25. Celine
CELINE
Lena is telling me about a garden.
I’m sitting on the edge of my bed with the phone against my ear, and she’s describing rose bushes along a stone path, a fountain that runs all day, a sunroom where she’s been taking her afternoon tea instead of in her old room.
Her voice has that bright lift it gets when something genuinely good has happened to her, and for the first ten seconds, I’m just glad to hear it.
Then I do the math.
“Wait,” I say. “Different sunroom. Different facility?”
“Oh, they upgraded me.” She says it like it’s nothing, like it’s the kind of thing that happens to people every day. “Apparently, it’s a reward for how well I’ve responded to treatment. They moved me yesterday. It’s gorgeous here, Celine, you’d love it.”
My stomach goes cold before my brain finishes catching up.
“Who moved you?” I ask.
“The facility, I guess? Or the foundation covering my care?” A pause. I can hear her shifting, the soft sound of fabric against a chair. “Priya said it came through Zane’s people. I figured you knew.”
I didn’t know.
I keep my voice even because that’s the only thing I can control right now, the only muscle I have left that still listens to me. “Of course,” I say. “I just hadn’t heard the details yet.”
“It’s really nice here,” she says again, and I let her keep talking, about the fountain and the new doctor and a nurse named Astrid who brings her extra blankets without being asked, and I make all the right sounds in all the right places while something in my chest tightens into a fist.
When we hang up, I sit very still for a moment.
Then I stand up, and I go to find him.
He’s in his office. Of course he is. He’s always in his office at this hour, the lamp on, the city dark behind him, a man who has built his entire existence around being available to everything except the people who actually need him to explain himself.
I don’t knock.
He looks up when the door opens, and something in his face shifts the instant he sees mine.
“Lena was moved,” I say.
“Yes.”
“You knew.”
“Yes.”
I cross the room and stop in front of his desk, and I’m shaking, not visibly, not in a way anyone else would catch, but I can feel it under my skin, the tremor of fear that has nowhere left to go now that the danger is already past and all that’s left is the aftermath.
“Why?” I say. “Tell me why my sister was moved to a secured facility without anyone telling me, without anyone telling her the real reason, while I was sitting here finding out about it from her describing a fountain.”
“There was a credible threat,” he says. “An intercept came through yesterday morning. Someone was building a profile of her location, her routine, her security. I moved her within hours of finding out.”
“Within hours of finding out, and you didn’t call me.”
“No.”
I stare at him. He doesn’t look away. He doesn’t soften it or wrap it in something gentler than what it is, and somehow that’s worse than if he had.
“Three weeks ago,” I say, and my voice drops because I need it to stay steady more than I need it to be loud, “I stood in your kitchen and told you to stop deciding what I can carry. I told you that exactly. Those words.”
“I remember.”
“And you did it again.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not even going to pretend this was different.”
He’s quiet for a moment, and I watch him choose honesty over the easier path, the one where he explains the threat in enough detail that I forget to be angry about the silence underneath it.
“It wasn’t different,” he says. “I knew what I was doing when I did it. I told Roman so in this office before I made a single call. I weighed telling you first against the cost in time, and I chose the time. I’m not going to stand here and tell you I didn’t understand what that choice meant to you. ”
Something in my chest cracks, not from the threat to Lena, not even from the secrecy, but from the fact that he’s not arguing with me. He’s just confirming, piece by piece, every single thing I already suspected, and there’s nowhere for my anger to land because there’s nothing left to push against.
“You promised me,” I say.
“I didn’t promise you I would never make that choice again. I promised you I would give you everything I had once there was something concrete to give.” His voice doesn’t rise, doesn’t defend, just states the distinction like it might actually help. “There wasn’t time for both.”
“There’s always time to pick up a phone, Zane.”
“Ten minutes,” he says. “Maybe less. Against a contact actively building a target profile on a woman with no security training of her own.”
“And you decided those ten minutes were worth more than my right to know what was happening to my own sister.”
“Yes.”
I want him to flinch. I want some crack in the composure, some sign that saying it out loud costs him the way hearing it costs me.
He doesn’t give me one. He just stands there, taking it, letting me see exactly how deliberate the choice was, and I understand, with a clarity that makes my eyes burn, that this isn’t cruelty.
It’s something worse. It’s a man who has spent his whole life being right about threats and has never had to answer to anyone for the cost of being right.
“Is she safe now?” I ask.
“Yes. Fully secured. Better protected than she was before.”
“That’s not the question I actually want answered.”
“I know.”
“Then answer the one I want.”
He looks at me for a long moment, and something in his face does shift this time, some weight settling behind his eyes that I haven’t seen from him since the morning I told him I was pregnant.
“I don’t know how to give you both things,” he says. “Speed and inclusion. Not every time. There will be moments where the danger moves faster than the conversation can, and I will choose the danger every single time, because the alternative is a version of you I can’t accept losing.”
The room goes very quiet.
I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know if it’s an apology dressed up as strategy or strategy dressed up as something closer to love, and right now I don’t have the energy to tell the difference.
“I need the full picture,” I say. “Not pieces. Not what you decide I can handle this week. Everything. The faction, the intercept, what they actually want.”
“Tonight,” he says. “I’ll give you all of it tonight.”
“You said that about Gregor too.”
“I know. And I did give it to you. Eventually.”
“Eventually isn’t good enough anymore, Zane.”
He doesn’t argue with that either. He just nods once, the smallest possible movement, an acknowledgment rather than a promise, because we both already know how little his promises have been worth lately.
I turn and walk out of his office, and I don’t look back, and somewhere behind me I hear him not following, which is its own kind of answer. He’s letting me have the distance because he knows, the same way I know, that closing it right now would only be another decision he’s making on my behalf.
I go to my room. I sit on the edge of the bed where I was sitting twenty minutes ago, listening to my sister describe a fountain she has no idea is sitting inside a threat assessment.
I don’t cry.
I’m too angry to cry, and underneath the anger, there’s something colder and more exhausted, the tiredness that comes with loving someone who keeps proving, piece by piece, that loving him will always come with conditions I never agreed to.