A Husband I Never Had

POV: Matteo

"Can I speak to Matteo for a moment," Sofia said, her eyes flicking to Rhys, polite in a way that didn't match the tightness in her jaw. "Healer business. Won't take long."

"Of course," Rhys said, releasing my hand slowly, reluctant in a way that still felt strange to witness. "I'll be here."

Sofia didn't say anything the second we stepped into the corridor. She just looked at me, held my gaze a beat too long, something working behind her eyes that she clearly wasn't ready to put into words yet.

"What is it," I said. "Say it."

"Not yet," she said. "I need to be sure first."

"Sofia—"

"Trust me," she said, already turning to go, "for a little longer. Please."

She left before I could push further, and I stood there in the hallway with the same unease she'd carried into that room, small and cold, sitting right alongside the warmth I still felt from his hand around mine.

I told myself it was nothing. Healers were cautious by nature. That was all this was.

I went back in anyway, and the moment I sat down, Rhys's whole face shifted toward me like I was the only thing in the room worth looking at.

"Everything alright?" he asked.

"Fine," I said. "Just healer things."

He studied me a second longer than the answer warranted, but he let it go, the way this version of him let most things go when I didn't want to explain them.

"Tell me about us," he said instead. "If you don't mind. I keep trying to picture it and there's nothing there. Just you."

"What do you want to know."

"Everything," he said. "How we met. What our life looks like. Small things too, not just the important ones."

I sat there for a moment, turning the question over, feeling the weight of an opportunity I hadn't let myself name yet.

Two years I had spent as the footnote in every version of this marriage anyone else told. The council's version, where I was the dutiful consort who'd stepped up. My mother's version, where I was the practical one, never the beloved one. Even my own private version, edited down to what I could survive believing about myself.

Now, for the first time, I was the only one who got to write it.

"We met the week before the bonding," I said, choosing my words with more care than I'd ever used telling anyone anything. "It wasn't a long courtship. Everything happened fast, after my brother."

"That must have been hard," he said, quiet, and reached over to take my hand again like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"It was," I said. "But you were kind about it."

The lie left my mouth easier than I expected. Not a lie exactly. Just an absence, a careful editing of everything that had actually happened that night, the debt paid, the trembling hand, two years of cold mornings folded neatly out of the story before he could ask to see them.

"I like hearing that," he said, and something in his voice made my chest ache with how much he meant it. "I was worried, honestly. That I might have been someone difficult to love."

"You weren't," I said, and hated myself a little for how good it felt to say it.

We spent the rest of the afternoon like that. Him asking, gentle and unhurried, about small pieces of a life I'd actually lived alone. I told him which side of the bed I preferred, the left, and watched something soft cross his face like the detail mattered enormously to him.

"I want to remember that," he said. "Even if I have to be told twice."

"You take your coffee black before council meetings," I told him. "Sweet after."

"How do you know that."

"I pay attention," I said, and it was true, though I didn't tell him it had taken me two years of standing in doorways, unacknowledged, learning him from a distance he'd never once invited me to close.

"Nobody's ever paid that kind of attention to me before," he said. "Or maybe they have. I just don't remember it feeling like this."

I didn't correct him. I let the moment sit exactly where he'd put it, warm and undeserved and entirely mine to shape.

By the time evening came, I'd built him an entire history out of half-truths and careful omissions, a marriage that had never once existed the way I described it, and some traitor part of me didn't want to stop. For the first time since I was a child standing in my brother's doorway, I was the one whose version of events mattered. I was the one being listened to.

I hated how much I wanted to keep it that way.

"Was I good to you?" he asked, later, the question landing softer than it had the first time he'd asked it, but no less direct. "Before all this. I know you said it was complicated. I'd like the real answer, if you're willing to give it to me."

I froze.

The real answer sat in my chest like a stone I'd carried for two years, sharp-edged and heavy, ready to spill out if I let it. The wedding night. The photograph in his desk he'd never explained. The hand that only touched me for cameras. Every cold morning that had taught me love wasn't something I was going to be given, only something I might earn if I stayed useful enough.

"Rhys, I—"

I couldn't say it. Whatever fragile thing had grown between us in this hospital room over the last few days, whatever tenderness I'd been starving for since the moment the elder pronounced us bonded, I couldn't bring myself to be the one who cracked it open.

"I don't know how to answer that," I said instead, which was its own kind of coward's truth.

He watched me for a long moment, his eyes moving over my face like he was searching for something specific and not quite finding it.

Something flickered behind his gaze. Quick. Unreadable. Gone almost before I registered it was there at all, buried back beneath the soft, open expression he'd worn all afternoon.

I couldn't be sure I'd seen it at all.