Chapter Twelve

Isolde's POV

The apartment Dacre gave me had a window facing east, and for the first time in years I woke up to sunlight.

I lay in bed that Sunday morning and let it fall across my face. The sheets were clean and soft. The kitchen smelled faintly of lemon. On the bedside table sat a small white ultrasound picture in a silver frame, which my grandmother had bought me the week before from a market stall, pretending it was nothing. A blur of gray and black, a tiny curve in the middle. My child.

Eight weeks. Almost nine. Dr. Voss had examined me three times since the gala and said the baby was thriving, and I was thriving, and that if I fainted again she would personally lock me in a hospital bed. I had believed her. I had started eating real meals. I had started walking in the mornings, slowly, one hand on my stomach, talking to someone who couldn't answer.

I hadn't spoken to Saffron since the night of the gala.

I should have been afraid. I was a little afraid. But the fear had a strange shape now. It was no longer the hot, shaking panic of that first night. It had settled, hardened, turned into something cooler. He had seen me. He had looked at me, and he had not understood. Dacre had made sure of that.

He had driven me home himself after the gala, in a silence so deep I'd thought he was angry at me. When we reached the building, he turned off the engine and sat with both hands on the wheel.

"Did he touch you?"

"No."

"Did he say anything that frightened you?"

"No. I just wasn't expecting him."

He nodded slowly. Then he said, without looking at me, "If he comes near you again, Isolde, you will tell me. Not because I want to take over your life. Because I would like to be the person you call."

I had gone upstairs and cried for ten minutes, and had not been able to say exactly why.

That Sunday I spent the day with my grandmother. We cooked together in the small kitchen, with the radio on and flour all over the counter. She told me stories about my father as a boy, a clumsy, loud, laughing child who broke three of her windows before he was ten. I laughed until my ribs hurt. When I left, she pressed a Tupperware of stew into my hands and a small bag of ginger candy, and kissed me on both cheeks.

"Go home," she said. "Rest. And tell that man he is welcome at my table any time he likes."

I blushed. She cackled.

I got home around ten. I took a shower, put on my softest pajamas, and was brushing my hair at the vanity when the sound began.

A knock. Slow. Heavy.

I froze. The building had a doorman and a security desk. Nobody could come up without calling first. The knock came again, three times, deliberate, and under it I heard something else, a low, broken sound I could not place.

I put down the brush. I went to the door and put my eye to the peephole.

He was standing in the corridor in a black coat soaked through, his hair plastered to his forehead, rain dripping off his chin. He looked like a man who had been walking for hours. His hands hung at his sides. In one of them was a thick, creased manila folder.

"Isolde," Saffron said, through the wood. "Please."

I did not move.

"I know you're there. I can hear you breathing." A pause. His voice dropped. "I know."

I put my forehead against the door. My heart was pounding hard enough to hurt.

"I read the file," he said.

My stomach turned to ice.

"I read all of it. The hospital. The scan. The dates." A long, shaky breath. "It's mine, isn't it? The baby. It's mine."

I thought about not answering. I thought about pretending to be asleep, about calling Dacre, about calling the guard. But I had spent five years hiding behind doors, and I was so tired of it.

I turned the lock and opened it.

He was on his knees.

Right there in the corridor, in his wet coat, in front of an open door and anyone who might walk past. Saffron Cole, the man who had never bent for anyone, who had never kneeled even at his father's funeral, knelt on my doorstep with the rain pooling around him and the folder crushed in his hands.

"Isolde," he said. "I'm sorry."

I said nothing.

"I should have told you. I should have said it the first night, the first year. I did not hate you. God, I never hated you. I loved you so much I thought I could not survive it. My mother, you know what she is. Every time I showed it, she punished you. I thought if I pretended, if I made myself cold enough, she would leave you alone." He laughed, a terrible sound. "I thought I was protecting you."

"You threw me away," I said. My voice was steady. I almost didn't recognize it.

"I know."

"You put a pen in my hand."

"I know. I know. And I would give anything to take it back." His eyes were red. "Nyx means nothing. She was a decision I made to hurt myself. I'll end it tonight. I'll tell the whole world. I'll give you everything I have, the company, the house, anything. Just come home. Let me be a father to him. To her. Let me do it right."

I looked down at him for a long time.

I had waited five years to hear those words. I had imagined them a thousand nights, lying beside a man who turned his back, wishing on every star I could see. In my dreams I had always thrown myself into his arms.

Now I felt nothing. Not hatred, not triumph. Only a quiet, clear distance, like standing on a far shore and watching a boat I had once been in drift out of sight.

"Saffron," I said. "Get up."

"Not until you say yes."

"Get up."

He stood slowly. Water ran off his coat. He looked at me with such naked hope that something in my chest ached, a small, old, tired ache, for the girl I had been.

"I waited five years for you to say that," I said. "You're saying it in the wrong year, to the wrong woman. I'm not her anymore."

"Isolde..."

"I'm not angry. I'm just done." I held the door with one hand. "Please go home."

"I can't."

"You can. You always could. You just never wanted to."

His face crumpled. I closed the door gently, so gently, and slid the lock into place. I stood with my back against the wood, shaking, and listened to him stand in the corridor for a very long time. Then, slowly, his footsteps moved away, and the elevator chimed, and the building was quiet.

I slid down to the floor. I pressed both hands over my stomach and breathed.

"It's all right," I whispered. "It's all right. He's gone."

My phone buzzed against the floorboards.

I thought it was Dacre. I picked it up, and an unknown number glowed on the screen, followed by a message, short and polished, every word placed like a knife.

We should speak, daughter in law. I believe you are carrying my grandchild. Lucinda Cole.