CHAPTER TEN — Anyway

LENA'S POV

I found the note in the morning.

Someone had slipped it under my door while I was sleeping. A small folded piece of paper, nothing special about it, just torn from a notepad. I almost stepped on it getting out of bed.

I picked it up and unfolded it.

Four words in Ghost's handwriting.

I would have anyway.

I stood there in my bare feet reading it three times. Then I sat down on the edge of the bed and read it again and felt something loosen in my chest that had been pulled tight since the moment he told me the truth about Edmund.

He did not have to write it down. He had already said it the night before. But he had written it anyway, which meant he wanted me to carry it with me, not just hear it once and wonder later if she had imagined it.

I folded it carefully and put it in the pocket of my sweatpants and went downstairs.

Ghost was at the kitchen table.

He looked up when I came in. His eyes went to my face the way they always did, reading something before I said anything. I sat down across from him and put the note on the table between us.

He looked at it. Then at me.

"You wrote it down," I said.

"Yes."

"Why."

He was quiet for a moment. "Because I wanted you to have it in a form you could keep," he said. "Spoken words are easy to second guess. Written ones are harder to argue with."

I looked at him across the table. At the hard jaw and the steady eyes and the man who had built a fortress and was currently doing the very careful work of letting someone inside it.

"I was angry with you yesterday," I said.

"I know."

"I am less angry today."

"I know that too," he said.

"The note helped," I said.

Something shifted in his expression. Warm and brief and real. "Good," he said.

I picked the note back up and put it back in my pocket.

We sat together in the quiet of the early morning kitchen and drank our coffee and did not need to fill the silence with anything and that felt like something significant. Like a door that had been stuck for a long time finally opening all the way.

Axel found us there twenty minutes later.

He stopped in the kitchen doorway, looked at the two of us at the table, and said nothing for approximately three seconds which was a record for Axel.

Then he went to the coffee pot and poured himself a mug and sat down beside me and said, "Are we good."

"We are good," I said.

He looked at Ghost. Ghost nodded once. Axel visibly relaxed in a way that told me he had been carrying the tension of the last two days more than he had shown.

"Good," Axel said. "Because I have been walking around this compound like I was waiting for something to explode and it is exhausting."

"You hide it well," I said.

"I absolutely do not hide it well," he said. "Ask anyone."

Ghost said, "He does not hide it well."

Axel pointed at him. "See. Even Ghost noticed and Ghost notices nothing personal."

"I notice everything," Ghost said. "I just do not comment on most of it."

"That is somehow worse," Axel said.

I laughed. Short and genuine and easy in a way that felt like the first easy thing in days. Axel grinned at the sound of it. Ghost watched me laugh with that expression he had sometimes, like he was filing something away somewhere careful.

Rook came in from his morning rounds around nine and stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at the three of us at the table.

"You are all in the same room," he said. "And nobody is tense."

"Revolutionary," Axel said.

Rook came in and sat down and poured coffee and looked at me. "How are you feeling."

"Better," I said honestly.

"The babies were active last night," he said. It was not a question. He had a way of knowing things about my body before I said them that I had stopped finding unsettling and started finding reassuring.

"All three of them," I said. "Taking turns."

"That is normal at this stage," he said. "They are running out of room. They are going to get more active not less over the next few weeks."

"Wonderful," I said.

"You should be eating more," he said. "Protein especially. Three babies need more than you have been giving them."

"Rook."

"I am not telling you off," he said. "I am telling you what they need."

Axel said, "He is telling you off but very gently."

Rook ignored him. He looked at me steadily with those green eyes and waited.

"Fine," I said. "More protein."

"Thank you," he said simply.

Axel stood up and went to the refrigerator and started pulling things out with the energy of a man who had been given a purpose. "I will make eggs," he said. "Nobody argue with me."

Nobody argued with him.

After breakfast I went back upstairs and sat on my bed and took the note out of my pocket again.

I would have anyway.

I thought about what it meant to be let in by someone who had stopped letting people in. I thought about the compound and the gate and the three men downstairs who had voted unanimously to keep me here. I thought about the babies shifting inside me and the DNA results and Edmund Hale spending four million dollars trying to take back what he had never actually had.

He had bought my presence at an altar.

He had never once had me.

These men had never bought anything.

They had just opened a gate and then kept opening doors and I had walked through every one and somewhere along the way without planning it I had stopped looking for the exit.

I folded the note and put it somewhere safe where I would always be able to find it.

Then I went back downstairs because Rook had said more protein and the babies had opinions about breakfast that I was learning to take seriously.

The compound was alive around me when I came down. Voices and boots and someone's music from outside. The ordinary morning sounds of a place that had become mine without me noticing exactly when it happened.

Ghost was still at the kitchen table when I came back in.

He looked up.

I sat down across from him.

He passed me the plate Axel had left covered on the counter.

I ate.

We did not talk much. We did not need to.

Outside Edmund Hale was spending four million dollars.

Inside the compound the morning was just the morning and Ghost was across the table and the babies were moving and the note was in a safe place and everything was exactly as complicated and exactly as right as it needed to be.