablecloths through tall windows, silverware clinked softly against porcelain plates and conversations drifted lazily between nearby tables without anyone paying them much attention.

It felt ordinary, getting out like this. She.. she enjoyed it admittedly. Her team made a conscious effort to avoid the subjects hanging over everyone’s heads. They talked about work, albums other artists were releasing, Aladdin’s newest words, and whether he was going to inherit her stubbornness or her sweetness—perhaps even both, he’s a taurus after all. Elizabeth carried most of the conversation herself, launching into one of her wonderfully meandering stories that somehow involved three countries, two dogs, and an actor whose name she’d completely forgotten before arriving at an absurd punchline that made the entire table laugh. Against her own expectations, (Name) laughed too. It startled her more than anyone else. The sound felt rusty, like something her body remembered doing even if her heart hadn’t caught up yet.

For one fleeting hour, she almost believed she’d survive this.

Then somebody recognized her.

She never found out who it was. Perhaps another customer quietly excused themselves to make a phone call. Perhaps a waiter mentioned her name to someone outside. Perhaps word simply spread the way it always seemed to whenever famous people tried to exist in public. It hardly mattered anymore. Fame had long since taught her that privacy leaked away in tiny, ordinary moments exactly like this one until suddenly there was nothing left.

(Name) noticed the shift before anyone said a word. Her head of security, who until then had been standing comfortably near the entrance pretending not to watch the room, suddenly pressed two fingers against the earpiece hidden beneath his jacket. His expression tightened imperceptibly as he listened, eyes drifting toward the front windows where flashes of movement had begun gathering beyond the glass. Another member of security quietly stepped away from the wall to reposition himself closer to the table. Her manager stopped mid sentence, following their line of sight without turning his head too obviously. Even Elizabeth noticed, her smile fading as she reached instinctively for (Name)’s hand beneath the table, giving it one reassuring squeeze.

“They’re outside,” The head of security said quietly.

The words settled over the table like the forecast of an approaching storm everyone had secretly been hoping would pass them by. Conversation dissolved almost immediately. Chairs slid softly across the floor as everyone rose, years of navigating celebrity life taking over without discussion. (Name) lowered her gaze, adjusted her sunglasses with fingers that suddenly felt clumsy, and drew a slow breath that caught somewhere halfway inside her chest. The scarf was pulled a little higher. Her baseball cap lowered a little further. None of it would matter. It never really did. She fell naturally into the middle of the group as they began walking toward the entrance, surrounded by security without feeling particularly protected.

The restaurant door hadn’t even finished opening before the noise—her name hit her before she even saw the cameras.

It came from every direction at once, shouted over itself until it no longer sounded like her name at all, just noise. The moment her foot crossed the threshold, the sidewalk erupted into movement. Photographers surged forward as one body, camera shutters firing in relentless bursts that sounded almost mechanical, flashes exploding even beneath the overcast sky until the world dissolved into violent pulses of white. For a split second she couldn’t properly see where the curb ended or where her security team began. People jostled shoulders, stepping into one another’s paths in a frantic effort to get closer, lenses stretching over heads, microphones thrust forward like weapons. The air itself felt crowded.

“(Name)! Over here!”

“(Name), is it true Michael left you?”

“Were you blindsided by the divorce?”

“Is the marriage beyond saving?”

“Who’s getting custody of Aladdin?”

“Are the reports about your health true?”

“Did Michael cheat on you?”

“Do you still love him?”

The questions were invasive. One voice crashed into the next before she’d even understood the first, each reporter trying to shout just a little louder than everyone else, convinced theirs would be the question that finally cracked her open. Camera lenses crowded so close she could see her own distorted reflection staring back at her through polished glass, sallow beneath oversized sunglasses and thinner than she remembered. Someone stumbled against her shoulder. Another photographer leaned so far over the security barricade he nearly fell. Hands reached into her path holding tape recorders, notepads, microphones bearing television station logos.

Somewhere beside her, one of the security guards repeated, “Back up. Give her room. Back up,” in the same firm voice over and over until it blended into the rest of the chaos.

Nobody listened, but nobody ever did. There was money to be made from other people’s misery, and her nightmare had become one of the biggest stories in the world.

Her heartbreak had stopped belonging to her weeks ago. Every grocery store checkout aisle carried another magazine promising the “truth” behind the separation, each issue displaying a different photograph beneath another confident headline written by someone who had never once stepped inside their home. Anonymous friends appeared everywhere, speaking in quotations she’d never heard before, somehow claiming to know exactly what had been said behind closed bedroom doors, exactly how she’d cried, exactly why her marriage had failed.

Daytime television hosts dissected their relationship between celebrity gossip segments and cooking demonstrations, nodding thoughtfully as if they had been invited to the wedding themselves. Entertainment programs replayed years of interviews, slowing footage to half speed in search of glances that supposedly predicted the divorce all along. Fans filled call in shows arguing over which one of them deserved sympathy. Radio hosts joked about whose breakup album would sell more records. Newspapers printed diagrams of their relationship like timelines from a criminal investigation, reducing years of shared memories into neat columns of dates and speculation. Complete strangers debated custody arrangements over breakfast. Opinion columnists confidently explained why the marriage had collapsed despite never having spent a single minute inside it. Every person with a newspaper, a television, or a microphone suddenly believed they understood the most intimate years of her life better than she did.

Everyone had an answer, but no one had been there.

She kept walking because there was nothing else she knew how to do. Her shoulders curled inward beneath the oversized sweater, she thought that making herself physically smaller might somehow lessen the attention. One hand clung so tightly to the strap of her handbag that her fingers had begun to ache, while the other remained tucked close against her body, hidden beneath the loose knit of her sleeve. She didn’t lift her head. She couldn’t. Looking at them felt too.. it was just humiliating. So instead, she fixed her eyes on the black sedan waiting just beyond the crowd, wishing that they parked closer. Every step seemed to take forever.

The flashes refused to stop. They illuminated every new hollow beneath her cheekbones, every collarbone now visible beneath the sweater she’d chosen specifically because it hid how much weight she’d lost in such a short period of time—the difference was noticeable considering where she was before, to where she is now. Tomorrow those photographs would be everywhere. Side by side comparisons from six months earlier. Headlines asking whether she was eating enough. Television doctors offering diagnoses they’d invented from still images.

HEARTBROKEN STAR SPARKS HEALTH CONCERNS. FRIENDS FEAR SHE’S WASTING AWAY. THE PRICE OF DIVORCE?

They would speculate about stress, exhaustion, dieting, overwork. Nobody would write that she’d begun measuring her nights by how many drinks it took to fall asleep. Nobody would know about the little amber prescription bottle tucked inside the kitchen cabinet behind the coffee mugs, or how some evenings she’d stand in front of it with a bottle of vodka in one hand, trying to decide which one might finally quiet her mind. Nobody would know she’d stopped looking into mirrors for more than a few seconds because the woman staring back looked unrecognizable every single morning.

A security guard opened the car door just as the crowd pressed forward again. She slipped inside without speaking, her manager climbing in behind her before another photographer managed to wedge a camera between the narrowing gap. The door slammed shut with a heavy thud, muffling the shouting almost instantly. For one second, there was silence. She let out a shaky breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and leaned her head back against the leather seat, closing her eyes as if the darkness behind them might finally offer somewhere to hide.

Another flash burst through the tinted window.

Then another.

Even with the door closed, even with the engine starting, even as the car slowly pulled away from the curb, they were still taking pictures.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ㅤㅤ⋆ㅤㅤ Early March, 1994.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ╰ㅤ The Valley - Los Angeles, California.

The strangest part about looking for a house was that she had no idea what she was supposed to be looking for.

She knew how to stand beneath stage lights and deliver a performance perfectly timed down to the second. She knew how to walk into a room full of executives and hold her ground. She knew how to negotiate contracts, handle interviews, memorize choreography, and carry an entire career on her shoulders without letting anyone see how heavy it became. She had spent years making decisions that affected millions of people.

But standing inside a potential home with a realtor asking her what she wanted, she felt completely lost.

The woman showing her around was kind it was sickening. She had the bright, professional warmth of someone who had done this hundreds of times before, moving through each property with an enthusiasm that felt untouched by the fact that this was not an exciting new beginning for her. This was something else entirely.

“This room would be perfect for entertaining,” The realtor said, opening the doors to a wide living space with tall windows overlooking the backyard. “I can already picture family gatherings here. Holidays, birthdays…”

(Name) smiled politely.

She could picture them too.

That was the problem.

She could picture Aladdin running through the room. She could picture toys scattered across the floor, little shoes abandoned by the doorway, Christmas decorations covering every surface. She could picture a piano sitting somewhere near the windows, music filling the house in the evenings.

She could picture a life, but she just couldn’t picture herself living it.

The first house was beautiful.

So was the second.

The third had a kitchen larger than her first apartment and a backyard big enough for Aladdin to spend entire afternoons outside. The fourth had everything people dreamed about when they imagined a perfect home: marble floors, a sweeping staircase, a pool that reflected the sky like glass. A tuscan estate, she called it.

Every realtor’s dream.

Every magazine’s dream.

None of them were hers. Because she wasn’t really looking for a house, she was looking for something that didn’t exist—the life she had lost.

The realization came quietly, somewhere between one perfectly decorated room and another. She stood in a bedroom listening as the realtor explained closet space and bathroom renovations, but all she could think about was how, when she was twenty and signing the lease for her first apartment, Michael had been there.

He had known what questions to ask.

He had noticed things she hadn’t.

He checked the cabinets. The windows. The water pressure. The little details she never would have considered because she had been too young and too excited to care about anything except making the place feel beautiful.

He had laughed gently when she admitted she hadn’t even looked at the lease terms before signing. The whole time he had sat beside her, patiently explaining everything.

Now she was twenty seven, standing in a big empty house with a stack of paperwork, realizing she had no idea what she was supposed to be looking for. It unsettled her more than she wanted to admit.

For as long as she could remember, there had always been a man standing beside her when life asked for grown up decisions. First her father, patiently explaining mortgages, insurance, and contracts but she was too young to care about. Then Michael, who she’d fallen in love with. From then on, the practical parts of life had become shared things.

And neither man believed she was incapable of these things, but they loved taking care of her. And she’d loved letting them.

Now, for the first time in her adult life, no one was reading the fine print before she signed it. No one was pointing out what she’d overlooked or assuring her she was making the right decision. Every choice landed squarely in her lap, and she found herself staring at them longer than she should have because she’d never had to make quite so many of them alone.

It wasn’t dependence she was grieving. It was the absence of the person she’d always instinctively turned toward whenever life became too large to carry by herself. No one warned her that the hardest decisions wouldn’t be the ones in front of cameras. They wouldn’t be the interviews or the performances or the moments where millions of people watched her and expected her to be perfect.

It would be this; mortgages. Insurance. Paperwork.

Choosing where her son would sleep.

The small, ordinary things that somehow felt more terrifying than standing in front of thousands of screaming fans.

After the fourth house, the realtor finally turned to her with a hopeful smile. “Would you like to make an offer?”

(Name) looked around the room. It really was beautiful. Perfect, even. She could imagine Aladdin growing up here. She could imagine birthday parties in the backyard. Christmas mornings. Family dinners. A piano in the corner.

Everything.

Everything except herself.

Her fingers tightened slightly around the folder in her hands.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. The realtor’s expression shifted, waiting. (Name) looked once more around the room before lowering her gaze. “I think..” Her voice caught for just a moment. “I’d like to keep looking.”

And the heartbreaking part was that she didn’t know what she was waiting to find.

Because no house was going to feel like home when the person who had made it one was the very person she was trying to learn how to live without.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ㅤㅤ⋆ㅤㅤ Late March, 1994.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ╰ㅤ Neverland Ranch, Los Olivos, California.

The closet was the worst.

She had avoided it for days, finding reasons to be anywhere else in the house whenever she walked past it. The kitchen needed organizing. Aladdin’s things needed sorting. There were phone calls she needed to make. Meetings. Interviews. A thousand little responsibilities that were easier than standing in front of the closet they had shared.

Because the closet didn’t look like their marriage that had ended. It looked almost exactly as they’d left it. As though they had simply stepped out for dinner and forgotten to come back.

His clothes were still there—jackets arranged by color because he’d insisted it somehow made getting dressed easier (a majority of his clothing was either red or black). A few empty hangers interrupted the line where assistants had quietly removed some of his things weeks earlier, but enough remained that her eyes continued filling in the gaps automatically. Her mind refused to accept absence. It kept correcting it. He’ll need that tomorrow. He always wears that one when it rains. That sweater belongs in the wash. It was astonishing how stubborn memory could be, continuing to perform little acts of love long after there was nowhere left to put them.

Those were the things that hurt the most.

She stood there for several minutes holding a sweater in her hands without realizing she had stopped moving. It still carried the faintest trace of him, his skin, his favorite perfume. It wasn’t strong enough that anyone else would notice—but she did. She had spent years knowing him in ways nobody else did. The smallest details had become part of her understanding of him. The way he smelled after a shower. The way his clothes felt softer after being washed too many times. The way he would leave things in places without realizing it because he always assumed he would come back to them.

Because he always had.

Until he didn’t.

She reached for one of his long sleeves almost without thinking. The fabric slipped easily between her fingers. Time had already begun doing what time always did, stealing little pieces first. But there was still something there. Something warm and familiar that immediately transported her to sleepy mornings where he’d wander into the kitchen wearing this exact shirt, his hair a complete mess, asking if she’d already made coffee before remembering he didn’t actually drink it. The memory arrived so vividly she had to close her eyes. When she opened them again, she caressed the material gently, honestly too tenderly. As if being gentle with it somehow meant she was being gentle with him. Even after all of this, she couldn’t help but to enately want to be careful with him.

She sat down on the floor beside the open boxes, surrounded by pieces of a life she had never imagined having to separate. Photographs. Letters. Small gifts. Things that had once represented years of love and now felt like evidence from another lifetime.

The strangest part was that she didn't know what she was supposed to take.

What belonged to her? What belonged to him?

At some point, there stopped being a difference. That was the entire point of marriage. You stopped keeping score. You stopped remembering who bought what, who brought what, who contributed which piece. Everything became theirs.

Packing was supposed to feel productive.

People packed because they were moving. Because they had accepted that one chapter had ended and another was waiting somewhere ahead of them. There was supposed to be a rhythm to it. Empty the drawers. Fold the clothes. Tape the boxes shut. Write a label. Carry them to the front door. Repeat until the room no longer belonged to you.

It wasn’t that simple with her.

By the afternoon, boxes had begun appearing throughout the bedroom in uneven little clusters. Some were half full. Others still sat open and untouched because she kept finding reasons not to decide what belonged inside them. Marriage had a funny way of blurring ownership until it barely existed. Nobody warned you about that part when you said your vows. They told you everything became ours and they neglected to mention what happened if one day someone asked you to separate it all again.

She knelt beside a lower cabinet near the back of the closet, reaching into the corner where they had spent years absentmindedly shoving things they didn’t know what to do with.

Old photographs. Ticket stubs. A disposable camera neither of them had ever developed. Then her fingers brushed against something soft.

She frowned and pulled it free.

It was a plush frog. A ridiculously oversized frog wearing a tiny sequined tuxedo and an equally ridiculous little top hat that sat crooked over one stitched eye. One arm had gone limp where the stuffing had shifted over the years, giving it the permanently exhausted appearance of someone who had simply accepted life was happening to them.

For a long moment she just stared at it. Then a giggle escaped her lips. Small. Breathless.

“Oh, my goodness..” She pressed her fingertips against her mouth, shaking her head as another quiet laugh slipped out before she could stop it.

She remembered.

They’d been wandering through a carnival years ago after insisting they were “just going to walk around.” He’d spotted the frog hanging from the top row of prizes and become completely determined to win it for her despite the teenage employee repeatedly explaining the game was nearly impossible.

Michael refused to believe him.

Twenty dollars later he’d won exactly nothing.

Forty dollars later he’d accused the game of being rigged.

Sixty dollars later she’d been laughing so hard she’d nearly fallen over.

Eventually, the poor teenager had sighed, looked around to make sure his manager wasn’t watching, quietly taken the frog down himself and handed it across the counter.

“I can’t watch this anymore,” He’d whispered.

Michael had accepted it with complete seriousness before turning to her as though he’d conquered Everest.

“For my beautiful lady,” He announced, presenting the frog with both hands.

She’d looked between him and the absurd stuffed animal. “You spent sixty dollars on this thing.”

“It was an investment.”

“In what?”

“Our future.”

Now she sat alone on the closet floor with the same ridiculous frog resting in her lap. The laughter disappeared almost as quickly as it had come. Her thumb absentmindedly brushed over the crooked little hat.

“You were so stupid, kind of looks like you too..” (Name) whispered affectionately with the kind of fondness reserved for memories that hurt because they had once been so wonderfully ordinary. She smiled through tears that had begun gathering without permission.

The smile trembled, then it broke as she folded forward slowly, hugging the ridiculous frog against her chest hoping that a hug might somehow fix the pieces of her that had been broken for months.

The gift itself was absurd.

Cheap.

Completely impractical.

By every reasonable standard, it should have been one of the easiest things in the room to throw away. Instead, she reached for an empty box, placed the frog gently inside by itself, and wrote only one word across the lid.

KEEP.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ㅤㅤ⋆ㅤㅤ April, 1994.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ╰ㅤ Ashford Mediation Group, Beverly Hills, California.

The drive there felt like purgatory, honestly. The engine hummed beneath them, steady and smooth as it carried the car through late morning traffics. Buildings drifted past the window in slow succession, interrupted every so often by a red light or a pedestrian crossing. Somewhere in the front, her manager kept his voice low over the phone, discussing arrival times, entrances, making sure the press hadn’t caught wind of the meeting.

Beside her, her attorney rested a leather portfolio across his lap, turning over neatly tabbed pages as he reviewed everything one final time. Custody. Financial agreements. Property. Confidentiality. His voice remained calm and almost comforting in its neutrality, pausing now and then to reassure her that nothing unexpected would happen today. They had prepared for this. They had been over every document until he could practically recite them from memory.

She should have been listening. Instead, the words dissolved somewhere between his mouth and her ears, losing their shape before they ever reached her. She answered where she thought she was supposed to, nodding faintly, murmuring quiet acknowledgments she wasn’t entirely aware of making, her eyes fixed on the stitching of the seat in front of her until it blurred into a single uninterrupted line. Her hands rested in her lap, fingers woven together so tightly the joints had begun to ache. She loosened them forcibly and a minute later they were locked together again without her realizing.

Outside, the world continued. A florist arranged fresh bouquets beneath a striped awning. Two businessmen laughed together over paper cups of coffee as they crossed the street. A young mother stopped to kneel in front of her little girl, zipping her jacket before taking her hand and disappearing around the corner. Everyone seemed to know exactly where they were headed. Everyone still belonged to someone or something. The thought settled somewhere beneath her ribs before she could stop it. Once upon a time, she would’ve been driving toward Michael. Toward home. Toward the man who reached for the door handle before the car had even come to a complete stop because he couldn’t seem to wait the extra few seconds. Now she was driving toward paperwork that would ask her to untangle years of her life into paragraphs and signatures.

A quiet pressure began blooming beneath her sternum. It was so faint at first she mistook it for hunger. She straightened in her seat and drew in a deeper breath, holding it for a second before letting it out slowly. It helped, until it didn’t. The feeling returned, just a little heavier this time, spreading through her chest like something patiently unfolding. She swallowed against the sudden dryness in her throat and reached for the bottle of water beside her, taking two careful sips before placing it back exactly where she’d found it. The relief lasted only a moment before her coat suddenly felt heavier than it had when she’d put it on that morning. She slipped the top button loose then adjusted the scarf at her neck. The air conditioning whispered steadily through the vents, yet warmth had begun creeping beneath her collar, collecting behind her ears and along the back of her neck until she wondered if she was getting sick. She crossed one leg over the other. Uncrossed it. Pressed both feet firmly against the floor instead. Nothing seemed to settle the strange discomfort growing quietly inside her.

Her attorney had stopped speaking. “...Mrs. Jackson?”

“Of course.” He offered her an understanding smile, glancing back down at the papers. “I was just saying that, if at any point you need a break, Mrs. Jackson, we can—”

She blinked. “I’m sorry,” She said, her voice quieter than she’d intended. “Could you.. could you repeat that?”

For a second, she simply stared at her own hands.

“Don’t call me that, please.” The words came out and silence settled over the car. She hadn’t raised her voice. She hadn’t snapped, really. But the sentence landed with enough uncomfort that even her manager looked back over his shoulder.

Then, softer this time, embarrassed by how quickly the words had escaped her, she whispered, “Please.”

No one corrected her.

Her attorney gave a small nod, closed the folder for a moment, and apologized before continuing, avoiding the title altogether. She wanted to thank him, but the lump in her throat had grown too large to speak around. She hadn’t realized how much those two words still belonged to him until hearing someone else use them.

Mrs. Jackson.

A name she’d once worn with so much pride it hardly felt borrowed anymore. A name that had come to mean waking up beside him, dancing barefoot through the kitchen with a baby balanced on one hip, signing birthday cards together, whispered “I love yous” after midnight when the house had finally gone quiet. Now it sounded like someone describing a woman who no longer existed.

Not on a television screen.

The realization struck her so suddenly it stole the breath she’d only just managed to steady: in a matter of minutes, she was going to see him.

Not in photographs.

Not through lawyers.

Not through headlines.

Him.

The pressure beneath her ribs tightened and she inhaled, the breath stopped halfway down. She frowned and tried again, slower this time, but it still wasn’t enough. Her lungs worked. She knew they did. They simply refused to feel full. Without thinking, she lowered the window an inch, letting cool air drift against her face. It should have helped, but it didn’t. And she kept her eyes fixed on the road ahead, willing the sensation to pass if she ignored it long enough. It had to pass. She wasn’t going to lose herself in the backseat of a car. Not before she’d even laid eyes on him. Not before she had to sit across from the man she’d loved since she was twenty years old and somehow pretend she knew how to discuss the end of him in legal terms.

The realization struck her all over again, fresh enough to steal the air from her lungs.

She wasn’t driving to see her husband.

She was driving to negotiate the end of him.

Her breathing changed before she realized it had.

It came shorter now, each inhale still stopping halfway down her chest like there simply wasn’t room for the rest of it. She swallowed once. Then again. The knot in her throat refused to move as more heat crept up the back of her neck despite the air conditioning humming quietly through the car, settling beneath her collar and behind her ears until she felt almost feverish.

She cracked the window some more but the rush of outside air hit her face wasn’t enough.

Her attorney noticed first, lowering the papers into his lap and studying her for a moment before speaking carefully. “Are you alright?”

The car slowed for another light and she stared straight ahead. The nausea arrived sudden without a kind warning—not the vague discomfort she’d been sitting with all morning but something imminent and violent. Her stomach lurched so suddenly she jerked forward in her seat, one hand flying instinctively to her mouth because she could physically hold herself together.

She nodded before he’d even finished asking, too quickly that movement made her dizzy. “I’m fine.” The lie came. She’d become frighteningly good at saying it these days.

“I..” She swallowed hard. “Could we..” Her voice disappeared. She tried again. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

The conversation in the front stopped immediately and her manager turned around so fast his seatbelt caught against his shoulder. “Pull over,” He told the driver.

The car eased toward the curb and before it had even come to a complete stop, she was already reaching for the handle with shaking hands.

The cool morning air hit her the second she stepped onto the sidewalk, but it did nothing to steady the awful rolling in her stomach. She bent forward, one hand braced against her knee, the other pressed flat against her chest somehow attempting to slow the frantic pounding beneath it.

Nothing came up. Only dry heaves.

Again.

Again.

Her body kept trying to rid itself of something that wasn’t there. Tears burned behind her eyes from the force of it. She hated this. Because she knew exactly why. She knew. It wasn’t the meeting. It wasn’t the lawyers. It wasn’t even the divorce.

It was him.

In a matter of minutes she would be in the same building as the man she’d spent the better part of six years loving with everything she had, and she had no idea which version of him would be waiting on the other side of that door.

The husband who used to kiss her forehead before leaving for rehearsals. Or the stranger who had disappeared without saying goodbye. For the first time since leaving the house that morning, she allowed herself to think the one thought she’d been avoiding.

What if I look at him.. and I don't recognize him anymore?

The possibility frightened her more than the divorce itself.

Her manager was beside her before she even realized the car door had opened. “Easy,” He murmured, one hand settling carefully between her shoulder blades. “Easy, sweetheart. Don’t fight it, alright? That’s it..”

She wanted to tell him she wasn’t, wanted to tell him she had stopped fighting weeks ago. Instead another dry heave bent her nearly in half, her fingers curling tighter against her knee as tears sprang unwillingly to her eyes. Still, nothing came. Nothing except the violent ache in her stomach and the humiliating sound of her own body insisting it had something left to give.

His hand never left her back. Slow, steady circles the same pace every time. He didn’t rush her. Didn’t tell her to breathe like people always did when they had no idea what breathing felt like anymore. He simply stayed there, letting her have.. whatever this was without making it feel like a spectacle.

The attorney lingered a respectful distance away, quietly telling the driver they’d need another few minutes. Traffic continued behind them. Cars rolled past. People walked by without sparing more than a curious glance. The world refused to stop.

“That's it,” Her manager said softly. “You’re alright.”

She laughed, or tried to. It came out broken, somewhere between a cough and a sob. “No,” She whispered hoarsely. “I’m really... really not.”

“I know.” Those two words nearly undid her. Because no one had said them. Everyone else had spent months asking if she was alright, telling her she’d get through it, reminding her how strong she was.

He simply acknowledged the truth.

She wasn’t.

Her breathing refused to settle. Every inhale felt jagged, stopping halfway before she had to pull another after it, her chest tightening with each attempt until it became difficult to tell whether she was breathing too much or not enough.

“I can’t..” She swallowed hard. “I don’t think I can do this.”

He waited. “I can’t look at him.” The words came quietly. So quietly she almost wasn’t sure she’d spoken them aloud.

“I know,” He repeated. “But you have to.”

“What if..” She stopped, squeezing her eyes shut. “What if he looks at me like I’m just..” She couldn’tfinish.

Just someone else.

Just another meeting.

Just another signature.

Just another chapter he’d already closed.

Her manager stepped a little closer, careful not to crowd her, his hand still resting reassuringly between her shoulders. “Listen to me.” He started, she kept staring at the pavement as he spoke. “You don’t have to be brave in there.”

She frowned. “I feel—“

“No.” His voice remained calm, unwavering. “You just have to get through today. That’s all anyone is asking of you.”

Fresh tears slipped down before she realized they had. “I don’t know who I’m walking in to see.”

His expression softened. “Yeah, I understand that. Trust me, I do..”

“The man I married wouldn’t..” Her voice broke. “He wouldn’t have let it get here.”

Silence settled between them.

After a long moment he reached into his pocket, withdrew a neatly folded handkerchief, and held it out without a word. She took it with trembling fingers.

“I keep thinking..” She whispered, dabbing uselessly at her face, “That maybe he’ll walk in and it’ll be him again.” She hated how childish it sounded. As though the husband she’d fallen asleep beside for years had simply gotten lost and might suddenly find his way back.

Her manager looked at her for a long moment before speaking. “You’re young.” Her eyes lifted. “But.. don’t walk in there expecting the past to meet you halfway.” He gently squeezed her shoulder. “You’ve already survived every day that brought you here.”

She let out a slow, trembling breath, the first one that felt as though it reached the bottom of her lungs.

“I’l walk in with you,” He said gently. “I’ll stay until I can’t. Your attorney will handle the rest. And if you need a break, you stand up. I don’t care who’s talking. I don’t care what's being discussed. You stand up, and we’ll take one.”

She nodded faintly. And no matter how desperately she wished the car would simply turn around and take her home, there was no road left that led back to the life she’d been trying so hard to keep.

He waited until the trembling in her hands had eased enough that she could uncurl her fingers.

“Come on,” He said quietly, offering his hand instead of reaching for her. “Let’s get you sitting down.”

She looked at it for a second before slipping her own into his. Her grip was weaker than usual, cold despite the warmth lingering beneath her skin. He steadied her as she climbed back into the car, one hand lightly supporting her elbow until she settled against the leather seat once more. Before closing the door, he leaned down just enough to meet her eyes.

“You don’t have to say anything in there until you’re ready—or anything at all for that matter.”

She nodded, the door clicked shut and no one spoke for the rest of the drive. The attorney quietly returned the papers to his portfolio, deciding against continuing whatever explanation he’d been giving before they stopped. Her manager remained turned slightly toward the window in the front seat, giving her the rare kindness of not watching her every few seconds to make sure she was still holding together. The silence wasn’t uncomfortable. It was respectful, really.

She kept her eyes on the city as it slipped past. Every block carried them closer. Every red light felt shorter than the last. She found herself counting them without realizing she was doing it.

One.

Two.

Three.

Anything to keep from counting the minutes instead.

By the time the car slowed for the final turn, the nausea had settled into something quieter. It hadn’t gone away. It had simply become part of her, resting heavily beneath her ribs like a stone she’d accepted wasn’t moving anytime soon.

The building came into view through the windshield.

Large. Modern. Too much glass. It reflected the gray afternoon sky so perfectly it almost disappeared into it. The driver eased to a stop beneath the covered entrance and for a moment, no one moved.

Her manager glanced back. “We’re here.”

The words hung in the air as she stared through the windshield at the revolving glass doors ahead of them, watching strangers pass effortlessly through them. A man in a navy suit exited while adjusting his tie. A woman carrying a briefcase disappeared inside without slowing her pace. Her attorney stepped out first. Her manager followed, circling around to open her door before she had the chance.

When she didn’t move immediately, he crouched slightly beside the car. “You alright?”

She swallowed. “Yeah.” Another deep breath, this one reached a little farther just before she stepped onto the pavement. The cool air kissed her face, carrying with it the faint scent of rain that hadn’t quite arrived yet. She smoothed invisible wrinkles from the front of her coat and adjusted her heel.

Her manager gently rested a hand on the small of her back. Together, they crossed beneath the overhang and approached the entrance. The glass doors slid open with a mechanical hum, revealing a lobby that was painfully pristine. Marble floors reflected the overhead lights in muted pools across the room. Everything smelled like polished wood, fresh coffee, and expensive cleaning products. It was immaculate in the sort of way places often were when difficult conversations happened inside them every day.

The receptionist looked up almost immediately. “Good afternoon.”

Her attorney quietly introduced them, speaking in the same composed voice he’d maintained all morning. The receptionist nodded once after checking a schedule on her desk, offering a polite smile that stopped well short of familiar.

“They’re expecting you.”

Of course they were. She hadn’t.. considered the possibility that they could had already arrived. She was under the impression that they would have been there first and she could at least prepare herself before..

The thought tightened something in her chest again.

“This way.” The receptionist stepped out from behind the desk and led them across the lobby toward a bank of elevators tucked against the far wall. The walk wasn’t long, but it felt endless, their footsteps echoing softly against the marble with each measured step. No one spoke. The only sounds came from the gentle chime announcing the elevator’s arrival and the muted conversation of strangers somewhere deeper inside the building.

The doors slid open and they stepped inside, the receptionist pressing a button near the top of the panel.

As the doors closed, the lobby disappeared behind brushed steel, leaving only the gentle vibration of the elevator climbing floor by floor. She watched the numbers illuminate one after another above the door, each soft chime settling lower in her stomach than the last. When the elevator finally came to a stop, the receptionist led them down a corridor lined with frosted glass offices and framed artwork she couldn’t have described a second later. The hallway seemed impossibly quiet, the thick carpeting swallowing almost every footstep until the only thing she could hear with any clarity was the steady beating of her own heart.

They stopped outside a closed wooden door and the rreceptionist turned toward them, offering another small, professional smile.

“They’re ready for you.” Then she stepped aside.

The hallway fell silent.

(Name) couldn’t move.

At some point it stopped being hesitation. It stopped being indecision, grief, fear, or any emotion she could neatly identify and tuck away beneath a sensible name. It became something far older than that. It was instinctive. Something buried so deep inside the part of the human body that recognized danger long before the mind had time to reason with it. Every muscle seemed to arrive at the same conclusion without consulting her first. Don’t go in there. Don’t open that door. Turn around. Leave. Run if you have to. It wasn’t a thought she was having anymore. It was a command her body had already obeyed, planting her feet so firmly into the carpet that it almost felt as though the floor itself had grown around them.

The trembling began again, just the faintest vibration in her fingertips where they’d been laced together in front of her and subtle enough that no one walking past would’ve noticed unless they were looking for it. She wasn’t herself, even. Not until she felt the tiny, involuntary quiver travel into her knuckles. She instinctively pressed one hand over the other, squeezing hard enough to leave crescent shaped marks in her skin, hoping the pressure might somehow force the shaking to stop.

It didn’t—it spread. Slowly, with nowhere else to be. From her fingers into her wrists. From her wrists into her forearms. Tiny muscles fluttered beneath her skin without permission, a low, constant vibration that made her feel strangely disconnected from her own body. Her body had long since decided it was no longer taking instructions from her and she stared at her hands with detached confusion, willing them to be still.

They refused.

A careful breath caught somewhere halfway down her chest. She frowned. Tried again. Another shallow inhale. Another unfinished exhale.

It still felt like her lungs had abruptly forgotten how much air they were supposed to hold, every breath stopping just before it became satisfying, forcing another after it and another after that, until she couldn’t tell whether she was breathing too much or not nearly enough. A dull pressure settled beneath her sternum, expanding outward until it wrapped itself around her ribs like tightening wire. She swallowed hard against the dryness gathering in her throat, but even that simple movement felt strangely difficult, like something invisible had lodged itself there.

Then came the heat but not the ordinary warmth of nerves. It crept upward beneath the collar of her blouse in slow waves, spreading across her chest before climbing her neck with alarming speed. She shifted uncomfortably, fingers instinctively reaching toward the irritated skin just beneath her throat. It felt hot to the touch. Too hot.

She looked down.

Angry red blotches had already begun surfacing across her collarbone, blooming beneath her skin in uneven patches that spread almost as she watched them, climbing toward her neck like watercolor bleeding through paper. Another appeared just below her jaw, then another.

Stress hives.

She hadn’t broken out like this since she was nineteen, and she could only stare at them strangely fascinated by hrr own body was rejecting this.

Not even metaphorically but,

Literally.

Every system inside her had reached the same conclusion at once. Her pulse had accelerated. Her breathing had shortened. Her muscles had begun shaking. Her skin was erupting in protest. She felt like an animal standing at the edge of a forest fire, every instinct screaming to flee before she could even see the flames.

Run.

The word echoed somewhere deep inside her.

Run.

Her manager noticed before she managed to hide it. His eyes drifted from her face to the spreading rash creeping over her neck, then softened almost immediately with the concern of someone watching another person come apart in slow motion.

“..Hey.”

She didn’t answer but she wasn’t sure she could.

He stepped closer, careful not to crowd her, lowering his voice until it barely carried beyond the space between them. “Look at me, (Name).”

She tried.

God, she tried. But every time she lifted her head, her eyes found the door instead.

It seemed to pull at her attention with force, everything inside her understood that on the other side of it sat the dividing line between the life she’d had and the one she would be forced to live afterward.

“I can’t,” She whispered, voice distant.

“You can.”

She shook her head before she realized she’d moved. “No..” The word barely escaped her lips. “I can’t.”

Fresh tremors rippled through her arms. She tucked them tightly against herself, folding one over the other in a futile attempt to hide the shaking, but it only made it more obvious. Her shoulders had begun trembling too.

“I can’t go in there—I can’t even..” A breathless, broken laugh escaped her, so close to becoming a sob it frightened her. “I can’t even stop shaking.”

He reached up with careful hands, gently smoothing a loose strand of hair behind her ear. The gesture was so grounding it nearly undid her. “Just stay with me for a second.”

She nodded and his voice remained slow. “Can you feel your feet?”

She blinked at him, confused. “..What?”

“Your feet.”

She frowned, attention reluctantly leaving the door. “..Yes.”

“The floor underneath them?”

Another swallow. “Yes..”

“Good.” His hand rested lightly against her upper arm. “You’re here.”

Fresh tears blurred her vision almost immediately. “I don’t want to be. I want to go home.” The confession escaped before she could stop it. Raw. Childlike. Entirely honest. “I just..” Her voice cracked so completely she had to press her lips together before trying again. “I want to go home.”

His expression shifted—a flicker. Gone as quickly as it appeared. Because they both understood the thing she’d just said was nonexistent. There wasn’t a “home” waiting for her anymore. Not the one she meant. Not the one built around shared mornings and baby giggles and a man whose absence had hollowed every room he’d once occupied. There was only whatever came next.

“I wish I could come in with you,” He admitted quietly.

Her head snapped toward him so quickly the movement made her dizzy. “What! You can’t?” The panic returned with astonishing speed. Her knees threatened to give beneath her.

“No. Sweetheart, I told you that.” He hated the answer as much as she did. “They’ve only approved legal representation.”

She stared at him. “No..”

“But I’m staying right here.”

“No..”

“You’ll walk back through these doors, and I’ll still be here.”

“No!” Her voice rose just enough to tremble around the edges. "Please.. please don’t make me go in there.”

For the first time all morning, he looked completely helpless.

Helpless.

If there had been any way to walk through that door instead of her, he would’ve done it without hesitation. She knew that, and he knew she knew it. Which somehow made standing there feel even lonelier. Before either of them could speak again, her attorney’s voice drifted gently down the hallway.

“(Name).”

Neither of them turned.

“It’s time.”

The hallway seemed to narrow around her and air felt heavier. Even the lights overhead appeared suddenly too bright. Her manager’s hand squeezed her arm once, a reminder that when she came back through those doors, someone would still be waiting to catch whatever pieces remained.

She closed her eyes and drew in the deepest breath her body was willing to give her but it still wasn’t enough. Then, with legs that felt borrowed from someone else and a heart that seemed determined to escape her chest before she reached the handle—she took the first step toward the door.

One moment she was standing in the hallway, every muscle in her body pleading with her to turn around, and the next the door had already begun to swing inward beneath the quiet push of a palm.

The room was larger than she’d imagined—too bright from the large floor to ceiling windows and so sterile. A long conference table stretched through the center, polished to the point it reflected the overhead lights in muted streaks across its surface. Leather chairs sat neatly arranged around it, folders already opened, glasses of water placed with almost mathematical precision. Everything had been prepared hours before she arrived, every seat assigned, every document waiting patiently for signatures that would dismantle a life.

She felt them before she saw them.

Eyes.

They settled over her the instant she crossed the threshold, not invasive, not intentionally cruel she thinks, but impossible to ignore all the same. His team was.. ridiculously large: Lawyers who paused mid conversation. Assistants quietly setting down pens. People who had been expecting her arrival and now watched it happen in real time, each carrying the uncomfortable awareness that they were about to witness something far more intimate than legal.

She kept her gaze lowered.

One step.

Then another.

The carpet swallowed the sound of her heels, leaving only the dull rush of blood filling her ears. Halfway across the room, another sensation reached her.

Familiar.

Warm.

The faint trace of cedarwood, bergamot, and something softer she had once associated so instinctively with home that she’d stopped noticing it years ago.

His cologne.

It hung lightly in the room, barely perceptible to anyone else. But to her, it was overwhelming. The smell struck with such force that her stomach lurched before she could brace for it. Every memory attached to it arrived all at once, uninvited. Jackets borrowed on cold nights. Sleepy embraces before dawn. The hollow of his neck beneath her cheek. She had spent years breathing it in without thought.

Now it made her feel violently ill.

She swallowed hard as the nausea climbed steadily into her throat.

Don’t look up.

The thought repeated itself with quiet desperation.

Don’t look.

If she looked too soon, she was afraid everything holding her upright would simply.. stop. So she fixed her eyes on the table instead. On the grain of the wood. On the edge of an unopened folder. On her own hands, clasped together tightly enough that the faint tremor running through them almost disappeared beneath the pressure.

Someone quietly pulled out a chair for her and she thanked them automatically, though she couldn’t have said who it was.

The leather creaked softly as she sat. Her knees felt a sense of reliving beneath the table, bouncing once before she forced them still. She rested both palms against her thighs, pressing down as though she could anchor herself.

A glass of her favorite juice had already been placed in front of her and she stared at it. The condensation gathered in tiny droplets along the outside, slowly slipping toward the polished wood beneath.

It was something to look at.

Something that wasn’t.. him.

Silence settled over the room for one lingering moment, heavy enough that even the quiet rustling of paper sounded intrusive.

Then a chair shifted, a folder opened and the mediator cleared his throat: “Thank you all for coming.” His voice was carefully emptied of emotion. “We’re here today to discuss the terms that remain outstanding and, if possible, reach an agreement that serves the best interests of everyone involved.”

The words floated somewhere above her. Professional. Orderly. Clean. She heard every one of them but none of them felt real. Because all she could think was how absurd it was that the end of seven years could fit inside a folder no thicker than an inch.

The attorney on Michael’s side spoke first, sliding one of the folders forward.

“On the matter of custody,” He began, voice even and courteous almost, “Our client is requesting a standard shared arrangement. Equal time. A fifty-fifty split, alternating weeks, with flexibility for travel schedules given both parties’ professional commitments.”

The words landed in the center of the table, balanced and reasonable on paper—designed to sound like cooperation.

She kept her ⁠eyes fixed on the edge of her glass.

Fifty-fifty? As though fathers simply disappeared for weeks at a time, served their wives divorce papers through attorneys, built new lives somewhere else, and then returned expecting to divide a child neatly down the middle. Like time with a child could be weighed out evenly, as though it was something that could be portioned and exchanged without consequence. She never thought her own child would be subject to this kind of thing—life was cruel.

He wanted equal time. Equal responsibility. Equal claim. After everything he’s done.

Her own attorney shifted beside her, glancing once in her direction before responding. “We’ve reviewed that proposal,” He said calmly, “And at this stage our client is not in agreement.”

A pause.

The room tightened slightly.

Then he continued. “Given the current circumstances, she is requesting primary custody, with structured and supervised visitation.”

There it was, out in the open. Her stomach twisted again slower this time, bracing for impact long after the words had already been spoken. But she still didn’t look up—didn’t trust herself to see him yet. She wondered what his expression was..

Across from her, pens stopped moving. Someone exhaled quietly, the kind of sound people make when they’re pretending not to react.

Michael’s attorney adjusted his posture. “Supervised visitation is a.. significant limitation,” Je said, carefully choosing each word, “Especially in cases where both parties have been primary caregivers. On what basis is that being requested?”

Her pulse ticked harder beneath her skin.

Her attorney didn’t look at her, only answering immediately. “Stability,” He said. “And continuity of care during a period of documented instability.”

Documented instability.

A clinical phrase for something that felt anything but clinical when it lived inside her.

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was dense. Heavy with everything no one wanted to say directly in front of everyone else. She could feel it then, faintly, the shift in the room’s attention. Not hostility but something more complicated. Assessment. Quiet recalculation. The way people looked at decisions when they realized they were about to become precedent.

Her fingers tightened under the table again.

Fifty-fifty.

Supervised visits.

The phrases repeated in her mind without sound, colliding against each other until they stopped meaning anything at all except conflict.

Michael’s attorney spoke again, softer this time, “Our client has no intention of being removed from his child’s life. If anything, he is requesting increased consistency. Predictability. Equal access to daily care, schooling routines, and—”

“He’s not being removed,” Her attorney interrupted gently. A pause followed by: “He’s being structured.”

She felt the nausea return in a slow wave, not as sharp as before, but deeper. More settled. Something that sat under her ribs and refused to move.

Across the table, paper turned softly. Someone marked a note. Another cleared their throat. And the discussion continued anyway, the shape of their child’s life simply another item to be negotiated between professionals who had never once had to hold him when he cried.

The attorney on his side spoke first, sliding a neatly tabbed folder toward the center of the table with practiced ease.

Her attorney shifted almost imperceptibly beside her.

“As stated before, we reviewed the proposal,” He said. “My client cannot agree to that arrangement.” The room remained silent as he continued. “She is requesting sole physical custody, with supervised visitation until a consistent pattern of stability has been established.”

Across the table, Michael’s attorney folded his hands together. “Could you clarify the basis for supervised visitation?”

Her attorney answered without hesitation. “The events of the past year.”

“I’m going to need something more specific than that.”

“As documented,” Her attorney replied evenly, “Mr. Jackson entered treatment following prolonged substance dependency. There were also extended periods of physical absence from the child, interrupted communication, and the abrupt dissolution of the marriage.”

His attorney gave a small nod.

“We don’t dispute treatment. In fact, your client voluntarily sought it. Rehabilitation is generally viewed as evidence of recovery rather than evidence of parental unfitness, that isn’t a factor in this.”

Michael attorney spoke again. “Our position is that whatever difficulties existed between husband and wife should remain separate from the child’s relationship with his father.”

Husband and wife.

As though those were just words.

As though the marriage had ended because two people had simply grown apart.

As though she hadn’t spent months bathing him when he couldn’t stand long enough to bathe himself. Feeding him because he forgot to eat. Sleeping beside him through endless nights when every phone call brought another problem. Holding together a household, a career, a child, and a man who no longer had the strength to hold himself together.

As though she’d stayed through every unbearable moment only to be discarded the second he was strong enough to leave.

And now..

Now he wanted fifty fucking percent.

(Name) didn’t want to keep a father from his son. But somewhere in the midst of disappearing, serving her with divorce papers through strangers, and forcing every conversation to happen through attorneys, he had somehow convinced himself he was entitled to walk back into fatherhood like nothing had broken in between? The thought was so staggering she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to cry.. Or stand up and leave because she felt offended.

Her attorney let the silence settle for a moment before folding his hands neatly atop the folder in front of him.

“We appreciate the sentiment,” He said, his tone remaining unfailingly courteous. “But respectfully.. we find that position difficult to reconcile with the circumstances that brought us here.”

Across the table, no one interrupted.

He continued. “My client has been the child’s primary source of consistency throughout the better part of the last year. She has maintained his routines, his medical appointments, his education, his home, and his day-to-day care while simultaneously managing an unprecedented level of public scrutiny surrounding the dissolution of this marriage.”

He glanced briefly toward the documents. “During that same period, your client voluntarily entered treatment, ceased regular communication for an extended length of time, and elected to initiate divorce proceedings through legal counsel rather than direct communication with his wife with another woman in his life.”

His voice never rose. “Against that backdrop, requesting an immediate fifty-fifty custodial arrangement is, ridiculous and not a proposal we consider realistic.”

The discussion continued for another two hours.

Nothing changed. Every proposal was met with another counterproposal. Every compromise unraveled the moment someone followed it with, “However..” Custody schedules became calendars spread across polished wood. Holidays were divided before they had even happened. Birthdays were discussed in alternating years. Christmases became odd numbered and even numbered. Every sentence sounded perfectly reasonable on its own.

Together, they sounded grotesque.

The conversation had long since stopped being productive. It was two immovable objects politely colliding with one another over and over again, dressed up in professional language and careful tones.

Finally, her attorney closed his folder, “I don't believe we’re making meaningful progress.”

No one disagreed. Across the table, opposing counsel gave a small nod. “I think a brief recess would be appropriate.”

“Perhaps twenty minutes,” Another someone added. “Give everyone a chance to speak with their clients privately and reassess before continuing.”

There was a quiet chorus of agreement.

Pens were capped. Legal pads were gathered. Someone reached across the table to collect a stack of exhibits that had slowly migrated into the center during the discussion. Chairs eased backward with soft scrapes against the floor, the room immediately feeling larger now that everyone had permission to move.

(Name) didn’t Her hands remained folded tightly in her lap. Her eyes stayed fixed on the untouched glass of water in front of her, the same glass she’d been staring at for nearly two hours. She heard the rustle of jackets, the quiet exchange of voices, the metallic click of briefcases closing. The meeting was ending, at least for now.

Then, for the first time since she had walked through the door.. Michael spoke: “..One moment.”

The room stilled.

It wasn’t that his voice was loud. It was almost the opposite. It was quiet enough that everyone instinctively stopped moving to hear him.

“I have a request.” Every eye shifted toward him and he wasn't looking at the attorneys. He was looking at her. “If everyone is comfortable with it..” He paused, choosing his words carefully. “I’d like a few minutes alone with my wife.”

Silence settled over the room.

One attorney glanced toward another and (Name)’s attorney looked toward her, saying nothing as he wasn’t answering for her this time. He was waiting for her to speak while the request lingered between them.

Finally, opposing counsel spoke. “Well.. provided both parties consent, I don’t have an objection.”

Her attorney remained still for another moment before turning slightly toward her. “You don’t have to.”

She swallowed. Her throat felt painfully dry. “I know.”

"If you’d rather I stay, I stay.”

She closed her eyes briefly. This was the conversation she’d spent weeks dreading. It had been waiting for her whether there were lawyers in the room or not.

Slowly, she nodded. “It’s okay, Mark.”

Her attorney studied her face carefully, making sure she wasn’t agreeing out of pressure or obligation. Then he gave a small nod. “We’ll be right outside.”

One by one, the attorneys gathered their files and made their way toward the door. Their footsteps were quieter than before, everyone understood they were leaving behind something no legal training could prepare them to witness.

The door opened, then closed and the latch clicked softly.

And for the first time in months, there was no one left in the room except the two people whose names had been written across every page of the divorce file.

The silence that followed was worse than the situation at hand had been. At least that had given them something to hide behind: numbers, schedules, legal terms, the careful language of attorneys who could take something unbearably personal and reshape it into something that fit neatly inside a folder. Now there was nothing between them. No one interrupting. No one redirecting. No one stepping in when the weight of everything they had avoided finally settled into the room. For several moments, neither of them moved. (Name) remained exactly where she was, her posture still rigid from the hours she had spent forcing herself to stay composed. She didn’t need to look at him to know he was there, and that was the part she hated most. After months of distance, after everything that had happened, some part of her still recognized his presence before she ever saw him.

The quiet scrape of his chair shifting made her body react before her mind could. Her shoulders tensed, her fingers tightening together in her lap, her breath catching slightly. She wasn’t afraid of him, but some part of her was afraid of what would happen if she finally allowed herself to see him. The anger she had carried from a distance felt much easier to hold than the reality of having him sitting only a few feet away. Anger did not remember the good mornings, the private jokes, the years of knowing someone so completely that their absence felt like a missing piece of your own body.

“Can you..” His voice stopped.

An uncertain pause.

Her eyes remained fixed on the untouched glass in front of her, watching the faint reflection of the room distort across the surface.

“Can you look at me?”

The request was painfully simple. Almost too simple for everything that existed underneath it. Her fingers tightened further, but she didn’t answer. For a moment, neither did he. He didn’t push. He didn’t repeat himself. He simply waited.

That somehow made it harder.

“Please.” The word was quiet. Not a demand or even an expectation. A simple request of her.

She hated that he still had the ability to reach the parts of her that wanted to soften. She hated that one small word could pull at years of memories she had spent so long trying to bury beneath anger, paperwork, and silence. She had convinced herself that enough distance would make him easier to face, that time would turn him into someone she could look at without feeling everything at once.

But she was still sitting there, unable to lift her eyes. Because looking at him meant admitting he was real—that this was real. That the person who had once felt like home was sitting across from her, and she had no idea what to do with that anymore.

Her silence stretched for several seconds longer, but it wasn’t peaceful. It was the kind of silence that came when too many things were being held back at once, when every sentence she wanted to say had been swallowed before it could reach her mouth because none of them felt big enough to contain what she was actually feeling.

Her hands had started shaking again and she noticed it before he did. A faint tremor at first, barely visible beneath the table, her fingers twisting together. She pressed her thumb against the side of her hand, grounding herself, reminding herself that she was sitting in a room, that she was safe, that she was not back in those months of waiting for a phone call that never came.

It didn’t work, because the truth was she wasn't afraid of the room. She was afraid of the answers.

She finally lifted her eyes, but only for a moment. Long enough to see his face. Long enough for the anger and hurt she’d been carefully organizing for months to collide with the reality of him sitting there.

And then the question came out before she could stop it.

“Did you sleep with her?” Her expression changed the moment the question left her mouth, she looked exhaustion and wounded—the question itself had reached a place he had been desperately trying not to confront. For a moment, he simply stared at her, and when he finally spoke his voice was quiet enough that it almost disappeared beneath the weight of the room.

“(Name).. oh, God, please.” He looked down, his fingers shifting slightly against the edge of the table as he was searching for the right words and finding none of them. There was no defensiveness in him, no attempt to turn the question back on her. Somehow, that made it worse. She had prepared herself for anger. She had prepared herself for him to tell her she was being unfair or emotional or that she didn’t understand. She had prepared herself for a fight because a fight would have been easier than this careful, painful silence.

“Why are you asking me this?” The softness of it made something inside her crack. Her hands tightened together in her lap, feeling the frustration building beneath her ribs-she couldn’t.. she couldn’t fucking believe he didn’t understand why she needed to know. After months of unanswered questions, after watching her entire life collapse through headlines and whispers and conversations she wasn’t invited into, hearing him ask why felt unbearable.

“..Why am I asking you?” Her voice came out quieter at first, almost disbelieving. She looked at him for a moment, tears already gathering in her eyes, before shaking her head. “Why am I asking you?!”

“You know why I'm asking you, Michael!”

“(Name), please..”

“No!” The word came quickly, sharper than she intended. She swallowed, trying to steady herself, but the effort was useless. The control she had walked into the room with was gone, stripped away piece by piece until there was nothing left but the person underneath it.

“No, no, nonononono! Don’t do that!” She stood suddenly, a detached smile pulling at her lips. “I thought this was going to be an honest conversation! Don’t say my name like I’m the one being unreasonable!”

He went quiet and looked away as she pressed her lips together, she trying to keep herself from falling apart in front of him. It was almost humiliating how much she was still affected by him. How after everything, she was still sitting across from him hoping he would say something that made any of it make sense.

“I spent months trying to figure out what happened—look at me!” She snapped, her voice shaking as she watched him reluctantly look. “I spent months wondering if you were okay, wondering if you hated me, wondering if I did something wrong. I was trying to understand how we went from what we were to this, and then suddenly everyone else seemed to know things I didn’t!”

Her fingers curled against the table. “So yes, I am asking you.” She looked back at him. “Because I deserve to know!”

He inhaled quietly, but before he could respond, she continued.

“Tell me.” Her voice rose, the restraint finally snapping under the weight of everything she had been carrying. “Tell me!”

Her palm struck the table before she even realized she had moved. The sound startled even her, echoing through the empty conference room. Aggression and rage, yes. It was desperation. The kind that came from someone who had spent too long swallowing every question because she was afraid of what the answer might be.

“You at least owe me that much.”

The anger vanished as quickly as it appeared, leaving only the grief underneath. Her shoulders shook, tears spilling freely now as she looked at him. “You owe me the truth.”

Michael didn’t say anything. Then his expression shifted, and when he finally answered, his voice was barely above a whisper.

“No.”

She blinked. “What?”

“No.” He shook his head slightly. “Nothing happened.”

The answer should have relieved her. It didn’t. Instead, it created an entirely new kind of confusion. She stared at him, almost unable to process the words. “Nothing?”

“Nothing happened between us.”

Her brows furrowed as she searched his face, waiting for the rest of the explanation. Waiting for the part that would make everything fit together again. But there wasn’t one.

A small, broken laugh escaped her. “What the fuck? Then what am I supposed to do with that, Michael?”

He didn’t answer. Because that was the question neither of them wanted to confront.

If nothing happened, then why?

Why had everything changed?

Why had she been left behind?

Why had another woman become the center of every conversation surrounding the end of their marriage?

Her breathing became uneven as she looked at him, her anger slowly shifting into something much more painful. “What does she have?”

His expression changed slightly. “(Name), please don’t do this right now..”

“Shut up!” She shook her head, tears continuing to fall. “What does she have?” She pressed. “What has she done for you that I haven’t!”

He looked away.

That movement broke something in her. “I was there! I was there!” Her voice cracked. “I was there when things were difficult! I was there when nobody else understood what was happening! I stayed when it was hard—I stayed when it wasn’t convenient! I stayed when I had every reason to walk away! I love you!”

She wiped at her face, but it did nothing. “Tell me what I didn't give you!” He remained silent. “Tell me what I wasn’t!” The room seemed to shrink around them. ”What did she have that I don't, Mikey? Please!”

Michael couldn’t look at her. And that silence was its own answer. Not the answer she had been expecting. Her expression slowly changed as another realization began settling into place. It wasn’t sudden but a quiet, horrible understanding that arrived piece by piece.

If nothing happened between them.. then something else had.

Something before.

Her voice lowered. “Were you were talking to her before all this? Is that why you were coming home late?” He went still as she stared at him, watching his reaction. “You were.”

A pause. “You had to have been.” The tears blurred her vision, but she didn’t look away. “Because people don’t just wake up one day and end up here.”

Her voice trembled. “She didn’t just appear outta nowhere.” And for the first time, the thought that had been circling her mind for months finally became something she could say aloud. “You—you were already letting her into your life while I was still trying to save ours! To fix you!”

He was quiet for so long that she felt the answer before he ever spoke it. She searched his face desperately for the instinctive denial that never came, for the immediate shake of his head that would let her believe she had spent months torturing herself over nothing. Instead, he lowered his eyes, his jaw tightening subtly as though the effort of choosing his next words had become physically painful. It was such a small movement, so insignificant to anyone else, but to her it felt catastrophic. She had spent the better part of eight weeks replaying every conversation, every silence, every headline, trying to identify the exact moment she’d stopped being enough. Now she was watching it happen in real time, watching the man who had once answered every fear before she could even voice it suddenly become incapable of giving her the one reassurance she needed most.

“Yes.” The word landed with almost no force at all and her expression didn’t change. He swallowed before continuing, unable to meet her eyes for more than a second at a time. “Yes.. we were spending time together. We were friends.” He said it carefully, almost cautiously like there was a version of those words that existed without causing harm. “It wasn’t..” He paused, rubbing absently at his thumb with the opposite hand. “It wasn’t anything you’re making it out to be, honestly.”

She stared at him for several long seconds, trying to reconcile what he’d just said with the reality she’d been living. Friends. Such an ordinary word. Such an innocent word. It almost made her laugh. Months of silence. Months of unanswered phone calls. Months of waking up alone, wondering whether her husband still remembered she existed, only to discover that while she’d been clinging to the ruins of their marriage, he’d been building a “friendship” with another woman. The same friendship he and her once shared seven years ago? Oh, she bets, Whether he believed it had been innocent no longer mattered. Innocent things didn’t grow in secret. Innocent things didn’dmt survive only because one person had been left completely in the dark.

“It wasn’t anything I’m making it out to be?” She repeated quietly, her voice trembling with anger and disbelief. “Michael, I’m your wife!” The last word nearly caught in her throat. “I was sitting at home wondering why you wouldn’t speak to me while you were talking to somebody else, and you’re telling me I'm making something out of nothing?” She laughed then, but it was a broken sound, one born entirely out of exhaustion. “Do you even hear yourself?”

He opened his mouth to answer, but she was already shaking her head.

“No, no, don’t explain it away. Just answer me.” She leaned forward slightly, “Are you planning to be with her?”

The question lingered between them.

He didn’t answer, of course.

He tried. She could see him trying. His lips parted, his chest rose with a slow breath, and for one impossible second she thought he was finally going to give her something, anything, that she could survive. Instead, nothing came. His eyes drifted away from hers again, settling somewhere over her shoulder, as though even the possibility of speaking the truth aloud was more than he could bear.

She felt the air leave her lungs.

“If the answer was no,” She whispered, “You would’ve said no—is that what you do, Michael? You fuck all your girl friends?”

Still nothing.

The room seemed to tilt around her. She could hear the faint hum of the air conditioner somewhere overhead, the muffled footsteps of people passing outside the conference room, the sound of her own heartbeat pounding so violently in her ears that it drowned out almost everything else. It was astonishing, she thought, how quickly a person’s entire world could be rearranged by someone refusing to answer a single question.

“Do you love her?” She hadn’t meant to ask it.

It escaped her the way all the worst truths did, before pride had the chance to stop them. There was no anger left in her voice now, only desperation. It was the question beneath every other question she’d asked since sitting down. Not whether he’d betrayed her. Not whether he’d lied. Simply whether there was still anything left of the man who had once loved her so completely she had built her entire life around it.

Michael couldn’t answer that one either. His eyes closed for the briefest moment, and when he opened them again, they still wouldn’t meet hers. “I..” He stopped, swallowing hard. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

(Name) simply stared at him, then something inside her gave way. A short, breathless laugh escaped her, so hollow it barely sounded human. She sat back in her chair as tears spilled unchecked down her face, looking at him not with hatred but with a kind of horrified disbelief, as though she no longer recognized the person sitting across from her.

“You don’t know?” She repeated, almost whispering. “After everything.. after seven years.. after everything I gave you, everything we survived together, you don’t know?” She shook her head slowly, wiping at tears that refused to stop falling. “You’re a psychopath.”

“I have spent so long convincing myself that I missed something. That I wasn’t enough. That maybe there was something she could give you that I couldn’t.” Her breathing had become ragged now, every sentence interrupted by the effort of trying not to break completely. “So tell me.” She looked at him then, really looked at him, her eyes red and glistening with grief. “What has she done for you that I haven’t? What does she have that I don’t? I stood beside you through everything. I loved you when the rest of the world decided you weren’t worth loving. I built my life around yours because I believed we were building something together.”

Her voice cracked so sharply she had to stop and swallow before continuing. “And now you’re sitting across from me telling me you don’t know if you love this bitch?”

The realization arrived almost imperceptibly, settling over her in slow, unbearable pieces. If nothing physical had happened, if he was telling the truth about that much, then there had still been something. Something that had begun long before the divorce papers arrived, long before the headlines, long before she had any reason to suspect another name belonged in the story of her marriage. She lowered her eyes for only a moment before lifting them again, and when she spoke this time, her voice had become frighteningly calm.

Neither of them spoke after that.

The silence that settled over the room no longer felt tense. It felt exhausted. There was nothing left to argue about, nothing left to explain. Every question she had carried into that building had either been answered or answered by omission, and somehow the omissions hurt more. She sat motionless in her chair, staring at nothing in particular as tears continued slipping down her face, too emotionally spent to wipe them away anymore. Across the table, he remained just as still, his hands folded together in front of him, his gaze lowered to the polished wood between them. Whatever words either of them might have found earlier had long since abandoned the room.

A soft knock broke the silence.

Neither of them responded.

Another knock followed, more tentative this time, before the conference room door opened just enough for one of the attorneys to lean his head inside.

“I’m sorry,” He said carefully, his eyes moving between the two of them almost immediately. It didn’t take legal training to recognize that whatever had happened during the recess had not gone well. “(Name).. Michael.. are we interrupting something?”

She blinked once, she’d forgotten where she was. The conference room slowly came back into focus. The legal folders. The glasses of water. The yellow legal pads scattered across the table. Her attorney stood just beyond the doorway with her manager beside him, both of them studying her face with immediate concern. She could almost watch the realization spread across their expressions as they took in her swollen eyes, the mascara beginning to gather beneath them despite every attempt she’d made to hold herself together.

Her manager instinctively took a half-step forward. “(Name)..”

She lifted a hand before he could come any closer.

It wasn’t to stop him. It was because she couldn’t bear for anyone to fuss over her right now. She drew a slow, uneven breath that caught halfway through her chest before finally managing to speak.

“..Could I..” Her voice disappeared as she swallowed hard and tried again, this time barely above a whisper. “Could I have.. just a few minutes?”

Everyone remained still.

She looked toward her attorney, unable to quite meet anyone’s eyes for more than a second. I just..” She pressed trembling fingertips against the corner of one eye, frustrated when another tear escaped anyway. “I need to.. get away from him.”

No one said anything immediately.

There wasn’t anything to say.

Her attorney gave a small nod first. “Of course.”

She pushed her chair back carefully, surprised that her legs still worked beneath her. They felt disconnected from the rest of her body, numb, and she had to steady herself against the edge of the conference table before taking her first step. No one tried to stop her as she crossed the room, though she could feel every pair of eyes following her. Her manager instinctively moved as though to accompany her, but she offered him the smallest shake of her head.

“I’ll be alright,” She lied quietly.

He knew it was a lie.

She knew he knew.

Still, he respected it.

The receptionist looked up from her desk just in time to see her emerge, immediately rising from her chair with the professionalism of someone accustomed to recognizing distress without drawing attention to it.

“The ladies' room is just around the corner,” She said gently, gesturing toward the end of the hall.

(Name) managed a faint nod. “Thank you.”

Her heels echoed softly against the marble floor as she walked away. She kept her chin lifted until she rounded the corner and disappeared from everyone’s view.

Only then did she let herself unravel.

The hotel suite was unnaturally quiet.

Michael hadn’t spoken once during the drive back. His attorney had attempted conversation exactly twice before recognizing the futility of it, and the remainder of the ride had passed in silence, broken only by the dull rhythm of tires against pavement and the occasional crackle of the radio that nobody bothered to turn off. By the time he let himself into the room, the exhaustion settling over him wasn’t physical. It lived somewhere much deeper, clinging stubbornly beneath his ribs. Lisa looked up from the sofa when she heard the door open, quietly closing the magazine resting in her lap the moment she saw his face.

“How’d it go?” she asked softly as he slipped his jacket from his shoulders without answering, hanging it carefully over the back of a chair before rubbing both hands over his face. Every muscle in his body felt tight.

“..I don’t wanna talk about it.” There was no irritation in his voice. Just fatigue. A kind of emptiness. She watched him for a moment before giving a small nod.

“Okay.” That was all. No questions. No, What happened? No, What did she say? No, attempt to coax the conversation out of him. She simply returned the magazine to her lap, allowing the silence to settle naturally between them. And somehow… that had become unhealthy for him.

Michael lowered himself onto the edge of the bed, elbows resting on his knees as he stared absently at the carpet. He wasn’t thinking about the meeting anymore. Not entirely. He was thinking about everything that had happened before it, about the strange way memory had begun rearranging itself somewhere between the intervention and the weeks he spent in rehabilitation. Rationally, he knew the people around him had been trying to save his life. The doctors. His attorneys. His family. Even (Name). She had wanted him sober, healthy, present, alive. He knew that. He truly did. But memory was rarely interested in fairness. But looking back, he didn’t remember feeling protected. He remembered feeling cornered. Every concerned expression had become another reminder that something was wrong with him. Every difficult conversation became another decision someone else was making on his behalf. Doctors telling him what he needed. Lawyers explaining what was best. Friends watching him with careful eyes, silently evaluating whether today was a good day or a bad one. Even the woman he loved most had slowly become another voice asking him to stop, to change, to get help, to fight harder. She hadn’t been wrong. That wasn’t the point. Pain had a remarkable way of convincing people that love and pressure were the same thing, and by the time he left rehabilitation, he could no longer separate the two.

Then Lisa had called. She hadn’t asked whether he’d been taking his medication. She hadn’t questioned the decisions he’d made or reminded him what his doctors wanted. She never looked at him with that quiet mixture of hope and worry everyone else seemed unable to hide, as though they were all waiting for him to fall apart again. When he complained, she listened. When he sat in silence for minutes at a time, she never rushed to fill it. When he admitted he was tired, she didn’t tell him how to fix himself. She simply stayed. Around her, he didn’t feel like a patient. He didn’t feel like someone everyone was desperately trying to repair before he broke again. He didn’t feel like the center of another intervention. He felt like himself. Or at least, the version of himself he had been before every conversation became about what was wrong with him. He could breathe. The realization should have frightened him. It didn’t. Because nowhere in his mind had he labeled it betrayal.

When (Name) had looked across the conference table that afternoon, tears streaming down her face as she asked, Did you sleep with her? the answer had come effortlessly. No. Nothing happened. He believed it. He still believed it. There had been no affair. No kiss. No stolen night hidden from the world. Nothing physical had crossed the line his conscience had always considered unforgivable. To him, fidelity had always lived in actions that could be seen, touched, named. By that definition, he had remained faithful until the end. What he refused to examine were the things that couldn’t be photographed.

The phone calls that gradually became longer than the conversations he had with his own wife. The fears he confessed to another woman because they somehow felt easier to say aloud there. The loneliness. The frustration. The parts of himself that had once belonged inside his marriage but had quietly migrated somewhere else. He hadn’t chosen another woman in one catastrophic moment. He had simply stopped choosing the first one in hundreds of tiny, forgettable ones, each decision so insignificant on its own that none of them had felt capable of ending a marriage until they had all accumulated into exactly that.

His jaw tightened as her voice returned to him with startling clarity.

“What has she done for you that I haven’t?”

He closed his eyes.

Because there wasn’t an answer. Not an honest one.

Lisa hadn’t sacrificed more. She hadn’t stood beside him through years of scrutiny, impossible expectations, and relentless public judgment. She hadn’t watched him crumble and stayed anyway. She hadn’t built a home with him, celebrated birthdays with him, learned the invisible ways he unraveled when the world became too loud, or spent years believing in him when believing had become difficult. (Name) had done all of that. She had given him years. Lisa had given him relief. Those were not the same thing. Yet somewhere inside him, relief had quietly begun masquerading as understanding. It had become easier to sit beside someone who expected nothing from him than to face the woman whose expectations existed only because she had spent years believing he could survive. He had mistaken the absence of conflict for peace, the absence of accountability for acceptance, and by the time he understood the difference, it was too late to explain it without sounding like he was searching for excuses.

He leaned back against the headboard, staring blankly toward the ceiling as the room settled once again into silence. For the first time since leaving the conference room, he allowed himself to hear her final words exactly as she’d spoken them.

“You don’t even know if you love her.”

He wanted to tell himself she was wrong. He wanted to believe the distinction mattered. That friendship was friendship. That nothing physical had happened. That he hadn’t crossed the line she believed he had. But lying alone in the quiet, stripped of attorneys, explanations, and carefully chosen language, he found himself confronting a possibility he had spent months avoiding. Perhaps the cruelest betrayals were never the obvious ones. Perhaps they happened so gradually they were almost impossible to notice while they were occurring. Conversation by conversation. Confidence by confidence. One ordinary day after another, until the person who had once known you better than anyone else slowly became the last person you allowed inside your heart.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ㅤㅤ⋆ㅤㅤ June, 1994.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ╰ㅤ 1994 MTV Video Music Awards.

It hadn’t been one thing that made her spiral. If it had been one thing, maybe she could’ve gotten through the night.

But walking into her first award show since the divorce and realizing every hallway, every dressing room, every stretch of red carpet carried memories she hadn’t asked to revisit, was a lot. It was seeing him again for the first time not as her husband, not even as someone she could still pretend belonged somewhere in her future, but as another woman’s husband. It was watching them move through the room together with the kind of love she remembered once belonging to her. Then came them taking the stage. The applause. The cameras. And when they kissed beneath the lights, the room erupted around them as if the entire world had collectively decided to celebrate the life she’d spent months grieving.

That was her melting point.

Her manicured nails fumbled with the tiny bottle in her clutch, the bathroom lights too bright as they glinted off the pill caps. The celebrity style mirror mocks her—this is supposed to be a night of rebirth for her, and yet here she is squeezing five little white lies into her palm like they’re candy. A shaky breath hitches in her throat as she dry swallows them one by one, tasting salt and dissolving on the back of her tongue.

She stares at herself in horror through the mirror because who would cry for someone else’s husband? He wasn’t hers anymore. Her reflection wavers when a knock sounds at the door: “Two minutes ‘til hair and makeup, Miss (Name)!” calls an assistant whose name tag she didn’t remember reading.

There was a point where she stopped feeling like she was in the room at all, like her attention had slipped a few inches behind her actual body and was now watching everything happen from slightly off angle, delayed just enough that nothing lined up cleanly anymore. Voices reached her, but they didn’t land where they were supposed to. They skimmed across the surface of her awareness and kept going.

Someone said her name and she thought she answered, but she wasn’t entirely sure she had.

Her hands were being touched, adjusted, moved into place. Nothing aggressive, just corrective like she was a product on a conveyor belt that needed alignment before being sent forward. The feeling that accompanied it wasn’t panic yet. It was something flatter and an uncomfortable absence of ownership, because her body was no longer something she was directly responsible for managing.

There was a mirror somewhere near her, and she caught herself in it without meaning to. The reflection looked correct in the way costumes look correct on mannequins, everything in place without necessarily belonging to anything living. She stared at it for a second too long, waiting for recognition to catch up, but it never came.

There was just a murmur of thought forming underneath everything else.

I don’t feel well enough to be perceived right now.

But there was no space to say it out loud, and even if there had been, it felt like the kind of statement that wouldn’t change anything. The show would still happen. The lights would still open. The audience would still exist on the other side of whatever threshold she was being pushed toward.

A voice near her said something about timing, something about cues, something about being ready, and she tried to attach meaning to it, but the words kept arriving too late, like subtitles out of sync with dialogue. She focused instead on breathing, because breathing was still something she could technically confirm was happening. In and out. In and out. A system she didn’t have to negotiate with. But even that started to feel slightly detached, like it was happening near her rather than inside her.

From somewhere beyond the curtain there was applause again. It didn’t feel like it belonged to her world anymore. It felt like it belonged to people who still had consistent access to themselves. She wondered, distantly, what that must be like. To be fully inside your own life while it was happening.

A curtain shifted.

Someone said her name again, closer this time, like they were trying to bring her back into range. She tried to respond properly. Tried to find the version of herself that was supposed to be here, ready, contained, professional, whatever word people used for being intact in public.

But she’s not there tonight. The fact is, she’s fucked up on medication no one even knows she’s taking.

The backstage corridor felt so congested, everything moved in a delay. Voices came through water. Hands touched her arm and didn’t fully register as contact until after they had already let go. Someone said her name more than once before she realized it was directed at her and not the general atmosphere of panic forming quietly around her.

She was sitting, or maybe she had been sitting and was no longer, it was hard to tell where one state ended and the next began. The dress was already on. Hair fixed. Makeup finished in a way that looked correct under stage lighting and slightly unfamiliar up close, but it belonged to someone she had seen before but didn’t fully recognize as herself. The award show monitor down the hall flickered with rehearsals, applause, other people’s certainty.

There were voices around her that had shifted from instruction to hesitation.

“She’s not—” Someone started.

“She can’t go out like that,” Someone else said, lower.

A hand adjusted something on her shoulder. Another voice asked if she could hear them. She could hear them. She just couldn’t decide what hearing meant anymore. Words arrived, stayed for a moment, then dissolved before they could attach themselves to meaning. Everything felt slightly out of sync with itself, her body had agreed to show up but her awareness had not signed the same contract.

Someone was talking about timing.

Someone else was talking about canceling.

Her name again, more urgent this time. She blinked slowly at the floor as if it might offer instructions. The thing was, no one was really looking at her like she was a person anymore. That was the first thought that came through clearly enough to hurt— a distant, clinical recognition that she had become a variable in a situation that needed to be resolved.

Another mirror caught her reflection when she turned her head slightly. It looked like her. That was the most confusing part. Everything was correct but nothing matched.

Someone said, “We can push it. We can stall—”

Another voice cut in, “No, she’s on next.”

And that was when the room changed shape again. A stage manager appeared at the edge of her vision, speaking carefully, like approaching something that might break or bite or simply stop responding if handled too quickly.

“You’re up in a minute.” … “Do you understand?”

She tried to answer again. The attempt happened somewhere between thought and speech and didn’t fully complete as either. Instead, she nodded, or thought she did, or maybe just moved her head in a way that could be interpreted as agreement.

The corridor tightened around that decision immediately.

Someone stepped closer, checking her posture, adjusting her position like she was something that needed alignment rather than reassurance. There were words about marks on stage, about timing cues, about breathing. None of it landed in sequence. It came in fragments that refused to assemble into instruction.

Then there was the sound of applause from beyond the curtain. Not for her but for whoever had just finished.

A hand touched her back lightly.

“You go when it opens,” Someone said. “Just follow the light.”

The stage manager looked at her for a long moment longer than necessary, like there was still time to reverse something if enough certainty was introduced quickly enough.

There wasn’t.

The curtain up ahead shifted.

And her body, whether she agreed with it or not, began to move.

Michael almost didn’t attend.

The invitation had been sitting on his desk for weeks, accepted more out of obligation than enthusiasm. Industry events had become exercises in endurance lately. Smile when expected. Shake hands. Congratulate people whose names blurred together before the conversation had even ended. He had become remarkably good at appearing present while feeling entirely elsewhere. Lisa sat beside him as the lights dimmed, the auditorium gradually sinking into darkness as conversations softened into scattered murmurs. Applause rippled through the crowd when someone stepped onto the stage to introduce the next act.

Then her name echoed through the theater, carried through the speakers with practiced enthusiasm. Michael felt his stomach tighten before she had even appeared. He hadn’t seen her since the mediation. Not really. Not outside the memories that seemed determined to replay themselves whenever the world became quiet enough for him to hear them. He still heard her voice sometimes with startling clarity, still heard the accusation she had leveled at him across that conference table.

You dont even know if you love her.

It had followed him home. Followed him to bed. Followed him into every quiet moment since. The curtains parted. She stepped into the spotlight. For one fleeting second, she looked exactly as she always had. Beautiful. Poised. Elegant. Untouchable. The kind of performer capable of commanding an arena simply by standing still. Then the music began, and almost immediately something felt wrong.

Not obvious. Not enough that anyone unfamiliar with her would have noticed. The audience certainly didn’t. To them she was mesmerizing. Magnetic. Yet Michael found himself sitting forward almost instantly. She missed a mark by half a step. Barely noticeable. The kind of mistake most people would never catch. But he did. Then she remained still during a transition where choreography should have carried her across the stage. Her eyes drifted beyond the audience for a fraction of a second too long, lingering somewhere far away before she seemed to remember where she was and continued. Even her smile appeared delayed, arriving a beat late before disappearing altogether. Around him, thousands of people watched in complete silence, captivated by what they believed was an extraordinarily emotional performance.

Michael knew better. This wasn’t artistry. This wasn’t a creative choice. Every movement felt detached from her body, it looked like she was remembering the cues rather than inhabiting it. There were moments where she seemed–drunk. This was not a part of the performance. The realization settled heavily in his chest as the song continued, growing more devastating with every passing verse. Her voice never faltered. If anything, it became stronger. But strength wasn’t what made it unbearable. It was the rawness beneath it. The feeling that every note carried something she had never managed to say aloud. For the first time since the divorce meeting, he wasn’t hearing lyrics. He was hearing everything she’d swallowed. Every unanswered phone call. Every night she’d spent waiting. Every apology he had never given her. Every question he’d never truly answered.

By the middle of the performance, unease had settled so deeply beneath his skin that it became impossible to ignore. He shifted forward in his seat without realizing he’d done it. Beside him, Lisa noticed immediately.

“You okay?” she asked quietly. He didn’t answer right away. His eyes remained fixed on the stage. Something was wrong. The sensation crawled through him with growing certainty.

“I’m gonna go backstage for a minute.” Lisa frowned slightly, glancing toward the stage before looking back at him.

“Michael..”

“I’ll be right back.” He was already standing, beneath reason and logic, an older instinct had begun sounding an alarm he couldn’t ignore. He had spent years beside her. Years learning the subtle signs most people never noticed. The shorter breaths. The thousand yard stare. The way she’d lock her knees when she was trying not to collapse. The tiny changes that happened before panic arrived. Before exhaustion arrived. Before she admitted she wasn’t okay. He knew them all. His body recognized them before his mind could fully process what he was seeing.

The applause erupted behind him as he slipped through the auditorium doors. The sound followed him down a maze of unfamiliar hallways lined with security personnel, production staff, equipment cases, and cables taped neatly across the floor. He walked quickly at first, then faster. The muffled sound of the performance echoed through the walls until, somewhere near the dressing room corridor, the music stopped altogether. Then came shouting. Panicked. Urgent. Sharp. The kind of voices people used when something had gone wrong and everyone was trying not to make it worse. Someone yelled for a medic. Another voice shouted for space. Footsteps thundered down the hallway as crew members rushed past carrying equipment, forcing him against the wall. Security began converging toward a dressing room farther ahead. Michael’s stomach dropped instantly. He didn’t think. He started moving faster. Then running. By the time he reached the doorway, a crowd had already formed. Security personnel. Production assistants. Crew members speaking rapidly into radios. Two medics knelt somewhere beyond the bodies he couldn’t see through. He caught only the briefest glimpse of her sequined fabric disappearing beneath someone’s shoulder before another person stepped into his line of sight.

“What happened?” he asked.

Nobody answered.

The hallway was chaos. People moving in every direction. Radios crackling. Equipment being carried inside.

“What happened?” he repeated, louder this time.

A production assistant glanced toward him only long enough to recognize who had spoken.

“She collapsed.”

The words struck him with almost physical force.

“What?”

“She passed out after she came offstage.”

For a moment everything else seemed to disappear. The hallway. The noise. The people. His feet were moving before he’d consciously decided to move.

“I need to see her.” He barely managed three steps before someone intercepted him. Her manager stepped directly into his path firmly enough to make it clear he wasn’t getting through.

“I’m sorry.”

Michael stared at him in disbelief. “I need to see her.”

“I can’t let you in.” The words sounded unreal. His voice cracked despite himself. “Please.”

For the briefest second, sympathy flickered across the other man’s face. Sympathy. Regret. Understanding. Then it vanished. “She doesn’t need this right now.”

The sentence landed harder than anything that had been said during the divorce meeting. Because for years, he had been the first person people called when something went wrong. The first person through the door. The one sitting beside hospital beds. The one holding her hand. The one making decisions. The one people automatically looked toward in a crisis. Now he wasn’t even allowed inside the room. His gaze drifted instinctively past her manager’s shoulder, searching desperately for some glimpse of her through the crowd moving around the doorway. He saw nothing. Only medics. Only crew members. Only a closed circle of people trying to help her. A circle that no longer included him. His hands hung uselessly at his sides. There was nothing to argue. No legal language to hide behind. No compromise to negotiate. No loophole to exploit. The divorce had quietly altered something he hadn’t fully understood until this exact moment. He still possessed every instinct that had once made him her husband. Every urge to protect her. To sit beside her. To make sure she was okay. But instincts and rights were not the same thing. He no longer had the right. After a long moment, his shoulders sagged.

He lowered his eyes. “..Okay.” The word barely escaped him. Then he turned and walked away, each step feeling disconnected from the last. Behind him, the dressing room door remained closed. The people inside continued working.

I'm coming back. I'd like to see you. I'd like to see our son. If you're still willing. If you're still there. I'll be in the city next Tuesday. There's a café near the old apartment. The one with the terrible scones you used to pretend to like. 2pm. I understand if you don't want to come. I understand if you've moved on. But I've been in therapy, and I've been working on myself, and I think, I hope, I'm ready to try. I'm sorry it took so long. I'm sorry for so many things. I'll understand if you can't forgive me. But I wanted to ask. For a chance. Just a chance.

He read it again. Then a third time. Then he looked up at Maekar, who had abandoned his spoon and was now attempting to pry the suction cup off his tray with the focus of a safecracker.

"Your mother," Aerion said, his voice coming out strange and thin, "is coming home."

Maekar looked up. "No," he said, for no particular reason.

"Yes," Aerion said. "Yes, she is."

He didn't sleep that night, or the night after. He drafted and deleted thirty-seven responses. Too eager. Too cold. Too desperate. Too formal. Too much, always too much, the Targaryen instinct to overwhelm, to consume, to possess.

In the end, at three in the morning on the third night, he wrote:

Tuesday. 2pm. I'll be there. We'll be there. Take all the time you need. I'm still here. I never left.

He sent it, then lay awake until dawn, staring at the ceiling and trying to remember how to breathe.

Tuesday arrived with the kind of crisp, golden weather that made the city look like a postcard. Aerion dressed Maekar in the outfit he'd agonized over for three days, a soft blue sweater that brought out the purple in his eyes, proper trousers, tiny shoes that would probably be kicked off within minutes. He dressed himself with less care, which was to say he changed shirts four times and then put the first one back on.

The café was exactly as he remembered it. Slightly shabby, perpetually understaffed, with scones that could double as hockey pucks. You'd discovered it during your university days, before him, before everything, and you'd brought him here on your third date. I know it's not much, you'd said, but the coffee is good and they don't care if you sit here for hours. He'd taken a bite of a scone and nearly cracked a tooth, and he'd smiled and said it was perfect, and you'd laughed at him, head thrown back, and he'd known in that moment that he was done for.

He arrived at 1:45. The café was nearly empty, just a student with headphones in the corner and an elderly couple sharing a pastry by the window. He ordered a black coffee and a hot chocolate for Maekar, who was strapped into a high chair and trying to grab the sugar packets.

"Those are not toys," Aerion said, detaching a packet from his son's surprisingly strong grip.

"No," Maekar agreed, and grabbed another one.

At 1:58, the door opened.

He knew it was you before he looked up. He felt it, a shift in the air, some gravitational pull he'd been orbiting around for the past nine months. Nine months and thirteen days, to be precise. He'd counted.

You stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the autumn sunlight. You looked different. Not in any dramatic way, your hair was a little shorter, your face a little thinner, the shadows under your eyes a little lighter. But you held yourself straighter, steadier.

Your eyes found him immediately. Then they dropped to the high chair, to the silver-haired toddler who was now chewing on a sugar packet with great concentration.

Your hand went to your mouth. Your shoulders began to shake.

Aerion stood up. He didn't remember deciding to stand up. His legs just moved, carrying him across the café until he was standing in front of you, close enough to touch, not touching, terrified that if he reached out you would vanish like smoke.

"You came," he said. It was the only thing his brain could produce.

"I came," you said. Your voice was hoarse. Your eyes hadn't left Maekar. "Is that...he's so big. He's so big, Aerion. I missed...I missed so much..."

"Hey," Aerion said, and now he did reach out, his hand hovering near your elbow, not quite landing. "Hey. It's okay. You're here now. That's what matters."

You looked at him then, and he watched your face crumple in a way he'd never seen before. You'd always been so controlled, so careful, keeping your cracks hidden behind walls he hadn't known how to scale.

"Is it?" you whispered. "Is it okay? After what I did?"

"We have time," he said. "We have time to talk about all of it. But right now, there's a small person over there who would very much like to meet you. If you're ready. Only if you're ready."

You drew in a shaky breath. Nodded. He let his hand settle on your elbow, and walked with you to the table.

Maekar looked up as you approached. The sugar packet fell from his mouth. His head tilted, the way it always did when he encountered something new and interesting and potentially edible.

"Maekar," Aerion said, his voice rough. "This is your mama."

You knelt down beside the high chair, bringing yourself to eye level. Tears were streaming down your face, but you didn't seem to notice. "Hi," you said, barely a whisper. "Hi, baby. I'm your mom. I'm your mom, and I'm so sorry I was gone. I'm so, so sorry."

Maekar studied you with the intensity of a tiny scientist examining a particularly fascinating specimen. Then, slowly, he held out the soggy sugar packet.

The laugh that burst out of you was half-sob. "Thank you. That's...thank you, that's very generous."

"He's a generous soul," Aerion said. "He also tried to give me a half-eaten cracker this morning. You're in good company."

You looked up at him, and something passed between you. Something fragile and trembling and alive. He wanted to gather you up, to fold you into his arms, to take you home and never let you leave again. But that was the old Aerion, the one who grabbed and held and didn't ask. The new Aerion, the one who had spent nine months and thirteen days learning how to wait, stayed where he was.

"Do you want to hold him?" he asked.

"I don't know if I should," you said. "I don't know if I've earned..."

"It's not about earning," Aerion said. "It's about whether you want to. And if you do, if you're ready, he's right here."

You nodded, a tiny, terrified movement. Aerion unbuckled Maekar from the high chair, lifting him into his arms. The baby, toddler now, he had to stop thinking of him as a baby, immediately grabbed for his watch.

"We've talked about this," Aerion told him. "Not a toy."

"No," Maekar said, with great satisfaction.

"Yes, exactly." Aerion turned to you. "Ready?"

You held out your arms. Your hands were trembling. Aerion settled Maekar against your chest, and you gathered him in with a care that broke something open in his chest, something that had been locked tight for nine months and thirteen days.

"Hi," you breathed, your cheek against the silver-gold hair. "Hi, Maekar. I'm here now. I'm going to stay. I'm going to stay."

Maekar tolerated this for approximately thirty seconds before he began to squirm, reaching back for Aerion. Aerion saw the flash of hurt cross your face, quickly suppressed.

"He does that to everyone," Aerion said. "Yesterday he tried to escape Elena by climbing over her shoulder. We're working on stranger danger, but he seems to have interpreted it as 'strangers are fascinating and I must touch their faces.'"

You laughed, a wet, shaky sound. "He doesn't know me."

"No," Aerion agreed. "Not yet. But he will. If you want. If you're staying." He paused. "Are you staying?"

You settled Maekar on your hip with a naturalness that suggested muscle memory, some instinct that nine months of absence hadn't erased. He squirmed less this time. "I want to. If you'll have me. I know I don't deserve...I know I left, I know I walked out and left you both, and I wouldn't blame you if you hated me..."

"I don't hate you," Aerion said. "I've never hated you. I was scared, and I was angry, and I was so fucking sad I couldn't breathe, but I never hated you. I read the brochure. The one about postpartum depression. I found it in the nursery."

Your face went stony. "You found that."

"I found it. I didn't understand, before. I didn't see how much you were suffering. I kept leaving, kept going on business trips, kept assuming you were fine because you said you were fine. I should have looked closer. I should have asked harder questions. I'm sorry."

"Aerion..."

"Let me finish." He was shaking now too, he realized. "You left because you were drowning, and I didn't throw you a lifeline. I just stood on the shore and offered to buy you a better boat. That's on me. Some of it. Not all of it, I know, but some of it. And I've had nine months to think about it, and I've been working on…on being someone who listens. Someone who stays. I've been here, in the apartment, this whole time. I didn't go back to the estate. I didn't tell my family what happened. I've been waiting. For you. However long it took."

You stared at him. Maekar, sensing the emotional weight of the moment, chose this exact time to grab a fistful of your hair and yank.

"Ow," you said, startled.

"Sorry, he does that too. Here, let me..." Aerion reached out, gently untangling the tiny fingers. For a moment, his hand covered yours, both of them resting against the back of Maekar's head. Your skin was warm, familiar.

"Can we sit down?" you asked, your voice small. "I think I need to sit down."

He ordered more coffee. You didn't touch your scone, which was probably for the best. Aerion told you about the past nine months: the sleepless nights, the first steps, the first word, the first birthday. He told you about the nights he'd sat on the kitchen floor and called your voicemail just to hear your voice. He told you about the email, how it had been a lifeline, how he'd read it so many times the words had worn grooves in his brain.

You listened. You cried, silently, tears tracking down your face and dripping onto the table. When he was finished, you took a deep breath and started talking.

You told him about the clinic, the one from the brochure. You'd gone, once, before you left, but you'd been too scared to walk through the doors. After you disappeared, you'd found another one, in another city, and this time you'd gone in. You'd been diagnosed with severe postpartum anxiety, with a side of PTSD from the traumatic birth. You'd done inpatient treatment. You'd done outpatient treatment. You'd done therapy three times a week, group therapy, medication, the whole brutal, exhausting gauntlet of putting a shattered mind back together.

"I wanted to call," you said, your voice breaking. "Every day. I wanted to call and hear his voice and hear your voice, but I was so ashamed. I'd left my son. I'd left my husband. What kind of person does that? What kind of mother does that?"

"A sick one," Aerion said quietly. "A sick one who needed help. You got help. You're here now. That's what matters."

"That's what my therapist says." You laughed, a hollow sound. "You sound like my therapist."

"I'll take that as a compliment. She sounds like a smart woman."

"She is. She helped me understand why I left. Not just the depression, but…everything. The loss of control. The way my entire identity got swallowed up by being a Targaryen wife and a mother. I didn't know who I was anymore. All my boundaries were gone. My job, my apartment, my body, my time. It all belonged to someone else. And I didn't know how to ask for it back. I just…ran."

Aerion was quiet for a moment. Maekar had fallen asleep against your chest, his face slack and peaceful, one hand still gripping your collar. "Your apartment," he said finally. "The one you kept. I never went there. I don't have a key. But I thought about it a lot. About why you needed it. About what I'd done to make you feel like you needed an escape hatch."

"It wasn't you," you said. "Not just you. It was everything. The whole world telling me that I should be grateful, that I should be happy, that I had everything a woman could want, and I was just…empty. Hollow. I couldn't feel anything except this grinding exhaustion and this terrible fear that I was going to break my son. Hurt him. Not on purpose, but just…through being broken myself. I didn't trust myself. And I couldn't tell you. I couldn't tell anyone. So I left."

"I wish you'd told me."

"I know. Me too. I'm trying to learn how to tell people things now. It's harder than it sounds."

Aerion reached across the table and took your hand. Slowly, carefully, giving you time to pull away. You didn't. "I'm not going to pretend the past nine months didn't happen," he said. "I'm not going to pretend I'm not hurt, or that I'm not scared you'll leave again. But I'm also not going to pretend I don't want you back. I do. I've been half a person since you left. Maekar needs his mother. I need my wife. But I need you to be well more than I need you to be here. Do you understand? If you need more time, take more time. If you need to go slow, we'll go slow. Whatever you need."

"You've gotten better at this," you said, and a ghost of your old smile flickered across your face. "The whole listening thing."

"I've had a lot of time to practice. Maekar is an excellent conversationalist, but his feedback is somewhat limited."

"No," said Maekar, without opening his eyes.

"See? Criticism, but no constructive suggestions."

You laughed, a real laugh this time, and it was the most beautiful sound Aerion had ever heard. He wanted to bottle it. He wanted to wrap himself in it and never let go.

"I missed you," you said. "I missed you so much. Both of you. Every day. Every minute. Even when I couldn't face you, I missed you."

"We missed you too." He squeezed your hand. "We talked about you constantly. Well, I talked. Maekar mostly drooled. But the sentiment was there."

"What did you tell him?"

"Everything. About how we met. About the wedding. About how you wore a suit instead of a dress and my father almost had a coronary. About how you argued with me about financial regulations on our third date and I knew I was going to marry you. About how you're the bravest person I've ever met, because you walked away from everything to save yourself, and that takes more courage than anything I've ever done in a boardroom."

You were crying again. "Aerion."

"I told him his mother loves him. Every day. Even when she couldn't be here. I told him she was getting better, and she was coming back, and when she did, we were going to be a family again. I've been telling him that for nine months. Please don't make me a liar."

You lifted his hand to your lips and kissed his knuckles. Your lips were chapped, and your hand was still trembling, and you were crying and laughing at the same time, and Aerion thought he had never seen anything so beautiful in his entire life.

"I'm not going anywhere," you said. "I'm going to stay. I'm going to be here. We're going to figure this out. Together. If you'll have me."

"Always," Aerion said. "As long as it takes. However hard it is. I'm not going anywhere either."

They stayed at the café until the sun began to set and the barista started giving them meaningful looks. Maekar woke up, cranky and hungry, and you watched Aerion produce a pouch of apple sauce from the diaper bag with the efficiency of a man who had done this a thousand times.

"You're good at this," you said, a note of wonder in your voice.

"I've had practice. Also, the first time I tried to feed him, I got formula all over the ceiling. I'm still not sure how that happened. Physics-defying. Truly impressive."

"I missed all of that. The messy parts."

"There are plenty of messy parts left. He's entering a throwing phase. Every meal is an adventure. You'll get your chance."

You watched him coax the apple sauce into Maekar's mouth, dodging the grabby hands with the grace of long experience. Your expression shifted, softened.

"I'm scared," you said. "I'm scared I won't be good at this. At being a mother."

"Nobody's good at it at first. I certainly wasn't. I'm still not, half the time. Elenaa has to remind me which end the diaper goes on."

"That's not reassuring."

"It's not meant to be reassuring. It's meant to be true. You don't have to be perfect. You just have to be here. Show up. Try. Fail. Get up and try again. That's what parenting is. That's what marriage is, I think. I didn't understand that before. I thought it was about providing. About fixing things. About being the big important Targaryen who could solve any problem with money and influence. But it's not. It's about showing up. Every day. Even when it's hard. Especially when it's hard."

You were quiet for a long moment. Then you said, "Can I come home?"

Aerion looked at you. His wife. His exhausted, trembling, impossibly brave wife, who had walked into the abyss and fought her way back out again.

"The apartment's still there," he said. "I never left. I couldn't. It wouldn't have felt right, going anywhere else. I kept waiting for you."

"You kept it."

"It's ours. It's always been ours, I was just too stupid to realize it."

You reached out and touched his face, your fingers tracing the line of his jaw. "You're not stupid."

"I have my moments. This isn't one of them. Come home. Please. Come home."

You nodded, and Aerion felt something crack open in his chest, something that had been frozen solid for nine months and thirteen days, and warmth flooded through him like spring after a long, brutal winter.

"Okay," you said. "Okay. Let's go home."

The apartment looked the same. That was the first thing you noticed, standing in the doorway with Maekar on your hip. The same grey sectional, the same glass coffee table, the same stack of baby books on the end table. But there were differences, too. A play mat spread across the living room floor. A basket of toys in the corner. Pictures on the wall that hadn't been there before: Maekar's newborn photos, his first smile, the two of them at the park, Aerion looking exhausted and proud.

"You redecorated," you said.

"I had a lot of time on my hands. Also, the walls were very bare. It was starting to feel like a hospital waiting room. I needed something to look at during the 3am feedings."

"It looks like a home."

"It is a home. It's been waiting for you to come back to it."

You set Maekar down, and he immediately crawled toward the basket of toys with the single-minded determination of a heat-seeking missile. You watched him go, your face unreadable.

"Where will I sleep?" you asked. "I don't want to assume..."

"The bedroom," Aerion said. "Our bedroom. I've been sleeping in the nursery half the time anyway. Maekar still doesn't sleep through the night consistently, so..."

"No," you said. "No, I mean...I don't want to kick you out. That's not what I'm trying to do. I just...we haven't...it's been so long, and I don't know what we are right now, and I don't want to push..."

Aerion took your hands. "We're married. We're still married. I'm still your husband. You're still my wife. That hasn't changed. Nothing fundamental has changed. We've both been through hell, and we're both still standing, and we're going to figure out the rest of it. But you are not a guest in your own home. You are not sleeping on the couch. You are going to sleep in our bed, and I am going to sleep next to you, whether or not clothes are involved or anything happens at all. Because we've had nine months of sleeping apart, and I am not spending one more night without you next to me."

You stared at him. "That was very romantic. Also slightly intense."

"I'm a Targaryen. We don't do anything by halves."

You laughed, and then you were crying again, and then you were in his arms, and he was holding you, for the first time in nine months and thirteen days. You felt smaller than he remembered. More fragile. But also more solid, more real, more present than you'd been in the months before you left.

"I'm sorry," you sobbed into his shoulder. "I'm so sorry."

"I know. I'm sorry too. We're both sorry. Now we can stop being sorry and start being here. Together. That's the deal. That's the whole deal."

You pulled back just enough to look at him, your face blotchy and tear-streaked and beautiful. "I love you. I never stopped loving you. Even when I couldn't be here, I loved you."

"I know," he said. "I've always known. Come on. Let's order dinner. You must be hungry, and I have approximately three edible things in the refrigerator."

"That bad?"

"I've gotten better at cooking, but I'm still not good. Baby food is easier. Maekar doesn't know the difference between puréed carrots and puréed sweet potatoes. I could probably feed him either and he'd just..."

"No," said Maekar, who had found a stuffed dragon and was attempting to remove its wings.

"Exactly," Aerion said. "No complaints from the peanut gallery."

The first night was strange. He ordered Thai food, and you ate like someone who had forgotten what food tasted like, closing your eyes at the first bite of pad thai. Aerion gave Maekar his bath, narrating the process for your benefit: "this is the part where he tries to drink the bathwater, I recommend discouraging it", and you watched from the doorway, learning the bedtime routine you'd missed.

After Maekar was asleep, you sat on the couch together, not quite touching, a careful foot of space between. The television was on, some mindless reality show, but neither of you were watching it.

"Can I ask you something?" you said.

"Anything."

"Did you think about giving up? On me? On us?"

Aerion considered the question. It deserved an honest answer. "I thought about it. In the beginning, especially. I was angry. I was hurt. I didn't understand why you'd left, and the not knowing was worse than anything. But every time I thought about filing papers, about making it official, I couldn't do it. Because that would mean admitting you weren't coming back. And I wasn't ready to do that. Now I'm glad I didn't. Now you're here. Now we're going to be okay."

"You sound so sure."

"I'm not sure at all," Aerion said. "I'm terrified. I'm terrified I'm going to mess this up, that I'm going to fall back into old patterns, that I'm going to miss the signs again. But I'm also hopeful. Because you're here, and you're getting help, and I've been working on myself too, I've been reading books, actual books, about postpartum depression and communication and how to be a supportive partner, and I think we can do this. Together. Properly, this time."

"You've been reading books?"

"Shocking, I know. I had to order them online. I don't think the Targaryen library has a section on maternal mental health."

You leaned over and rested your head on his shoulder. It was such a small gesture, so achingly normal that Aerion's breath caught in his throat.

"Thank you," you said. "For waiting. For not giving up. For being here."

"Thank you for coming back."

Eventually, you fell asleep against his shoulder, your breathing slow and even. Aerion didn't move. He was too afraid of waking you, of breaking the spell, of losing this moment.

When he finally carried you to bed, you barely stirred, mumbling something incomprehensible and burrowing into the pillows. He lay next to you in the dark, listening to you breathe. Maekar made a small sound through the baby monitor, a dream-sound, and then went quiet again.

His family. His whole family. Under one roof, for the first time in nine months and thirteen days.

He didn't sleep for a long time. He was too busy being grateful.

The weeks that followed were not a fairy tale. Nothing was magically fixed. You still had bad days, days when you couldn't get out of bed, days when you looked at Maekar and felt nothing but that hollow, terrifying emptiness. But now you told Aerion when it happened. Now he sat with you, brought you tea, took over childcare without being asked. Now you had a therapist in the city who you saw twice a week, and a psychiatrist who adjusted your medication, and a support group full of other mothers who had been through the same darkness.

Aerion went with you to some of your appointments, at your invitation. He sat in the waiting room and read outdated magazines and thought about how many ways he had failed you before, and how many ways he was trying to do better now.

He cut back his hours at work. He delegated. He refused business trips unless they were absolutely essential, and even then, he called every night. He stopped trying to fix things and started trying to listen. It was harder than any hostile takeover he'd ever executed, but it was also more important.

Slowly, painstakingly, you rebuilt. Your relationship with Maekar was the hardest part. He was a toddler now, with strong opinions and stronger preferences, and his preference was firmly for Aerion. You took it with a grace that broke Aerion's heart a little.

"He doesn't know me yet," you said one night, after Maekar had screamed for twenty minutes rather than let you put him to bed. "It's okay. We have time. I'll earn his trust back."

"You don't have to earn it," Aerion said. "You're his mother."

"I'm a stranger who looks like his mother. There's a difference. But I'll keep showing up. That's what you said, right? Show up. Try. Fail. Get up and try again."

"I'm very wise sometimes. It's a burden."

You laughed. You were laughing more now. It was still tentative, still fragile, but it was there. A flame that had almost gone out, carefully nursed back to life.

The breakthrough came on a rainy Sunday afternoon, two months after you'd come home.

Aerion was in the kitchen, attempting to make pancakes, when he heard a sound from the living room that made him freeze. It was Maekar, laughing. Not his usual giggle, the one he gave when Aerion made funny faces or blew raspberries on his stomach. This was a deep, belly-shaking laugh.

Aerion crept to the doorway and looked in.

You were on the floor, cross-legged, and Maekar was in your lap. You were playing some kind of game, pat-a-cake, maybe, or something like it, and every time you clapped your hands together, Maekar shrieked with joy and grabbed at your fingers.

"Again?" you said, and he nodded vigorously. "Again. Okay, again."

You clapped. He laughed. His whole face was lit up, his purple eyes bright, his mouth wide open. He looked at you the way he looked at Aerion, with complete trust, complete delight, complete love.

Aerion stood in the doorway and watched, his heart painfully full. You looked up and saw him. Your face was wet with tears, but you were smiling. "He laughed," you said. "He really laughed. At me. With me."

"I saw," Aerion said. His voice was hoarse. "I saw."

You held out a hand toward him, and he came and sat beside you on the floor, close enough that your shoulders touched. Maekar looked between the two of you, and then he grabbed one of Aerion's fingers and one of yours and tried to put them both in his mouth at the same time.

"Coordinated assault," Aerion said. "He's getting smarter."

"He gets it from me," you said.

"Undoubtedly."

You leaned your head against his shoulder, and the three of you sat there on the living room floor, the pancakes left unbaked in the kitchen, the rain drumming against the windows, a family.

An imperfect family, not an unbroken family. But a family nonetheless.

That night, after Maekar was asleep, you sat on the couch with Aerion, your legs draped over his lap. This had become a ritual, this quiet time after the baby was down, when you could just be two people instead of two parents.

"I want to show you something," you said.

"What is it?"

You handed him your phone. On the screen was an email, professional, with a letterhead from a company he didn't recognize. It took him a moment to parse what he was reading, and then his eyebrows shot up.

"A job offer?"

"A consulting project," you said. "Remote work. Part-time to start. Fintech. They liked my resume, and they were willing to work around...around everything. My schedule. My needs. I've been looking for months. They're the first ones to agree."

"Darling, that's wonderful." He meant it. He meant it with every fiber of his being.

"I'm scared," you admitted. "It's been so long since I worked. What if I've forgotten how? What if I can't handle it? What if it's too much, with Maekar and therapy and everything else?"

"Then you quit," Aerion said simply. "Or you scale back. Or you adjust. It's not all or nothing. It doesn't have to be all or nothing."

"Since when do you understand nuance?"

"I've been practicing. I'm very proud of myself."

You laughed. It was becoming easier to make you laugh. "I want to try. I want to have something that's mine again. Something I built. Not because I don't love you and Maekar, but because..."

"Because you need to be your own person," Aerion finished. "I know. I understand. Probably better now than I did before. Take the job. Take it, and if it doesn't work out, we'll figure something else out. But you should have something that's yours. You've always needed that."

You looked at him for a long moment. Then you kissed him. A kiss that tasted like tears and the faintest hint of hope.

"I love you," you said.

"I love you too," he said. "More than I know how to say."

"You're saying it just fine."

"I'm trying. That's the whole secret. I'm just trying."

You curled against him, your head on his chest, and Aerion wrapped his arms around you and held on. Just holding instead of grasping, just being. That was the whole deal.

a/n: Liked the fic? You can donate on Ko-fi, your support helps me write more: https://ko-fi.com/catbayunthestoryteller <3

a/n ! I decided to divide this into two parts (or there may be three, depending.) since it’s too long, i am still writing the second part and i’m already 4k wc in!! gwayne hightower and reader will be interacting in the next part, this is more like an intro to the story since i wanna give more depth to y/n’s characterization

The comforting walls of the Vale cast an eerily cold akin to the Red Keep. But this one felt like a welcome embrace close to a home. Wherein one seeks something so differently amongst the nest you were cradled. Fiery fire brewing inside your veins, and yet you still find yourself pricking your skin with the coldness of Vale winds —tilting the scales. Perhaps the Gods have yet to toss the coin. Windows wide open at night, a thought of a thief climbing with sharp teeth at ready are tossed aside, seeing to that as your chambers are situated high above the castle, if nothing, those who seek your doom might blindly follow it for themselves instead.

You have thought of your brief life back in King’s Landing. How it is the safest with Knights situated in every corner of the halls, yet not from the gossips and rumors that seem to be easily spread around. The walls of the Red Keep have eyes, you thought. King Viserys himself is blinded by those who he trusts only because they carry his name, have been with him for years, and all those who are sworn in his name that he easily lets his guard down. A weak frail dragon surrounded by hounds. Perhaps it is the rotten eye of his that caused him to not see they’re consuming what is his slowly. The realm has been at peace for too long in his reign that he misreads it as an immunity from possible conflicts. As if he thinks he’s going to live a little longer.

A sudden rapping on the hardwood interrupted your musing on the window, the sigil of the Arryn’s fly past freely through the wind, it reminded you of dragons. You wondered if Silverwing had missed flying with her old companions or if she too enjoyed the solitude in the Vale with her rider.

“Come in.” You spoke softly. The hinges creaked and the door revealed your sworn knight.

“Princess. There’s been a raven.” With his arm outstretched, an unopened message lay in his palms. With your slight distance, you could make out the crimson red wrapped around the parchment. And there could only be one who it would come from. Your family —Rhaenyra, or perhaps the King himself, if he even ought to remember you.

“Who’s it from?” You stood from the comforts of the seat cushion, approaching the knight who directed his eyes elsewhere the moment he had seen your state. Noticing it, you had remembered your hair was left untouched by the bristles of your brush and your figure still clothed in an almost see through nightwear. Growing weary, you coil visibly and embrace yourself with your arm as an attempt to cover what had already been seen.

“It’s from King’s Landing, Princess.” He said, confirming your speculations. Not that there would be any other houses who would be interested in uttering a word nor send you one, considering you’ve spent your days for as long as you remember in Vale, and not one celebration in King’s Landing had you attended. As if they have forgotten you. A lot of people in Westeros probably don’t know you exist. Your cousin Jeyne had always been there to comfort you with words. Perhaps the celebration had been barbaric and involved men hunting for sport which is not something a Princess should see, she had told you.

Still the heavy feeling that has been growing inside of you, prevailed. Has your father forgotten you? Or is he still keen on Rhaenyra being his only child solely for his guilt on the death of your mother? Lady Jeyne Arryn had raised you the moment you left King’s Landing , and was even the closest you have to a mother. Sometimes you wished you truly were her daughter, the same darkness of her hair, and the same hues of her eyes. They said Targaryens are hard to not get a glimpse of, that the distinctness of their silver hair and violet eyes could make them stand out in a room with hundreds of people, but lately it seems as though you are nothing but a phantom. But it was a long time ago when you were in a crowded room.

You took the message from your knight, “You may go now, Ser Erryk. Thank you.” The loyal knight nods and leaves you to your matters. As the sound of the shut door diminished, you untied the wrapping of the parchment, not wasting a second. Reading the letter.

The King expects you to arrive at the Red Keep in a week. A celebration is to be held.

You scoffed at the shortness of the content, expecting more than just a command from whoever wrote it. With an annoyed sigh, you tossed it on the brewing fireplace. What could they want now that they’ve decided to let you come back again? They didn’t bother to send you an invitation in the past few feasts. Surely it has to be something big. This time you had hoped it would be about you —it has to, or they wanted to celebrate your name day early seeing to that as it wouldn’t be a few more moons till you turn nine and ten. It could be that your sweet half-sister Helaena had given birth again. You frowned at the thought, she was no older than three and ten when she gave birth to the twins, you had heard it was difficult for her and had cried for her mother through it. Begging for the babes to be pulled out of her aching tummy. The last time you saw her was at the wake of your late cousin Laena Velaryon —wincing at how that very night ended. Having just announced her betrothal to Aegon. You were still in shock on how a mother could subject her own daughter to such cruel fate and tie her with a man not worthy of her. It was for duty, Alicent said. But is sealing your daughter in an ill-fated life in exchange of uplifting the values worthwhile? If the Gods had only favored and had you been born a man, you would’ve saved Helaena and vied for her hand instead. Aegon was probably off to his cups and whores when the birth of Jahaerys and Jahaera happened, he was always kept to himself.

Aegon was born a year after you. It had you spiraling in thoughts on what went wrong with him, that he seeks comfortness in being far off his mind and trapped in between the legs of the whores in brothels. Although he seems to be torturing himself when he’s sober, he’d stare into nothing or play with the ring on his fingers but his eyes are far from where he is, as if he’s in a battlefield. You’ve always wanted to get a glimpse of his mind, out of curiosity and the sisterly instinct to help him with whatever has him out of the world all the time. There’s so much to read about him, yet you cannot decipher him. Aegon is stubborn, and he doesn’t want help, he convinces everyone —himself that he’s alright and that the cups and whores are nothing more than just entertainment to him, just like ladies with their embroideries, knights with their swords and kings with their throne and crowns. But you know better, that empty look in his eyes that begs for him to be free of his torment. Loneliness. You know because the same look stares right back at you in a reflection.

Alicent, your step-mother was present in your childhood years. You were raised alongside Aegon, it could be that Alicent is the sole reason for the way Aegon is, but your judgment is not something that is factual seeing as you do not know the Queen wholly, except that she was a nervous woman, as if she’s awaiting a knife in her back, always at high alert and paranoid. She is not what she seems, you were sure a dagger awaits in her hold, ready to pounce at every given opportunity, you had seen it on that night in Driftmark. A flood inside her that filled so, the dam broke and emotions surged and clouded her thoughts, and before she knew it, blood had been drawn. But you thought it was an unfair payment, Aemond lost his eye and Rhaenyra still has her sons whole. It was a side of Alicent that you never saw, but you understood her anger from that moment. You could never hate her, she was a mother to you, but Rhaenyra was your true blood sister. You shared the same womb, but yet the distance between you had dented what you two were supposed to have. Maybe she too shares the same thought as your father, how you and your twin ripped her mother apart and only for you, a girl to survive. If it had been Baelon who survived instead of you, the death of your mother might have been for nothing. What is a woman to a man anyways?

Still you were thankful for Alicent for not treating you differently just because you were not made in her womb, though at times you find yourself wishing you were. All the women in your life that filled the empty space your true mother had left, and yet it feels like something is still missing.

Her name was Aemma, the name left a bittersweet taste on your tongue. You wondered what she looked like, but your cousin Jeyne did stare at you with a longing smile in which she later on revealed to you how you reminded her of her late aunt. Maybe you do look like your mother and perhaps your father hadn’t forgotten you and he did not hate you for the death of your mother and brother. That the reason he had sent you away was that you reminded him too much of your mother that he could not bear to look at you, your presence itself dooms him to not let go of what’s already not there. That it is the past he is afraid of.

But it has already been years, surely he had moved past her death? and he wasn’t good with affections. You thought that your father must’ve missed you, and so he sent the message. After all, his health is declining —Alicent mentioned in a letter she had sent you many moons ago, along with her and your brothers and mainly Helaena missing you.

For the second time, a light tapping on your door diverted your gaze from the fire. “Who is it?” you said in an annoyed state.

“Princess, we’re here to prepare you for the day.” Your handmaiden said on the other side.

“Come in.”

You watched as they scurried inside your chambers, one of them closing the blinds to your window, hearing your handmaiden mutter to themselves of how cold your chamber had gotten. They prepared your bath, pouring boiled water after the other. One of them went to take a variety of choices in your wardrobe, dresses in hues of gray and blue.

“I’ll be wearing my dragon riding attire for today, Freya.” You interrupted, she looked at you in question. “I’ll be returning to King’s Landing today.”

The sound of a dragged chair echoes throughout the dining hall, along with it the sound of cutlery lightly clashing with each other as they are set on to the silverware. Handmaidens dash out from the room to another, the smell of roasted ham and what other meals your cousin Jeyne had prepared wafted through the air, and only then did your stomach rumble in hunger.

“Did you sleep well, dear?” Jeyne smiled at you, having just swallowed the meat she ate. She scanned your figure clad in another but your usual dress. All the clothes you have that she had tailored, she remembered well how you voiced out your thoughts that you grew to love the muted and cool hues of her house. A stark contrast from the colors of house Targaryen.

“I assume you’ve read the raven sent to you, what did it say? if you don’t mind.”

The roasted ham was different today, lacking the golden syrup. The previous cooks must’ve been switched out from their shifts today. “It’s from the King himself,” You paused, turning to grab the mashed potatoes on the side. “He wants me back in the Red Keep, says there is to be a celebration, did you receive one too?”

Jeyne gets her answer on why you were clothed in your riding attire. You were leaving, she frowns at the thought. “You’re going after breaking fast? But no, I did not get an invitation. It may be a private affair with your family? What else did the message say?”

You chuckled bitterly at the brief words written on the parchment earlier. “It only says that the King will be expecting me to be back in a week's time. No other pertinents. I don’t even think the King himself knows of it considering it’s the first time in a long time that I’ve heard something from him.”

“Or he finally thinks it is time you are owe an explanation and an apology. I recall that’s what you’ve always wanted to hear from him.” Jeyne gives you a sad smile, though you couldn’t see it as you gaze so far on the food on your plate, barely touched. Any memory involving your father had made you lose a bit of appetite despite your stomach begging to be filled. She reaches and places her palms on your hand, gripping still the silver fork.

“I forgot what he even looks like, or what he looks like now. Alicent says his face has rotted the following years. The last time I saw him, his right eye was close to coming off, she did say it no longer stuck to his socket and it had fallen just last year.” You weren’t sure whether to pity him or be disgusted. How could something alive begin to endure the stages after passing? The vision of possibly seeing flesh fall right apart from his bones had you grimace in disgust.

“I don’t know alot about your father, but I’ve seen you grow into the woman you are. I am sure you have more guts than he ever will have, maybe it is you who should speak to him, tell him of all the pain he has caused you.” But she did bore an anger towards Viserys, after all he had played a part in the reason for the passing of her aunt, Aemma. She heard of it, so young when she gave birth to her first born. The process was so difficult that they feared she may have died from childbirth after passing out the moment Rhaenyra had her first wail.

“Wise men only become Kings. He had sat on that throne for long, I am sure he knows of all the pain he has caused. He casted me aside long enough for me to finally let go of what I will never get, a closure from him. Sooner or later he would rather embrace death than me.” You sighed, “For all I know, his tongue might’ve fallen out from his mouth too… His hands may already have years ago, maybe then I’d understand why he never wrote me letters himself.”

Returning the gaze of the person who you could only feel a motherly love from. There was that look in her eyes again, “I am sorry for all that you endured your whole life.” she presses her lips in a thin line. “I hope that your time here in Vale was worth it, that I have given you everything you wanted but if not, you are welcome to come here again and take all that you need.” Her eyes glistened, a wave threatening to spill.

“Thank you, Jeyne. For everything. I do look for my mother in strangers, but you ought to know that it was only merely out of curiosity, having heard about her but not what she looked like. But it is you that I’ve grown to have a bond close to that of a mother even if you are my cousin, and for it I am utmost grateful.” A satisfied sigh left your lips as you thought of all that she had offered to you, even if you did not share her name or came from the same house. Why your own blood, your father couldn’t even bother to do all that she did, even the slightest. “I couldn’t ask more of what you gave me, Jeyne. ‘tis all enough.”

Jeyne Arryn stood from her seat, not hesitating to greet you with a warm embrace. Though the unfamiliar affection made you still in time, it was foreign, you’re yet to decide whether it is to your liking or not but before you do, Jeyne pulls away from you. Swiftly wiping her cheek as she returned to her previous place. “You should eat now, you’ll be traveling to King’s Landing, wouldn’t want you to starve when you arrive at the Red Keep, they might come to a conclusion that you’re not fed well here in Vale.” She chuckles at the last line. Jeyne already misses you, every second passing making the walls of the castle even bigger and colder. And looking back at the red accents of your riding attire, she cannot help but think you’re better off with the colors of her house.

Ser Erryk had insisted on horseback in return to King’s Landing, along with him are carriages with your chests and your loyal ladies-in-waiting. You had offered him to ride with you on the back of Silverwing, half jesting. But as he looked at the fiery beast staring at him with its eyes, he tensed visibly, earning a chuckle from you. The large winged creature that could burn anything in its way and could eat him right then and there, it amazes him how Targaryens have managed to bow these dragons to their whims. What was the saying? Targaryens are closer to God than men. But the ability to tame dragons was already enough for Targaryens to be called the Gods themselves. A blasphemous thought, Ser Erryk tells himself. Then again, when did Gods ever intervene with the lives of men? or they solely act upon when it comes to treason as a means to flout their violence nature? He sees children dying in the streets, little girls that are sold off to men in accordance with financial advantages. Are the Gods even Gods if they cannot help the innocents? mercy seems to have been lost as the world ages, or perhaps the world he lives now is seven hells itself.

Though every time he is graced and reminded by your presence, his mind easily tosses aside that conclusion. He would say angels walk amongst the soil and it embodies you. The silver hair and violet eyes that could easily make men bend to their knees, even him. Ser Erryk often tells himself that your constant silence is intentional to keep everyone within the vicinity of hearing your voice from falling at your feet. He even heard from lords and ladies that even breathing the same air in the room as you is worth a thousand swordsmen and gold. Perhaps that is why everyone is so keen to marry off their sons and daughters to Targaryens. He would be lying if he too did not share the same interests as them, if only he wasn’t a Kingsguard and was of Highborn, a Lannister or a Baratheon, he would’ve fought men for your hand. Erryk liked to think he was born to die for you and that he would do.

At four and ten, King Viserys had deemed his feature to be hideous for a princess to see and decided to send his last daughter with Aemma away from the Red Keep, and that it would do her great to know of her mother’s side of the family. The Vale was one of the safest places in Westeros, and even with the security of it, he had appointed Ser Erryk with you. And ever the loyal guard he is, he did not hesitate to offer his sword to you even if it meant a great distance between him and his twin brother. At times, when his mind is off of things including protecting you, he would miss him and tell himself that he would soon see Arryk. He wonders if you too miss your family back home, though it is clear with your persistent pondering on the huge window of your chambers, a permanent frown embedded in your face. It almost seems like you are born for misery, the very death of the Queen —your mother and the death of your twin brother after having just lived for an hour. But Gods, did it look good on you.

Ser Erryk asks oneself what might have actually gone on your mind on days where you stare at nothing. Was there war in your mind? As an oath keeper, he cannot do nothing, and will do nothing but to do what he does best. To not engage in the affairs of those whose life is much more worth than his.

“There is nothing to be done. Father wishes it and the King approved.” Alicent sighs, eyeing her brother pacing anxiously in his guest chamber. Absent-mindedly fiddling with the skin around her nails, yet not daring to scar it.

“And he did not even consult me first before making rash decisions?” Gwayne flares in anger. Having been ordered by his father to come to King's Landing just weeks ago expecting more than just being thrown into a lair of dragons. He was presented with shocking news that he did not foresee in his years of existing. It feels as though he was tricked on coming here. As if his father’s deep rooted disappointment in him had grown so that he would exchange his son's freedom for his self interests. Then again, in what world Otto Hightower wouldn’t put himself first.

“This decision is to our advantage, Gwayne.” Alicent begins, her mind tangles as she too is caught off guard by the abrupt instances. Keen on comforting her older brother with words though she is not good with it. It had been suggested to the King in the past but Viserys laughed straight at his hand’s face. You were two and ten then and Viserys didn’t see any advantages between the marriage seeing as he had already wed Lady Alicent. “You are to do your duty as well as I did.” there was a bitter tone in her voice, reminded of the last remaining years of her childhood she was stripped off.

Gwayne seems to not have caught up on this, drowning in his own agenda. “How? She's a child.” He responds in offense.

“The princess is long past her age when she is supposed to be courted. She’s of nine and ten in moons time.”

“Has she not been raised here well in court, has she not? how will she do any better in this duty when she’s spent most her life in isolation, away in Vale?” Gwayne scoffs, “For all I know I could as well be married to a woman with a mind of a child.” Alicent hisses at this, a sense of motherly love she bores towards you. It has been a long time since she last saw you and your travels back to King’s Landing is indeed a long one, she couldn’t wait to set her eyes on you.

“Watch your words, brother. The princess will not be insulted inside her home, if someone were to hear-“

Gwayne caughts her off, “Then that would be good wouldn’t it? Perhaps they’ll stop the betrothal once they hear me insulting my future bride.” There was a moment of silence between them. Neither of them could understand each other, miscommunications were no stranger since they were young. An unspoken jealousy between them in the eyes of their father, one wanted to be the other.

“I raised her for a while. She’s good.” She defended. True to her words, not even she could deny the goodness in her, as though she was destined to be great. Her and Helaena were the only purest things in her life. The girl wasn’t hers yet she longs for her as though she came from her womb. Perhaps it is indeed a good thing she wasn’t or she may turn out to be like her sons. Or is it just the way she raised them. “And father will see to it that this marriage will prevail.”

“And what is to be gained from this marriage?” He asks sarcastically, masking the sound of defeat. Gwayne regains his composure, with a wine in his goblet, he sits on the other end of the same couch Alicent is in. He realizes that he could not avoid the inevitable. If there’s one thing he knows about his father is that whatever he wants, he gets. No matter how long it would take and who would suffer, but the question remains as to why decide this betrothal.

Alicent remains unspoken for a little while, she stares at the fireplace. Watching as the fires consumes the wood. The crackle of it fills the silence. She could feel the time coming, of when the scales finally tip and so will the peace she remained intact about to spill. So will blood. There was nothing to be done but to protect her family. Her father had told her, fed her, that after the death of the King, the life of her family would be in danger. That Rhaenyra would come for the throne just as it was meant for her and would annihilate those who would be a threat to her birthright. But she had known her childhood companion, and she is anything but. Though her father had been so desperate to take a hold for power for reasons she doesn't know, she had known Otto and he would’ve survived dragonfire if it meant to spite his enemies. Without second thoughts, she resorts, “To prevent war.”

“Why would there be war?” Her brother with confusion etched on his features turns to look at her. Gwayne tries to find any hint on her face that could give in that she might be convincing him not to change his mind by lying. He admits if it were the case, then he doesn’t know his sister was worse at speaking false commentaries. But all Alicent does is stare back at him with that look she used to give him when they were children. She’s scared. It seemed like she was the only one with such thoughts about the realm, afraid of the war that would not come.

All frustrations he had felt left him, and he finds himself wanting to reassure his little sister. The one who was sent to court years ago, they had not been spending time together since that day, they only met briefly in every year or two. Sometimes he thinks she is no longer the girl he once knew, but this moment proved him otherwise. “Sister-“ he began, with a look of worry. Alicent was still staring at the raging flames on the fireplace, her eyes stray far away. Gwayne sees in her eyes tears that are threatening to spill.

Words spill in a moment of vulnerability, Alicent could feel she is projecting her fears on her brother, but it was not what she had meant. Something that lies unconsciously in her mind, as if wired to infect those around her. Even she doesn’t know it was all because of her father. But how could she blame him for everything? when he was the only one who could understand her, the only one on her side. Her whole life she was meant to believe that family was the only one who could not turn their backs on her. Alicent was so blinded by this notion that she did not realize it was Otto who led those around her astray from her.

The Queen awaits the foreign comforts she so rarely receives, but was alas interrupted by a Kingsguard entering the chambers. Both of the Hightower siblings got out of their moment, turning their head in unison on the distraction.

“Your grace,” He then turns to Gwayne. “My lord, King Viserys requests both your presence in the throne room. The princess has arrived.”

The wretched smell of King’s Landing greeted you from miles away, whether it may be from the bay or your rotting father. Either way, it wasn’t pleasant and it reminded you how having been sent to Vale was a favor in disguise. It had you in question how the townsfolk living near the water could bear such a stench.

It has been long since they’ve seen the silver beauty fly fast and swiftly above their heads, they could only say one thing about the dragon. To whom it belongs to and what it had meant. King Viserys’ second born daughter has come back to the Keep. It may mean bad or good fortune, still it insulates great feast inside the castle walls, all while those who live outside survive off of scraps. There are some who are still fortunate enough to have gold enough to shelter and fill their stomachs.

Silverwing bellows loudly as she lands on the clearing outside the dragonpit, her size finds it uncomfortable inside. You unclasped the strap from your saddle as your dragon finally settled, climbing down from Silverwing. The dragon keepers surround her, though she is not threatened. Seeing you now on the ground queues your dragon to leave somewhere, a clearing far away from the dragonpit, to fend for herself.

A wheelhouse awaited you not far away from where you stood, along with it two Kingsguard sent to you by the King, all unfamiliar. It would be weeks perhaps a moon till your sworn knight Ser Erryk would arrive, so will your ladies-in-waiting. The thought of unfamiliar faces tending to you for a while reels your bones. There’s something about the castle that makes everyone so.. untrustworthy. Even a certain dornish Kingsguard.

“Princess. Your father the King awaits you.” The taller one announces as you approach, the other opens the door. You nod in answer, even flying takes back the essence of socializing.

The huge doors of the throne room silenced those who were inside by its creaking hinges. Loud voices turning to hush whispers, all eyes shoot straight at the entrance as a Kingsguard announces the long awaited arrival of King Viserys’ and the late Queen Aemma’s second born.

“The Princess, Y/n Targaryen.”

It has been so long since the princess appeared in court, they have heard of her growing beauty far on the north in Vale. How she had turned exactly just like her grandmother. Even they whisper how she was Daella come again, a shy reclusive little girl in the Vale.

Many had attempted to ask for her hand through the King, young lords interested in her supposed beauty but none had dared to send you one in Vale. But all were all met with unanswered letters. Not that the King or the Hand have read any of them, though as she grew older, the letter became less and less. Some had even compared her beauty to her older sister Rhaenyra.

You breathe deeply, your vision went straight forward on the Iron Throne, sat on it is what you could make out as your father, but who would dare sit on it other than him. It seems he now wears a mask on the side of his face. Some force prevents you from eyeing those around you, but in your peripheral vision, the greens on the right side of your father could only be the Hightowers, Alicent and Otto, mayhaps.

Yet as you near, you couldn’t help but look on the left, and was met with surprise. You caught the eye of a silver haired woman, she stays the same but in some ways different. She sends you a smile that reaches her eyes, beside her are the all too familiar dark-haired boys that you used to grow up with, and they too had changed. Your sister Rhaenyra and her sons, Jacaerys and Lucerys. Towering behind them is your Uncle who nods at you. You had heard they married shortly after your cousin Laenor died, which was after the funeral of his twin sister, Laena. Seemingly suspicious but you aren’t one to pry on the business of others unless it harms you in any way.

Halting just in front of the staircase leading to the throne, King Viserys face was clear to you. His mouth a little agape, struggling to breath but you see it slightly turn upward.

“My daughter.” He says above whisper, but it echoes still in the room, everyone’s attention now to the both of you.

You stood awkwardly, darting your vision on the left now and you are met with Queen Alicent’s worrying eyes. For what it is for, you’re not sure. It may be because of the King’s health, had he endured the struggles to sit on the throne today for you? or perhaps there really was a reason for your return home and it involves you. It wouldn’t be a surprise but still you cannot help the surge of nervousness fill up your body. Depending on what it is, your reaction may vary. You hope it isn’t anything worse.

Just as quickly as it laid on Alicent’s, you diverted back to your father. “Y-your Grace- My King. Father.” You stuttered. Regretting the choice of words, you mentally wanted to hit yourself right then and there. Feeling the piercing gaze of the Hand, you spared him a quick glance. There was something in him that made him suspicious though this wasn't the case for your father. He just simply couldn’t get rid of the Hightower but what even for? he may seem to have ill-intents but it wasn’t enough.

“If I may, father. Why am I here? I mean, why send me home now?” You asked shortly, just as you did, Alicent could feel the guilt starting to consume her. She tears her gaze from you to the floor. How oblivious you are that you are to be betrothed at the behest of his father and yours. Surely you wouldn’t take it well. If she were in your place, having called to come back only to perform your duty, it would’ve angered her. Not only is it a reminder that you are nothing but a second born, but how little a woman could say in the form of politics. She once raised you and it felt as if she had betrayed you by not sending you a letter prior. Will she lose another child too? Will learning of the truth astray you even further away from her? Will you ever hate or forgive her?”

At the question, Viserys and Otto glanced at each other simultaneously, an unspoken demeanor either of them only knew. Otto clears his throat, attracting your attention, he steps forward closer, a few steps in front of his daughter and another man beside Alicent who you now noticed. The man seems to be looking straight past the entrance, lost in thought it seems. They seem to look a lot like each other, could it be her brother?

“Princess. We agree it has been years since you are in Vale. And as the Princess, and knowing you’re past your age when you should be courted,” your face contorted to an annoyed one by the mention. “The King has deemed it fit that you are to do your duty. To the realm that is.” Otto finishes, though he doesn’t move from his place, as if awaiting your answer. It took you a minute to evaluate his words, on what it could mean.

“I’m afraid I don't understand.” You said in a whisper, looking back and forth between the Hand and the King. The suspense starts to creep up your mind, not doing any better in easing your nerves, as if they all walk around in eggshells. In the meanwhile, you search for the answer on those around you. You looked on the faces of your sister and her family but instead they mirror the same confusion as you, Rhaenyra merely gives you a shrug. Just not far behind Alicent are your half-siblings, the only woman in the three which you could only assume as Helaena, now grown, seems to not have her mind present at the moment, the shorter man —which you undeniably recognized as Aegon, only focuses on the rings of his finger. The taller —Aemond, even with his eyes fixated on you, his face remains unmoving, you cannot read it, and you sighed in frustration at the lack of answer you were trying to find.

King Viserys interrupted the tension surrounding you, “Y/n.” He began. “Do not mistake me for not seeing you as equal to your sisters and brothers. I have sent you away and for that I am deeply sorry if you have felt any resentment.” His words, instead of giving the peace you’ve always wanted, made you colder each second, not because of bitterness. Now you understand the situation, and you could feel your throat dry with anticipation, he is offering you a duty they know you would not want. “Daughter, I have you sent back home to do what a Princess should do to keep the realm at bay. Your duty now lies in the joining of houses.” He plans to send you off again.

Blood drains from your face at the realization. “Father- you cannot make me..” You pleaded with a shaky voice, the familiar sting in the back of your eye, signaling tears that are threatened to be spilled, you hold on to it. And for the second time, you looked around you for silent help. Rhaenyra sees the glistening in your eyes even from a distance, her face shocked with the words spoken by the King, she strides near you, gaining the attention around even Alicent who now looks at her.

“Father, Y/n surely does not have to?” Your sister attempts. She looks at you with pity, it fills her with dread that you are to be sent away from her again. How the King could just face you with a notion of marriage having just arrived in the castle. Truly his words before had meant nothing and a ploy to get him in your good graces, a persuasion masked in an apology. Just as the King had wanted to earn you again, he had not realized it did nothing but reel you further and further.

“It has been done, Rhaenyra.” The King’s breath started to struggle. At the revelation of what your duty could be, your father could no longer look you straight in the eye, even he knows what he has done. Viserys accepted the possibility of dying without ever being forgiven by his second daughter and he would deeply regret that in the afterlife if there even was one.

“To whom even?” You asked, voice now louder with anger fueling in your veins. Realizing there is no escape now, that this was always what you’re destined for, though you did not know it would be this soon.

Otto turns his head to the King, Viserys nods at him. “Princess. It would be a delight to introduce you to my eldest son, Ser Gwayne Hightower.” He gestures to the man beside Alicent. Right about how he could be the brother of your stepmother, but not about him being the one you’re betrothed to. A Hightower. Your hand is to be given away to a Hightower. The King willingly threw his daughter to a pack of hounds.

The said man steps beside the Hand. You look at him with uncertainty. He too bore the Hightower features, red hair and the blue in his eyes. Grimacing at the green of his attire. Ser Gwayne was a lot taller than you, the distinctive gap in height made you feel helpless. It was the first you had heard of and met him, it tenses your bones that you are to be tied to a man you know nothing of. Though you won’t deny that he is good looking, a resemblance he had with Queen Alicent but not so from his father. They took after their mother, you thought for a second. You weren’t oblivious to violence circling in the lines of arranged betrothals, no one ever expects women in marriages to be contented with their husbands. They were said to have one purpose and it is solely to bore heirs. Would your betrothed be a worse man, that you don’t know. Though if it were the case, a knife to your throat would be nothing but mercy. And right at the moment you want nothing more than to pierce yourself on the swords leading to the Iron Throne.

Ser Gwayne Hightower slightly bows to you in greeting, “Princess.” He says in a raspy voice. He too looks displeased at the moment, however his face remains blank since the first time you laid eyes on him. You cannot read him but he is the opposite. The tension grew thicker every second Gwayne was left unanswered. It seems the interaction between the two of you made it all even worse and anointed to how sudden all this decision was. You had just arrived at King’s Landing, even Silverwing may yet to rest, your hair still a little disheveled from the flight, figure clad in riding attire. The very first thing you had wanted as you arrived was to wash off the stink of your dragon and change to a suitable dress but was instead greeted by your betrothed whom you didn’t even know existed till now.

It was all too much of a news, the exhaustion, frustration, betrayal and anger had taken a hold of your mind. And without any fear of the consequences of your words, you chose to let go of it. If the King will have your head, so be it.

“I would rather die!” You looked at your father one last time, gasps breaking out. Even a chuckle that turned to a brief laugh who you knew all too well belonged to your uncle Daemon. Otto never looked so offended in his life. Without wasting another breath, you hurriedly made your way out of the throne room. Your father calls behind you, but all you did was ignore it and the first tear kissed your cheek.

King Viserys made an attempt to follow you, but as soon as he stood from his throne, his left foot gave up. The King's Guards hurriedly assessed him.

You had not been born cold.

That was the thing no one at court ever understood, though courts were forever mistaking silence for pride and reserve for disdain. You had been raised amongst lions, and lions were loud creatures even when finely dressed. Casterly Rock had rung with bright laughter through gilded halls, with splendid tempers, sharp tongues, and easy boasts, with uncles and cousins who embraced noisily, quarrelled noisily, and made peace just as noisily over wine. The Lannisters were beautiful in the way songs preferred—fair and golden, bright as hammered coin in sunlight, with green eyes clear as sea glass and crimson cloaks spilling from their shoulders in rich folds. Their guards were red cloaks, their banners red and gold, and their pride was as old as the Rock itself.

You were all of those things too. You had the pale gold hair, the emerald eyes, the fine bones, and the lion’s pride.

You simply had not inherited your kin’s ease with noise.

As a girl, you had often stood just behind the others, smiling softly while the room filled around you. You felt things too deeply and spoke too little. In the west, that had been understood for what it was: shyness, reserve, gentleness turned inward. Your mother would smooth your hair and call you tender-hearted. Your cousins would talk enough for three people and pull you laughing into their games regardless. At Casterly Rock, no one mistook your quiet for frost.

At King’s Landing, they did.

By the time you came east, the match had already been measured in ledgers and whispered over at council tables. Prince Valarr had thought, in the vague, careless way young men often thought of futures not yet nailed down by older hands, that he might one day marry Keira of Tyrosh. Not for love, perhaps not at first, but because she had been there, and because she had been easy in his company in a way few women were. Keira was clever and handsome, and quick enough to laugh at him without making him feel small for it. He knew the tilt of her chin when annoyed, the cadence of her voice in gardens and hawking fields, and the little courtesies that had begun, over time, to feel like the first stones laid in the road of something more.

Then Prince Daeron was offered Keira instead.

It was called a finer match. A wiser one. A more useful one. Men with rings on every finger said so in grave tones, and women in jeweled sleeves nodded as though marriages were bolts of silk to be weighed and priced. For Valarr, as though some god in a bitter mood had chosen to salt the wound, there came a bride from the westerlands with Casterly Rock at her back and Lannister gold in her veins.

“Lannister coin will strengthen the crown,” Prince Baelor had said.

What Valarr heard was simpler and crueler: Keira is gone, and you are to be paid for in gold.

He said nothing, because princes were not reared to complain prettily when duty was laid upon them. He bowed his head, accepted the terms, and stood in the hall like something carved while men older than he was decided the shape of the rest of his life.

You arrived a moon’s turn later beneath banners stirring in a dry black wind off Blackwater Bay. The day was bright and pitiless, all hard light on pale stone and brazen helms. You descended from your litter in crimson velvet lined with lion fur, gold thread at the hems, your hair partly hidden beneath a jeweled net. You came with a small train of handmaidens chosen by the royal household to ease your settling into court—though in time they would become far more than attendants.

You curtsied before the royal family with perfect grace.

Your hands did not tremble.

Your face was composed so beautifully that one might have mistaken calm for indifference.

Valarr looked at you as one might look upon a polished shield: fine enough, but cold to the touch.

You saw the look and hated him a little for it. You were already frightened, already trying not to show it, and the thought that the man you were to wed believed you proud and unyielding felt like one more weight laid on your shoulders before the marriage had even begun.

Their wedding, your wedding, was a splendid misery.

The sept was full. Candles burned in long pale ranks beneath crystal stars. Silk rustled. Swords whispered against scabbards. Lords in dark velvets and ladies crusted in gems watched with the bright, hungry stillness courts reserved for unions that mattered. The singers sang. The bells rang. The court smiled as though it had not just watched one bride exchanged for another like a treaty clause amended after midnight. Valarr did all that was expected. He cloaked you. He kissed you when the septon bade it. He danced. He drank. He smiled until his jaw ached.

Across the hall, Keira sat beside Prince Daeron in Tyroshi silk and pearls, graceful as enamel on ivory. Daeron leaned to murmur something in her ear. She laughed softly. Valarr saw it. He hated that he saw it. He hated even more that the sight of her followed him into the bedding chamber that night.

You sat on the edge of the bed in crimson silk, your back very straight, your hair half-unbound and spilling over one shoulder in pale waves that caught the candlelight. The chamber smelled of wax and spiced wine and crushed rose petals underfoot, with smoke from the brazier lingering faintly in the rafters. Outside, the distant noise of revelry rolled through the stone like surf.

“You may look at me as though I am a sentence passed upon you,” you said at last, “but it will not make the door open again.”

Valarr, half-undressed, turned toward you.

There was no tremor in your voice. No plea. No tears.

He ought to have admired that. Instead he said, sharper than he meant, “Did they teach you to say that in the west?”

“No,” you answered. “In the west they taught me not to beg where I am not wanted.”

For one ugly moment, he almost laughed.

That should have warned him. That should have told him there was wit in you, and hurt pride, and some slender hidden softness held upright by sheer will. That should have been the beginning of something honest between you.

Instead, it became the shape of what followed.

And yet it was Valarr, strangely, who first saw the truth of you. Not in any song-worthy fashion, not by moonlight in a garden or with vows half-spoken into a kiss, but in the common, unbeautiful places where the heart sometimes showed itself despite all effort.

At your first feast in the capital, the great hall had been a roar of voices. Targaryens at one end, mighty lords at the other, silver dishes flashing beneath torchlight, musicians sawing at strings, courtiers pressing too near with curiosity dressed as courtesy. You bore it beautifully, because Lannisters did not tremble where anyone could see. You answered what was asked. You smiled when proper. You lowered your head when expected. But beneath the table your hands were clenched so tightly your nails bit crescents into your palms.

Valarr, seated beside you, went still after some time.

Then, without announcement and without looking at you, he said quietly, “You need not stay until the final course. I can say you are tired from the journey.”

You turned, startled.

He only reached for his cup as if nothing of consequence had passed between you.

But when the roasted swan came out and every eye in that end of the hall was drawn toward some drunk Reach lord making too much of himself, Valarr rose and offered you his arm with princely ease.

“My lady wife has had a long day,” he said to those nearest. “I’ll see her to her chambers.”

There was no mockery in it. No impatience. Only simple understanding.

It should have meant nothing.

It meant everything.

Later, in the corridor beyond the hall, where the noise fell away behind thick stone and a pair of servants hurried past carrying trenchers slick with grease, you let out one long breath you had not known you were holding. Torches hissed in their brackets. A draft from some stairwell touched your cheeks coolly through the heat left by the feast.

Valarr glanced at you. “You looked as though you were about to bolt like a frightened doe.”

To his surprise, you laughed.

Not the little polished court laugh women learned young, the one meant to smooth over a man’s vanity. This laugh was warmer, younger, unguarded. It eased something in his face in answer.

“I may yet,” you said.

“That would be difficult in those skirts.”

You looked down at the heavy fall of crimson silk and, for the first time since coming to court, smiled with your whole mouth.

That was how it began.

Not with passion. Not even with hope at first. Only with the dangerous tenderness of being seen.

He did other things too, all of them small enough that another woman might have called them nothing at all. You, being made as you were, made a home of them. He noticed you ate little at feasts and had simpler food sent up afterward—warm bread, honeyed apples, broth with herbs—saying only that royal cooks ruined everything by over-seasoning it. In crowded corridors, he shifted so careless young knights and swaggering men-at-arms had to go around you rather than brush too close. Once, when you woke from a bad dream in the Red Keep—strange stone, stranger bed, no sound of the sea, only the vast uneasy silence of a place full of watchers—you found a lamp had been left burning low. He had noticed, on the second night of your marriage, that you slept poorly in darkness. He never mentioned it.

You loved him for that most of all.

You were not a woman who fell quickly, but you fell completely.

Quiet women often did. They loved in hidden, stubborn ways. They built whole cathedrals inside themselves and let no one hear the labour of the stone. By the time you were carrying your first son, you were already his in every way that mattered, not merely by law, nor by bed, nor by duty, but in that soft and terrible place where a wife begins to turn toward her husband before anyone else in the room, where she saves thoughts for him, where evening feels unfinished until his step sounds in the corridor.

The handmaidens chosen for you by the royal household saw it before anyone. Ellyn saw how you brightened when Valarr came unexpectedly to break his fast with you. Myria saw how you kept the books he favored nearest the chair by the window. Ysilla saw how you wore more black and red than crimson and gold after marriage, not because anyone asked it of you, but because you wanted to please him. They saw, too, how frightened you were of wanting too much.

And perhaps you had reason.

Because you were everything a prince ought to have wanted. Beautiful, dutiful, gentle, highborn, fertile. The court said so often enough. They praised your grace, your modesty, the calm way you carried yourself through the dragon-haunted strangeness of King’s Landing. They said you were a good wife to the second heir to the Iron Throne. They said you would be a good mother to princes. In time, they would say you might even be a good queen.

You were lovely enough to be admired. Soft enough to be praised. Obedient enough to make old men nod in approval.

And still, in your husband’s eyes, you lived beneath another woman’s shadow.

Keira.

Not because he was dishonorable. That was the misery of it. Valarr was married to you now. Keira was wed to Daeron. He did not touch her. He did not shame you with open disloyalty. He was too decent, and too proud, for that. He respected the life that had been laid before him. He came to your bed. He gave you sons. He stood where a husband ought to stand.

But sometimes respect was not the same thing as surrender.

Because Keira had not been some passing fancy. She had not been a pretty stranger glimpsed across a feast hall. She and Valarr had spoken first. Walked first. Laughed first. They had become close in the quiet, unguarded way two young people sometimes did before anyone named it aloud. There had been gardens, and hawking fields, and those long, easy conversations that taught one person the shape of another. By the time the court began speaking of them as a likely match, the ground had already been laid.

Then the plans changed.

Daeron was offered Keira.

Valarr was promised you.

No vows were broken, because none had been spoken. No betrayal had happened, because the world had cut them off before either could claim such a word. That only made it worse. Their story had not ended in scandal or sin. It had ended in silence, in duty, in a future folded away before it had fully begun.

And so it lingered.

Not in any way the realm could condemn. Only in the small, unbearable ways a wife noticed and no one else did.

In the way his face would still alter, faintly, when Keira laughed from across a room. In the way he never overstepped, never lingered too openly, and yet seemed to go still for half a breath whenever she entered his notice. In the way older courtiers still smiled sometimes when their names rose together in talk, as though remembering some gentler version of the future before politics had done what politics always did and laid human hearts out like pieces on a board.

And Keira herself was not innocent in it.

Not cruel, perhaps. Never openly. Never enough to disgrace herself. But darker than simple kindness allowed.

She moved through the Red Keep as though she belonged there, and that belonging itself felt like a quiet triumph. She spoke to Prince Baelor without seeming foolish. She laughed with Daeron’s kin and was laughed with in return. At feasts, no one mistook her pauses for uncertainty. At hunts, she rode with the men, speaking over hoofbeats as though she had been born to it.

And when she looked at Valarr, sometimes there was still something there.

Not enough for anyone to name.

Only enough for you to feel.

Enough to make your stomach turn cold.

Enough to make you understand that though she had married Daeron, some corner of her still kept the memory of what might have been. Not because she wanted to take him from you now. Not because she meant to start some vulgar little war between women. But because certain feelings, once grown properly, did not die only because wiser people arranged otherwise.

That was the cruelty of all of it.

He did not cheat on you.

She did not tempt him.

No one crossed the line.

And still you knew, with the miserable certainty of a wife who loved too deeply, that you did not have him whole.

Once, after a feast where Keira had moved through the room with her usual easy grace, you found yourself alone with her by a bank of candles guttering low beneath painted saints.

“You are well loved here,” you said before you meant to.

Keira looked at you then, really looked, and some brightness went out of her face.

“No,” she said softly. “Only well worn-in.”

You blinked, startled.

She traced one finger along the stem of her wine cup. “Do not mistake fitting into a room for belonging to it.”

Then, after the smallest pause, she said, “Men are not the only ones who learn to live with what they were given.”

That was when you understood.

Keira had wanted him too.

Not foolishly. Not all at once. But slowly, in the dangerous way friendship became fondness and fondness became something neither of them had been allowed to finish.

You had married him.

She had not.

And still, some part of her looked at you and saw the woman who had been given the life she once thought might be hers.

That was the first time you hated her a little.

Not because she was cruel.

Because she was honest.

Because in that one quiet sentence, she told you she knew exactly what sat between the three of you, and had chosen to carry it so gracefully that no one would ever dare call it grief.

Then someone called her name, and she turned away before you could answer.

You thought of that moment more often than you wanted.

Because in the end, it seemed true of all three of you.

Keira had lost the life she might once have had.

Valarr was trying.

That was the worst part.

If he had been cruel, perhaps you could have hated him. But he was only blind, and there was no easy way to stop loving a man who kept reaching for the life before him and still failed to see it.

At first, you told yourself it did not matter.

Valarr had married you. He had come to your bed. He had touched your belly when your first son moved and smiled in wonder. He had stood over you after the birth, smelling of leather and wind and cold air from the yard, and bent to the babe with a softness you had never seen him turn on anyone.

“A son,” he said.

You, white with exhaustion, damp-haired, aching from two days’ labor, looked up at him with something terribly hopeful still alive in your eyes. “Yes,” you whispered. “A son.”

He touched the child’s cheek. His face changed then, softened by wonder in a way that made you love him a little more, poor thing. You thought perhaps this was how doors opened. Through children. Through patience. Through quiet trying.

“What shall we name him?” you asked.

Valarr did not answer at once. His fingers were still on the babe’s face. “Aelor,” he said finally.

It was a prince’s name. A good name.

You smiled, tired and radiant. “Aelor, then.”

Valarr kissed the child’s brow. He kissed your forehead too, but only briefly, and perhaps only because the midwife stood watching.

You told yourself it was enough.

Women had made whole lives from less.

You learned his habits with the devotion of someone trying to solve a riddle no one else believed existed. You learned how he liked what wine he preferred during evening meals in the winter, what books he reached for when angered, how he hated too much noise at supper after council, and how he softened at the sound of a child laughing nearby. You kept his household well. You bore yourself with dignity among dragonlords and vipers. You learned High Valyrian lullabies, though the words felt awkward in your lion’s mouth.

You wrote letters home and waited for letters back. At first, you wrote carefully bright things: the weather, the beauty of the royal gardens in spring, the little kindnesses of court, the way Prince Valarr had once noticed when you were overwhelmed at a feast and brought you away without embarrassing you, the way he warmed your side of the bed in winter, the way he smiled, once, when the babe first closed a hand around his finger.

The replies came late, smelling of cedar and sealing wax and distance.

Your mother wrote of her health, of which cousins were soon to wed, of a septon newly come to the Rock.

Your father wrote less.

When Aelor was born, the letter from the west was rich parchment and fine words. You have done your house honour. A son strengthens your place. The realm sees your worth now.

You read it twice.

Then a third time, more slowly, searching for something else between the lines. Are you well? Are you happy? Does he cherish you? Are you lonely?

There was none of that.

After Baelon, the message was colder still in its own polished way. A second son brings further pride to your name and secures your position admirably. You have done all that was asked of you.

All that was asked of you.

You folded the letter carefully, set it aside, and cried so quietly that Myria, seated only a few feet away with embroidery in her lap, did not at first understand what she was hearing.

There were moments, too, when you tried very hard to belong not only to Valarr, but to his world. You tried to sit with him when his kin were present, but Targaryen talk moved strangely around you—old names, old grievances, dragon memories you had no part in, glances that carried the weight of shared blood. You would add a word here or there, smile where you ought, ask a question politely, and feel at once the slight pause that came after, the subtle shifting of a conversation that had not truly expected your shape within it.

No one was unkind.

That was the misery of it.

Prince Baelor, your father-in-law, grave and measured in all things, would always speak to you with perfect princely respect. He was never unkind. That was part of the hurt. But when you tried, once, to ask his thoughts on some hawk from the Reach that Valarr had mentioned admiring, Baelor answered kindly enough and then turned almost at once to one of his brothers over some question of levies and patrol roads. You stood there smiling with your hands folded while their voices moved on around you like water over stone.

It was not that he disliked you.

It was worse.

You were dutiful. Quiet. Manageable. In a household crowded with louder tempers and more difficult kin, you were never thought likely to cause scandal, discord, or trouble. Others drew the eye because they were troublesome, glittering, or politically useful.

You were simply the one no one worried about.

And in a court like that, a woman who brought no trouble was too easily mistaken for a woman who needed nothing at all.

You felt foolish afterward for minding.

Foolish for wanting more than courtesy.

Foolish for thinking that becoming a wife ought to have made you less of an outcast in your own husband’s family than you had been on the day you arrived.

At first, Valarr noticed some of these things.

He simply did not understand what noticing required of him.

Then your second son was born.

By then, the court called yours a strong marriage. Fruitful. Fortunate. A prince with two healthy heirs and a lady wife who comported herself flawlessly—what more could a man ask? Men toasted him for his good fortune. Women praised your grace, your gowns, your modesty, your sons. Singers called you the Golden Princess. Only those who watched closely saw that you smiled less.

Valarr still came to your chambers, though less often after the second child. At first, you thought it was weariness. Court had grown heavier around him. His father pressed more upon him. The realm always wanted something from men born too near crowns. Then one evening, while he fastened the clasp of his mantle before the fire and the nursery beyond the inner door murmured with soft child-sounds, you asked very gently, “Will you come to me later?”

He did not even turn.

“I have heirs enough,” he said.

The silence after was so complete that you could hear a torch sputtering in the corridor beyond and the faint scrape of a maid’s slipper over the rushes outside the door.

You sat at your dressing table with your hair half-braided, staring at his reflection in the polished silver mirror. He had not meant, perhaps, for the words to sound as they did. Valarr had a rare gift for the wound he did not intend.

Still, he had said them.

Not, I am tired. Not forgive me. Only that.

As if you had been something to pass through, and now pass beyond.

He must have felt something of the change afterward, because he began bringing you gifts: a hawking glove from Myr, a comb of worked ivory, a length of sea-green silk, a carved cradle-piece for little Baelon, a silver mirror backed with lions and dragons twined together.

They were all costly. They were all beautifully made.

Not one of them was right.

The glove was stitched in the Tyroshi style Keira had once worn. The silk was a shade you despised against your skin. The comb was too delicate for the braids you favored. The mirror was a princely apology offered by a man too cowardly to speak plain words.

You thanked him for each one with perfect courtesy.

Then came the morning that killed something in you.

It was early, scarcely light. The room still held that bluish hush before dawn when everything seemed suspended between worlds. Your younger son had cried in the night and been carried off again by his nurse only a little while before. You had not gone back to sleep properly after. You lay awake beside Valarr, one hand resting over the ache in your side, watching the first pale seam of day beneath the curtains and listening to his breathing in the dark.

He stirred beside you then, not fully waking, his face still turned into the pillow. For one small foolish moment, you thought he was troubled. His brow had drawn faintly, and there was something strained in the way he breathed, as though some dream had hold of him. Without thinking, with the softness that had always been your ruin, you reached for him. Your hand came to rest on his bare shoulder, gentle, instinctive, almost tender enough to be a prayer.

And then, rough with sleep, still half-lost to whatever place he had wandered in dreams, he murmured one name.

“Keira.”

The world did not shatter loudly.

That would have been kinder.

It only went very still.

Your fingers slipped from his shoulder as though you had touched iron in a flame. At first you thought you must have imagined it. You had to have imagined it. But the cold came at once, thin and sharp and absolute, running through you from the inside out like sea-wind in winter. Valarr breathed once more, deeper now, and opened his eyes a little. He saw you sitting upright. He saw your face.

And in that instant, he knew.

“[Y/N]—”

You had already risen.

He pushed himself up, all sleep gone, horror rushing in where drowsiness had been. “[Y/N], wait.”

You crossed the chamber barefoot, one hand hard against your mouth as if to hold something inside yourself—not anger, not words, but some smaller, uglier, more humiliating sound. That was the cruelty of it. You had reached for him to soothe him, thinking he was uneasy, thinking perhaps he needed comfort, and instead he had opened his sleep-ravaged mouth and given you another woman’s name as though it lived somewhere truer in him than you ever had.

“Listen to me,” Valarr said, rising after you. “I did not mean—”

You turned then.

He had seen you grave, shy, dutiful, pale with childbirth, smiling with your sons, overwhelmed in crowded halls, but never like that. Never stripped so bare of composure. You looked as though he had struck you.

Not only hurt. Shamed.

Keira. Another woman’s name, from your own husband’s mouth, spoken in your bed while dawn still lay over the marriage like a blessing not yet spent.

Your lips trembled once. “I know,” you whispered.

That was what undid him. Not accusation. Not fury. Only that soft, awful answer.

I know. I know you did not mean it, which means it was true enough to live beneath thought. I know there is still a place in you where I am not the woman you wake beside. I know I reached for you in kindness, and you answered me with the shape of someone else.

Tears rose despite your pride. They came too quickly, too hot, too helpless. You turned away sharply, but not before he saw them. And once he saw them, you hated it all the more, because now even this grief—which felt private, humiliating, too raw to survive daylight—had become something witnessed.

Valarr took a step toward you and stopped, because he did not know how to cross the distance he had made with one word.

“[Y/N]—please.”

You laughed then, and it was a dreadful little sound, broken straight through. “Do not,” you said, your voice shaking so badly you scarcely knew it for your own. “Do not beg me not to feel it. You have already said it.”

He reached for you then, not boldly and not even with certainty, but like a man who had finally understood that you had not been made of stone, only taught to stand still while he hurt you.

You flinched from him.

That seemed to wound him too, but not enough. Never enough.

Your breath broke on the next inhale. You covered your mouth harder with your hand, but it was no use. The sound came anyway, small and torn and mortifyingly real. Not graceful tears. Not silent suffering. A wounded sound, the sound of a woman who had held herself together for too long and discovered too late that the thing splitting her open would not even have the decency to do it in private.

Then you fled into your dressing room and shut the door between you.

He heard you crying.

That was the worst memory of his life afterward. Not the name itself, though that would have been wound enough. It was the sound of you weeping on the other side of a door, where you thought he could not reach you, and his own uselessness before it. Prince of the realm, husband in name, and still unable to mend what he had broken because he had never learned how to kneel before grief he himself had caused.

Inside, Ellyn found you first. You had sunk onto the stool before the mirror, one hand pressed to your chest as though you might still your own heart by force. Your hair had fallen loose over one shoulder. Tears slid down your face helplessly, no longer quiet, no longer controlled. You had cried silently before. This was worse. This was breath catching and shoulders shaking and the miserable humiliation of being unable to stop.

Ellyn dropped to her knees at once. “Oh, my sweet lady,” she murmured.

That broke what little composure remained.

You bent forward and covered your face, and then you were sobbing in earnest, your whole body shaking with it. Myria came running at the sound. Ysilla shut the outer door and drew the curtains before any passing servant or curious groom in the corridor could glimpse you undone. No one asked you anything at first. They simply gathered around you. Myria held your hands. Ysilla fetched cool water no one drank. Ellyn pressed your head against her breast as if you were no princess at all, only a girl far from home who had loved unwisely and been made to know it.

When you finally managed to speak, it came out raw and small and ruined.

“I thought—” You had to stop. Your breath caught again. “I thought he was having a nightmare.”

Ellyn made a sound then, one of those quiet wounded noises women make for one another when words are not enough.

“I touched him because I thought—” Your voice broke completely. “I thought he was troubled.”

That was somehow worse than the name itself. Worse because it laid your tenderness bare. Worse because it meant you had gone to comfort him and been answered with another woman’s ghost.

Then came the truth that had been choking you from the moment it happened, and once it was out you could not stop it.

“I tried so hard,” you whispered. “I tried so hard to be enough.”

Ellyn’s eyes filled. “You were never meant to earn what should have been given freely.”

After that, you changed.

Not at once. Not sharply enough that a man like Valarr—emotionally armored, proud, slow in all matters of the heart—could point to the very day and say, there, there is where I lost her. But the change came all the same.

You remained perfectly dutiful.

That was part of the tragedy. Had you screamed, or raged, or publicly shamed him, the court would have named it a quarrel and expected its end. You did none of that. If anything, you became more flawless.

You dressed with exquisite care. You stood beside him in public without misstep. You managed the household superbly. You gave him no scandal. You continued to be gentle with your sons, and soon the court began to praise you not merely as a great lady, but as the very model of what a prince’s wife should be. Shy, they called you now. Reserved. Pious. A little sad, perhaps, but sweet with your children. And oh, how devoted you were as a mother.

That part was true.

People saw you in the gardens with Aelor and Baelon, your golden head bent while they chattered over pebbles and petals and insects caught in childish hands. They saw you kneel without complaint to tie a little shoe, to wipe a mouth, to kiss a scraped palm. They saw how your face softened for your sons in a way it never did for anyone else. Women at court began speaking of you tenderly. Poor shy Lady [Y/N]. So pretty. So well-mannered. Such a good wife. Such a good mother.

And because the world was cruel in ordinary ways, they praised you most just as you became loneliest.

After the second boy was born,

Valarr did not become cruel in any way that court singers would have understood. He did not raise his hand to you. He did not shame you before the realm. He did not bring whores beneath your roof or make a spectacle of betrayal. In some ways, that made it worse. He became, instead, the sort of man whose neglect could be mistaken for virtue.

He loved his sons.

Gods, how he loved them.

He would return from the yard smelling of horse and leather and cold air, and the moment he crossed the threshold of your chambers, his face would change for the boys in a way it no longer changed for you. Aelor would cry out and Baelon would reach with both arms, and Valarr would go to them at once, smiling with that unguarded tenderness you had once thought, in the first sweetness of marriage, might one day be yours too. He would lift one child high and settle the other against his hip, laughing when little hands caught in his hair or tugged at the chain about his throat.

You would rise when he entered, because wives did, because princesses did, because some part of you still did it in hope rather than habit.

Often, he would not even see that you had risen until after the boys had been kissed, admired, and praised.

“Look at you,” he would say to them, warm as summer. “Have you tormented your lady mother all day? Have you eaten well? Has Baelon’s cough eased? Has Aelor been brave?”

Only then, sometimes, would his eyes flick to you.

“You ought not keep them up too late.”

“They should have thicker cloaks in this wind.”

Always through the children.

Always around you, rather than to you.

You learned there were griefs so small and daily that no one named them. To stand in your own chamber, hands folded in silk, and watch your husband smile as though the room had become blessed simply because his sons were in it, while the woman who had borne them stood only a few feet away and might as well have been another carved chair. To know he was not a bad man, not truly, only a man who had somehow placed all his softness in one part of his life and left the rest to starve. To be unable even to resent him properly, because the sight of him loving your children was beautiful, and you had prayed for that beauty before either boy had drawn breath.

That was the shameful part.

You were glad he loved them.

You only wished he did not seem to love them in place of you.

Once, in early autumn, you gathered your courage and asked if you might all go hawking together—only the four of you. Your voice was careful when you said it, as if softness itself might save the request from being damaged.

“The weather is fair,” you told him. “Aelor has been begging to see the birds flown, and Baelon loves the horses. Might we go, just us?”

Valarr looked almost surprised, then agreeable enough. “If you like.”

For a day and a half, you were absurdly happy.

You chose warm wool for the boys yourself. You had little gloves lined in fur brought out for Aelor. You made certain Baelon’s hood was mended where the stitch had loosened. You packed honey cakes and apples sliced small, a flask of watered wine for Valarr, and sweet milk for the children. You dressed not as a princess at court, but as a wife hoping to be a wife, in a dark green riding gown that would not startle the hawks. Even Ellyn smiled to see the color in your face.

When the morning came, the yard was crisp with cold and the sky pale as hammered steel. The horses were saddled. The boys were bundled and shining with excitement. You had Baelon in your arms and Aelor tugging at your sleeve when Valarr came down the steps.

He was not alone.

Prince Baelor was with him. So were two uncles, three cousins, and a knot of sworn men behind them. One of the hawk-masters came too, along with a pair of young pages, and by the time the little party moved out through the gate, it had become not a family day at all but something half progress, half princely outing, full of male voices and easy familiarity and the old blood-kinship from which you always stood a little apart.

Valarr seemed not to notice.

Or worse, perhaps he did notice and thought nothing was amiss.

“Aelor, ride with your grandsire” Baelor said, and Aelor went delightedly, because he was a child and proud of such things.

One cousin took up a conversation with Valarr about hounds and a boar seen three days earlier in the kingswood. An uncle laughed over some old hunting memory. The hawks shifted and rustled. Leather creaked. Hooves struck the frosted ground.

You rode at the edge with Baelon before you and your little basket strapped behind the saddle.

Every now and then, Aelor would twist around in his seat to look for you, waving when he found you and shouting, “Mother, look!” each time a hawk lifted, or a dog barked, or a horse stamped. Baelon kept patting your gloved hand and leaning back against your breast as if, by childish instinct, he knew you needed the closeness more than he did. When the company halted near a thin stand of leaf-bare trees, you dismounted and laid out the food you had packed for the four of you.

The pages and grooms ate it too.

Valarr praised the cakes without realizing what he was saying. “These were well thought of.”

When you finally went to your chamber, Ellyn helped unpin your hair and found dried salt at your temples where the wind had touched tears you had never wiped away.

There was another time.

Months later, when you asked again—not for hawking this time, but for something simpler.

The market.

Nothing grand. Nothing intimate enough to frighten him, you thought. The city was lively that morning, the weather fair, and the boys were old enough now to be delighted by cluttered stalls and sugared almonds and toy sellers and little carved beasts. You thought perhaps that was safe enough. A family thing. A public thing. A modest thing. By then, you had learned not to ask for too much.

So you waited until Valarr had broken his fast and the boys were still talking eagerly over some little painted cart Aelor had seen from a window the day before.

“There is a market near the Street of Flour,” you said, keeping your tone light. “The children would enjoy it, I think. We might all go together. Just for an hour.”

Valarr was reading some note from council. He looked up only after a moment.

“The market?”

“Yes.” You smiled, because smiling made requests sound smaller. Safer. “Aelor would like the toy stalls. Baelon loves anything with wheels. And there is a woman who sells sugared apples in the autumn. I thought—”

“It is a good idea, wife,” he said.

Your heart rose too quickly.

Then he added, in the same practical tone one might use when discussing cloaks or horses, “But I think I should take only the boys.”

You went still.

Valarr folded the note once. “The streets will be crowded. It would slow things if all of us went.”

The room remained warm. Somewhere behind you, Baelon was humming to himself over a crust of bread. Aelor had started talking about apples without understanding any of it.

You heard your own voice come out very small. “Slow things.”

“I only mean,” Valarr said, not quite looking at you fully, “with guards and nursemaids and the children and you besides, it becomes more of an event than an outing. They will enjoy it better if it is simple.”

If you are not there, the words seemed to finish.

You stood very still. “I see.”

He must have heard something in your voice then, because he frowned faintly. “It was not meant unkindly.”

That almost made it worse.

“Of course not,” you said.

Aelor looked up from the table. “Mother, are you coming?”

You smiled at him. You had become so very good at smiling. “No, sweetling. Today you shall have your father to yourself.”

Baelon, hearing only the uncertainty in your tone, stretched his arms toward you at once, and you took him up because otherwise you might have begun to cry before everyone.

Valarr rose. “Have them dressed warmly.”

You nearly laughed again at that. Warmly. As if you had not already thought of their cloaks, their mittens, the scarf Aelor complained of but always needed. As if mothers did not live inside such details by reflex.

When he had gone, taking with him the sound and certainty of the outing, you stood in the middle of the chamber with Baelon on your hip and felt, for one humiliating instant, as though someone had slapped you.

Ellyn found you a little later in the dressing room, not yet changed, still with Baelon’s little shoe in your hand because you had been the one lacing it when Valarr told you that you would not be coming.

“My lady?” she said carefully.

You did not turn. “He said it would be slowed down if all of us went.”

Ellyn closed her eyes.

You gave a thin, breathless laugh. “All of us. I am all of us.”

Then, because the boys were already laughing in the courtyard below and you could hear Aelor calling excitedly about horses and sweets and carts, you pressed the shoe to your mouth and cried without making a sound.

When they returned, Aelor came bursting in with stories about ribbons and nuts and a painted spinning top. Baelon had sugar on one cheek and a little wooden cart tucked in both hands. They were delighted. They loved you. They climbed into your lap at once and tried to tell you everything all at once, as if by saying it to you they could somehow include you after the fact.

You kissed them and listened and smiled in all the right places.

Then later, after they slept, you broke over the sight of the little market basket still sitting unused by the door.

These were the griefs no one wrote songs for.

The market basket untouched.

The riding cakes eaten by pages.

The waiting lamp gone dark.

The seat beside him filled by sons and cousins and fathers and not by you.

The way he would say good idea, wife and make you feel, for one heartbeat, chosen, only to brush you aside with perfect reasonableness the next.

You stopped trying to fill every silence after that.

At supper, you no longer told little stories from the west that no one in King’s Landing understood. You no longer placed the choicest pieces on Valarr’s plate before he could reach for them. You no longer reminded Aelor to tell his father what he had learned that morning. You ate what was before you and let the clicking of utensils fill the long spaces where a wife’s warmth had once been.

The boys noticed, though children never knew how to name what they noticed.

Once, Aelor climbed onto the bench beside you and asked, puzzled, “Mother, why do you not give Father the honey anymore?”

You nearly dropped your spoon.

“I think,” you said after a long pause, “your father can reach it himself.”

The child considered that with solemn seriousness and then pushed the honey dish toward Valarr anyway, because children hated imbalance instinctively.

Valarr thanked him.

He did not understand why you looked away.

So the days went on.

The court went on mistaking your ruin for grace.

And still, you loved him.

That was the true humiliation of it.

That night, after the boys had finally been coaxed to sleep, you remained in the nursery long after there was any need for it.

Aelor had one hand curled into his blanket. Baelon had turned onto his side, cheek soft against the pillow, breathing in the deep, even rhythm of the truly sleeping. The brazier had burned low. Candlelight trembled against the walls and turned the carved beasts upon the bedposts into long, wavering shadows. You sat upon the floor between them, your back resting against the settle, one hand still lying loose upon Baelon’s coverlet as though, if either child stirred, you meant to soothe him before he woke.

You did not hear Valarr come in at first.

It was only when he spoke that you looked up.

“You will wake stiff there,” he said quietly.

His voice was low enough not to wake the children.

You looked at him, then back at your sons. “I had not meant to stay.”

But that was not true, and both of you knew it.

For a moment he said nothing. He stood in the doorway with one hand braced lightly against the frame, still in his shirt and half-undone doublet, as though he had come looking for you and had not expected to find you here like this, hidden amongst the little quiet breaths of your children.

Then he stepped inside.

The floor gave a faint creak beneath his weight. He stopped first at Baelon’s bedside and drew the blanket a little higher over the child’s shoulder. It was such a small gesture that it ought not to have mattered. But you watched his hands do it, careful and gentle, and felt that old ache move through you again.

When he turned back to you, he did not speak at once.

Instead, to your surprise, he lowered himself down before you.

Not onto the settle. Not into one of the carved chairs.

Down.

Kneeling.

That alone was enough to make your breath catch.

He did not reach for you. Perhaps he knew you might pull away. Perhaps he feared you would.

The nursery was very still. Beyond the shuttered window, somewhere in the yard below, a guard’s step passed and faded. Aelor sighed once in his sleep and settled again.

Valarr looked at the rushes, then at his own hands, and only after that at you.

“I do not know how to mend this,” he said.

You went so still it almost hurt.

His mouth tightened, as though even that much truth sat badly on his pride.

“But I know,” he said, more roughly now, “that I have done you wrong in ways I was too blind to see while they were still small.”

You stared at him.

He let out one slow breath. “I thought being dutiful to you was enough.”

The words seemed to fall between you and stay there.

You looked away first.

The candle near Baelon’s bed had bent low enough that wax had begun to spill crookedly down one side. You fixed your gaze on that instead, because looking at Valarr while he said such things felt more dangerous than you knew how to bear.

He spoke again, quieter now.

“I think perhaps I have hidden inside duty,” he said, “because it was easier than admitting I did not know how to be better than dutiful.”

Something in your chest tightened so sharply you had to press your hand against your skirt.

“You do not need to say this now,” you whispered.

“Yes,” he said. “I do.”

That silenced you.

He swallowed once. In the low light, he looked younger somehow. Not softer, not quite, but less armoured. Less princely. Only a man at last standing before the hurt he had made and finding no clean way around it.

“You have given me more grace than I earned,” he said. “You have given me sons. You have kept my house. You have borne…” He stopped, and for the first time his voice faltered. “You have borne me at my worst, and I let you do it alone.”

Your eyes burned at once.

You hated that they did.

You hated more that some part of you, bruised and foolish and still too full of love, wanted so badly to believe him that it felt like another humiliation all its own.

Valarr looked at you then in a way he had not in a very long time. Not glancing. Not passing over. Looking.

“You deserved more than courtesy from me,” he said. “You deserved to be cherished.”

Your breath shook on the way out.

That was the word, then.

Not duty. Not kindness. Not patience.

Cherished.

You had not known until that moment how badly you needed to hear it spoken aloud, or how cruel it was that it should come now, when you were already too wounded to receive it cleanly.

For a moment neither of you moved.

Then, very carefully, as though approaching a frightened creature that might still startle and run, he lifted one hand and laid it over yours where it rested clenched in your lap.

His palm was warm.

You did not pull away.

That was the mercy you gave him.

Only that.

His thumb moved once, a small, unthinking stroke across your knuckles, and you nearly broke at the tenderness of it because it came so late, so simply, and from the same man who had taught you to live on so little.

“I cannot unsay what I said,” he murmured.

No. He could not.

The wound of it still lived between you.

But he was here now, kneeling on the nursery floor while your sons slept only feet away, speaking as though duty had finally failed him and left him no shield but honesty.

You looked at your joined hands and said nothing.

After a long while, Valarr bowed his head over them.

Not a prince’s bow. Not something formal. Only a tired, aching lowering of himself, as though shame had at last found the proper posture for his body.

When he spoke again, his voice was barely above a whisper.

“But if you will let me,” he said, “I would learn.”

That was all.

Not a vow.

Not a promise grand enough to heal you.

Only a beginning so small it might have been mistaken for nothing.

And perhaps that was why it hurt so much.

Because even then, with his hand over yours and your children sleeping near enough to hear if either of you wept, hope still came like pain in another dress.

So when the red-cloak guard came,

it felt less like temptation than like grief taking on another shape.

His name was Ser Lucan Hill, though once, long ago in the warm sunlit yards beneath Casterly Rock, he had only been Lucan. A boy with wind-burnt cheeks and scraped knees and a wooden sword forever tucked beneath one arm. His mother had served a lesser household branch tied to the Rock, and Lucan had grown beneath lion banners all his life. As children, he had played with you in those half-wild, half-guarded ways children of unequal station sometimes did before adults remembered themselves. Once, when you were very small, you had given him one of your toys to share—an old carved lion with one ear slightly blunted where you had dropped it on stone. He had treasured it absurdly. Beneath a stair-arch one hot summer afternoon, you had both made a childish promise over it, solemn as septons, that one day you would be husband and wife, because children thought love meant only I like you best, so you shall stay.

Then you had grown.

And he had not stayed.

He rose instead. Not high enough to dream madly, never that, but high enough for a crimson cloak and a sword at his hip and the grave reserve of a man who had learned the line between wanting and speaking.

You spoke to Lucan only once alone.

Not truly alone, of course. Nothing in King’s Landing is ever truly alone. There are always footsteps somewhere beyond the turn of a passage, always servants with lowered eyes, always guards at a distance pretending not to listen. But for a little while, there are only the two of you beneath a narrow stone gallery where the late light slants red through the arrow-slits and paints bars across the floor.

He stands in his crimson cloak with his hands clasped behind his back, as if he is afraid to let them hang loose lest they betray him. He is broader now than the boy you once knew, quieter too, but some things have not changed. He still tips his head a little when he is nervous. He still looks at you as though your silences mean something and are not merely empty spaces for other people to fill.

“My lady,” he says.

You almost laugh at that, though there is nothing funny in it. Once, he called you [Y/N] with scraped knees and dirt on his cheek and a wooden lion clutched in his fist. Once you had both been small and foolish enough to think that liking someone best was the same thing as being allowed to keep them.

Now he calls you my lady.

Now you are a prince’s wife.

Now he stands with the care of a man who knows exactly how dangerous tenderness can be when spoken aloud.

“You need not be so formal with me,” you say, though your voice comes out softer than you meant it to.

“Yes,” he says after a pause. “I do.”

That hurts more than it ought.

For a little while neither of you speaks. Somewhere below in the yard a horse stamps. Farther off, a child laughs—one of yours, perhaps, though you cannot tell which. The sound rises bright and then is gone.

Lucan’s eyes flick to you and then away again. “You look tired.”

It is such a small sentence.

No prince has asked you that in earnest in a very long time.

You lower your gaze to your hands. “I am well.”

He does not insult either of you by pretending to believe it.

The light has shifted enough now to catch on the red of his cloak. It reminds you absurdly of summer at the Rock, of banners snapping over stone, of childish games in the yard. The memory comes so swiftly it almost steals your breath. You remember pressing the little carved lion into his hands because he had no toys of his own. You remember him looking at it as though you had given him the crown itself. You remember the two of you swearing beneath the stair-arch, with all the solemn stupidity of children, that one day he would be your husband and you would be his wife and the lion would sit between you so neither of you forgot.

You should not think of such things now.

You think of them anyway.

“Lucan,” you say, and the name feels dangerous in your mouth after all these years.

He goes very still.

You do not know why you ask it. Perhaps because you are lonelier than pride can survive. Perhaps because he is the only person in this place who ever looks at you and sees the girl you were before you became useful. Perhaps because some part of you wants to know whether you imagined that old childish tenderness, or whether it had lived somewhere real once.

“If things had been different,” you say quietly, “if we had found one another again when we were older—”

Your throat tightens.

You almost stop.

But you have already come this far, and pain has made you reckless in small quiet ways.

“If that had happened,” you finish, looking not at him but at the bars of red light on the floor, “do you think you might have been happy with me?”

The silence after is terrible.

Not empty. Full.

When you finally force yourself to look up, Lucan’s face has changed. There is grief in it now, plain and unhidden, the sort of grief only a man of low enough station and old enough love would ever dare carry before you without dressing it up as politeness.

He swallows once.

Then he says, very softly, “I liked you then more than I had any right to.”

Your breath catches.

He gives a short breath that is almost a laugh and not a laugh at all. “Gods, I was a fool for you.”

You stare at him.

No one has ever said anything so simple to you in a way that felt so devastating.

Lucan’s voice drops lower. “If the fates had been kinder in this life, I think I would have loved you a very long time.” He looks away then, jaw tightening once before he masters it. “And I think I would have spent that life trying to make you happy.”

You shut your eyes.

For one hideous, suspended moment, it feels as though your heart is being torn cleanly in two—the life you have, and the life no one ever meant you to have, laid side by side at last.

When you open your eyes again, he is still standing where he was, but there is distance in him now. Restraint. The old hard wall of understanding built back up brick by brick.

“But the fates were not so kind in this one,” he says.

Then he bowed, and when he straightened, he was a red-cloak guard again, and nothing more.

Later, much later, after your family has gone and the castle has swallowed the day whole, Ysilla comes to your chamber with a little parcel in her hands.

You know at once it must be from him.

Your heart begins to pound.

“Does Valarr know?” you ask, too quickly.

“No, my lady,” Ysilla says.

Ellyn is already crying. Myria will not meet your eyes.

You tell them you ought not take it. You say it because it is what ought to be said. Because you are a prince’s wife. Because you are a mother. Because somewhere beneath your ribs there is a small new heaviness you have not yet named aloud, though your body has already begun to know it in the queasy mornings, the strange weariness, and the way your gowns have started to sit differently across your middle.

Perhaps it is nothing.

Perhaps it is not.

You do not say a word of that either.

Myria kneels before you and whispers, “My lady, please.”

So you take the parcel.

Your fingers are trembling badly by the time you peel the wrapping back.

Inside is a small carved lion.

Plain wood. Smooth with age and handling. One ear blunted.

For a moment, the chamber disappears.

You are seven again in the Rock’s summer heat, pressing your favorite toy into a boy’s hands because he has none, because you like him best, because children think love means here, take what I treasure; I trust you with it. You hear your own little voice swearing that one day you will be husband and wife. You hear his answering promise, so earnest it had made you laugh.

He kept it.

All this time, he kept it.

Your hand closes around the lion, and the other goes, without thinking, to the slight tender secret low in your belly.

Then you begin to cry.

Not prettily. Not quietly, at first. It comes up through you like something breaking at last, and you bend over the little lion with your shoulders shaking while Ellyn catches you, Myria presses one hand to your back, and Ysilla turns toward the door to guard what little remains of your dignity.

Because he remembered.

Because he remembered the child you were.

Because somewhere beyond these walls there might have been a life in which that remembrance became a home instead of a wound.

And because, even now, with another child perhaps beginning its silent life beneath your heart, you know exactly where you will sleep tonight.

In the prince’s chambers.

In the great cold marriage.

In the life the fates chose.

You cry until there is no breath left in you, the little wooden lion clutched so tightly in your hand that the carved ear bites into your palm. Ellyn says your name once, very softly, as if she fears you might shatter completely if spoken to any louder. Myria is crying too. Ysilla has turned her face toward the door, guarding your grief the way other women guard jewels.

But none of them can help you.

Because the worst part is not the lion.

Not the memory.

Not even Lucan’s quiet voice in that red-lit passage, telling you that in a kinder life he thought he might have loved you a very long time.

The worst part is the hand that drifts, helpless and unthinking, to your belly.

The worst part is knowing that by this time next year, they will call you blessed again.

They would praise your beauty, your sweetness, your grace, your fertility.

No one would know that on the night you first held your third child beneath your heart, you were on the floor weeping over a little wooden lion and mourning the life you had never been allowed to live.

And that, perhaps, was the cruellest thing of all:

The realm would call her blessed for the very life she was mourning.

ACT I

Chapter 1 : Big plans require unexpected moves.

Chapter 2 : First impressions can make or break a union.

Chapter 3 : Cultural differences can cause misunderstandings.

Chapter 4 : Proceeding with caution is wise in a new environment.

Chapter 5 : Disrespect has consequences.

Chapter 6 : Desire ignites even in the coldest places.

Chapter 7 : What is said and what is meant can be two different things.

Chapter 8 : Southern court training has different strengths from the North.

Chapter 9 : Patience is a skill that can be honed.

Chapter 10 : There’s a time and place for subtlety.

Chapter 11 : There are many different ways to find warmth in the cold.

Chapter 12 : Promises must be made carefully.

Chapter 13 : Courtesy demands good manners.

Chapter 14 : Not every invitation is accepted.

Chapter 15 : One must be careful while mending bridges.

Chapter 16 : It's wise to pay attention to the signs.

Chapter 17 : Words can easily turn into oaths.

Chapter 18 : The heir to the north is raised not only to rule, but also to fight.

Chapter 19 : Honesty is the solution to many issues.

Chapter 20 :  Drinks can lead to recklessness.

Chapter 21 : Weddings can be very chaotic.

Chapter 22 : Harvest follows patience.

ACT II

Chapter 23 : After the wedding comes the honeymoon.

Chapter 24 :  Ladies of the southern court are taught to yield words like weapons.

Chapter 25 : Saying goodbye to family is always difficult.