Chapter 17: A List I Couldn't Argue With

Damian POV

I didn't sleep much that night. I kept replaying it in my head, over and over, the flat way she said it. "I need you to help me find a mate.” No anger in her voice at all. That was the part that kept me up. Anger I could've argued with.

I found her the next morning in the garden shed, the same place she always seemed to be lately, sorting something dried and brittle between her fingers.

"You didn't mean what you said last night," I said, not even a greeting first. "Right?"

She didn't look up. "I meant it."

"You're hurt, Wren. Everything that's happened, it's fair you'd be angry, but this isn't the answer. Running off to marry some stranger isn't going to fix anything."

"I'm not running off to fix anything." She set down whatever she was holding, finally looking at me. "I'm asking to leave because I don't want to be here anymore. Those are different things."

"That's the hurt talking."

"Is it?" Something in her expression didn't shift, calm in a way that unsettled me more than tears would have. "Let's actually go through it, then. You tell me where the hurt ends and the facts begin."

"Wren…"

"No, really." She crossed her arms, settling in like she'd been waiting for exactly this conversation. "You think I'm just wounded and confused. Fine. Let's see if that holds up."

I didn't say anything. Some part of me already knew I wasn't going to like where this went.

"Fifteen years I was your sister," she said. "Then Calla came home, and within a year, I was the one everybody watched for signs of jealousy. Nobody watched her for signs of lying. That's fact one."

"That's not…"

"I'm not finished." Her voice stayed level, no heat rising in it at all. "You asked me to take the blame for something I didn't do. You told me it would repay the family. I believed you, because I loved you, and I went to prison for two years believing that love meant something to this family."

"I know. I've said I'm sorry for that."

"You have. Fact two… nobody visited me. Not once. Not you, not Mom, not anyone. Two years, Damian. No letters either."

I opened my mouth and closed it again. I didn't have a defense for that one. Never had.

"Fact three." She held up three fingers now, like she built this list a long time ago and was only now getting the chance to read it out loud. "I came home to find my room gone, my greenhouse turned into Calla's music room, my role caring for Mom handed to someone else entirely, and half the staff not even knowing who I was."

"We can fix all of that…"

"Fact four." She kept going, not even acknowledging the interruption. "You didn't defend me at yesterday's council meeting when a man questioned whether I even deserved to be in the room. You changed the subject."

"I told you, I'll talk to him…"

"Fact five." Her voice finally sharpened, just slightly, the first real crack in the calm. "Calla is quietly poisoning our mother with foxglove disguised as a heart tonic, and when I raised it, nobody in this house treated it like an emergency. They treated it like me being difficult."

That one landed harder than the others. I hadn't wanted to think too hard about that particular thread yet.

"So tell me," she said, "which one of those five things is the hurt talking, and which one is just what actually happened?"

I didn't have an answer. Every single thing she said was true. I lived through most of it myself, watched it happen with my own eyes, and somehow managed to convince myself none of it added up to anything worth this much finality.

"It's not that simple," I said finally, weak even to my own ears.

"It's exactly that simple," she said. "I've spent this whole time hoping something would change. Hoping you'd see it. Hoping Mom would see it. I'm done hoping. That's not the same as being hurt and irrational. It's just math, eventually. You add it all up, and you get an answer."

"And the answer is leaving."

"The answer is leaving," she confirmed.

I sat down on the little wooden stool by the door, because standing suddenly felt like too much effort. "Who?" I asked. "Who would you even want me to arrange this with?"

"Doesn't matter."

"It matters to me."

"Why?" She looked at me, genuinely curious now instead of frustrated. "You didn't care who I ended up with before I got sent away. Why does it matter now?"

"Because you're my sister, and I want you to at least end up somewhere decent, if you're really doing this."

She was quiet for a second, considering that.

"I don't have a preference," she said finally. "Someone reasonable. Someone who won't hurt me. Beyond that, I genuinely don't care who it is, Damian. I'm not looking for love. I had enough of hoping for things that never came through. I just need someone willing to take me somewhere that isn't here."

Something about the flatness in her voice when she said it, the total absence of any hope attached to the idea of a mate at all, hit me harder than if she'd been crying. Crying I could've held onto, could've promised to fix. This wasn't sadness. This was somebody who already stopped expecting anything good, arranging her own exit the same practical way she once managed Mom's medication schedule.

"Wren, that's not how it's supposed to work. A mate's supposed to matter to you."

"A lot of things are supposed to work a certain way." She picked her herbs back up, done with the conversation as far as she was concerned. "I've stopped counting on it."

I sat there a long moment after she went back to sorting, watching her hands move steady and unbothered through the dried stems, and I realized I had absolutely nothing left to argue with.

Every fact on her list was true. And the girl standing in front of me, asking for a stranger instead of a future, wasn't broken or confused.

She was just finished. And I didn't know how to fix that.