2

Elara pov

I waited for him with a book open in my lap, though I couldn't tell you a word I read. The house had gone quiet in that muffled way it does after a death and a coronation happen under the same roof on the same day.

I kept the clinic paperwork on the nightstand where I could see it under the lamp. I planned to hand it to him the second he walked in, before either of us could talk our way into another conversation about titles. I rehearsed it in my head like lines for a play I was scared to perform.

Midnight came and went. I lit a second candle when the first one burned low, some dumb part of me convinced that if the room stayed bright enough he'd feel obligated to come back to it.

My phone buzzed a little after one. For one stupid second I thought it might be him.

It was a photograph.

Her, asleep, tucked against someone's arm, hair loose on a pillow that wasn't hers. Bare shoulders. I recognized the headboard — I'd picked it out myself, in our first year, from a craftsman two villages over.

My hand shook badly enough that I dropped the phone on the blanket. There's a kind of pain that shows up before the anger does, before you've built any armor around it, and it sits somewhere under your ribs, hot and stupidly physical. I actually pressed a hand to my own chest, like that would keep it from spreading. I kept thinking about his mouth on mine the morning he left, and trying to make that memory match the shoulders in the photo, and failing every time.

Another message came in before I'd finished with the first one.

*Already saw it? Still waiting up? Don't bother. He's not coming back tonight.*

I sat very still. A door closed somewhere down the hall, some other, unbothered life continuing on its normal track while mine fell apart in a four-inch square of light.

Another message.

*You really didn't know? He and his brother both came to me first, back when we were young. I turned them both down — there was only ever one of them I wanted, and it wasn't the one you married. That's when he started paying attention to you. You were what was left over.*

I typed back with fingers that didn't feel like mine. "We're fated mates. The Goddess bound us herself. You're lying, and it's working, but that doesn't make it true."

*Still on the Goddess story? Cute. Go look inside his ring. Our initials have been in there since before your vows. He's just never had a reason to take it off in front of you.*

The ring sat on the low table by the window, right where he'd left it hours ago, along with the coin on the leather cord and everything else he peels off at the end of a long day. Five years married, and I'd genuinely never thought to look inside the band. Why would you go looking for evidence against something you've never doubted?

I made myself get up. My legs didn't want to cooperate, same as the day the healer told me I was pregnant — some part of my body understanding before the rest of me did that things were about to change.

The ring was warmer than I expected. I tilted it toward the candle until the inside of the band caught the light.

Two sets of initials, worn soft from years of rubbing against skin. Hers. His.

I sat down hard, the ring pressed into my palm.

Memory has an ugly habit of rearranging itself once you've got a reason to look at it differently. That summer we both came of age — the one I'd always privately called the beginning of *us* — was also the summer he drank himself sick more nights than not, and I was the one who sat with him through it, wiped his face, walked him home. I'd thought that was him finally letting me in. It hadn't occurred to me until right now that it was the same summer his brother and Seraphine first showed up somewhere together, holding hands, and that whatever he was drowning that summer might not have had anything to do with grief at all.

I set the ring down like it had gotten too hot to hold.

"No," I said out loud, into the empty room, because I needed to hear it in my own voice. "I'm not building my life around a message from a woman who wants to hurt me." I'd ask him myself. I owed myself an answer I'd actually earned, not one handed to me by somebody gloating in the dark.

I put a hand on my stomach, checking again that the small, real thing was still there.

If everything she'd said turned out to be true, I'd leave. I'd take my pup and not look back.

I didn't know yet how soon that promise would get tested, or how much smaller my world was about to get first.