Chapter 11 #2
“I understand,” she said. Then she asked quietly, “Do you love us equally?”
The question hung between us. I didn’t hesitate, couldn’t hesitate. The answer lived too close to the bone for anything but truth.
“Of course I do.” The words came out steady, certain, with a force that surprised even me. “Completely. Differently, maybe. The way you love different people is always different. But equally? Yes, without question.”
Something eased in her. I watched it happen, the gradual loosening around her eyes, the way her shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch. She believed me. I could see it in her face, the softening that happened when Gabriella decided something was true.
“I believe you,” she said. “I think… Part of why it hurts so much is that I do believe you. You’ve been here, with me.
The potion, the lake, the way you look at me when you think I’m not paying attention.
You haven’t… pulled away. Even with everything else happening.
You’ve stayed present. For me. That matters. ”
She picked up a clump of soil, turned it over in her palm, and let it crumble between her fingers. The gesture was absent, habitual, the way Gabriella’s hands always found something to do when her mouth was working through something difficult.
“There’s just…” She hesitated, and the hesitation cost her something.
I could see it in the set of her mouth, the careful way she arranged the next words.
“A part of me has always felt left behind. In Sabrina’s shadow.
You know how it is. She’s… Sabrina. She’s beautiful, she’s confident, she walks into a room and every eye finds her.
And I’m the wingless one. The quiet one.
The one people look past because there’s nothing flashy to catch.
And I’ve made peace with that, mostly. The potion helped.
But then you come home, and suddenly the thing I’ve always been afraid of is happening.
She has you too. And part of me is terrified that what you feel for me is…
I don’t know. Pity, maybe. Or obligation.
The way you love the broken one because someone has to. ”
The words landed in a place I hadn’t known was tender until something touched it.
I crossed the distance between us in two strides, dropped to my knees in the dirt beside her, and took her face in my hands.
Her skin was warm from the sun, slightly damp at the temples, and when my thumbs brushed her cheeks I felt the faint tremor she’d been hiding.
“Listen to me,” I said. My voice was low, firm, the tone I used when something needed to be absolutely clear.
“What I feel for you has nothing to do with Sabrina. Nothing. It’s separate.
It’s its own thing. It started the moment I came home and saw you grown, and it kept growing, and the lake was…
” I searched for the word and found only the truth.
“The lake was the most honest thing I’ve done since the war ended.
There was no pity in it. No obligation. There was just you.
The way you laugh. The way you see things no one else notices.
The way you carried yourself through six years of being different in a world that punishes difference.
That’s what I fell for. Not the wingless girl. You. Gabriella. Exactly as you are.”
She made a sound. Small, wounded, the noise of someone whose defenses had just been dismantled by the one person who knew exactly where the weak points were. Her hands came up, gripping my wrists, and for a moment she held on like she was afraid the ground might shift.
Then I kissed her, my mouth finding hers with the urgency of a man who needed his body to say what his words couldn’t quite reach.
She kissed me back. Her lips were warm, slightly chapped from the morning air, and the taste of her was familiar and new at once, salt and earth and the sweetness that belonged only to Gabriella.
I held her. One arm around her waist, the other hand cradling the back of her head, fingers tangling in her dark blonde hair, and I held her until the shaking stopped, until her body relaxed against mine.
When she finally pulled back, her eyes were wet, but she was smiling. The smile reached her eyes the way it hadn’t since before the door swung open, and the sight of it did something to my chest that felt dangerously close to hope.
“Okay,” she said. Just that one word, soft and certain, and it contained more forgiveness than any speech could have managed.
I helped her to her feet. Her hand found mine, fingers interlacing, and we stood there in the vegetable garden with dirt on our knees and the morning sun warming our shoulders.
* * *
After Sabrina left to find Gabriella, I told myself I would give them privacy. I told myself this with the conviction of a man who had absolutely no intention of following through, and thirty seconds after they disappeared around the corner of the barn, I was already moving.
Curiosity, worry, the veteran’s instinct that had kept me alive through six years of war by assuming the worst possible outcome was currently applying that same principle to my love life with considerably less useful results.
I circled wide, keeping to the tree line that bordered the north orchard, and found a spot behind the thickest oak where the low-hanging branches provided cover and the summer leaves caught the wind just right to mask the sound of my breathing.
They were sitting on the flat stone beside the old well, the one we’d used as children for games and secrets and the occasional illicit apple theft when Angelina wasn’t looking.
Sabrina had her wings folded tight against her back, the damaged feathers still visible even from this distance, and Gabriella sat with her knees drawn up, her arms wrapped around them, her wingless back straight in that way that meant she was listening hard.
I couldn’t hear everything. The wind carried fragments, sentences breaking and reforming like waves against a shore, but what reached me was enough.
“I’m sorry,” Sabrina said. Her voice carried clearly, stripped of its usual brightness, and the raw honesty in it made my chest tight.
“Not for last night. I can’t apologize for that, and I won’t pretend to.
But for the way you found out. For not telling you myself.
For letting you walk into that room and see…
everything. That part’s on me. Completely. ”
A pause, long enough that I wondered if Gabriella had walked away, but then her voice came, quieter, carrying on the same wind that had brought her sister’s.
“I felt betrayed,” she said. “Not because you slept with him. I knew about that, or I suspected. It was the… the finding out. The way it happened. It felt like being left behind. Again.” Another pause.
“But I don’t want to hate you, Sabrina. I’ve spent too many years comparing myself to you to start hating you now.
That would be… exhausting. And I’m tired of being exhausted. ”
The honesty of it, the sheer lack of performance in either of their voices, made the oak trunk feel suddenly insufficient as cover.
I pressed closer, my shoulder against rough bark, and tried very hard to look like a man who was simply enjoying the morning shade and not actively eavesdropping on the most important conversation of his recent life.
“We both love him,” Sabrina said. “That’s the part I can’t change, and I don’t want to. I’ve loved him since before I understood what that meant. And Gabriella. I’m sorry for everything… I know you’ve been in love with him for years.”
“I have,” Gabriella said simply. “Since I was thirteen. Maybe longer.”
“So what do we do?” The question hung between them, carried on the wind to where I stood with my heart hammering against my ribs. “Because I don’t want to lose you. And I don’t want to lose him. And the math on those two things not being mutually exclusive is… complicated.”
“Then we don’t lose each other.” Gabriella’s voice, firmer now. “We figure it out. Together. The three of us. We don’t fight over him. We… share him, I guess. Though that sounds terrible when I say it out loud.”
Sabrina laughed. The sound was startled, genuine, breaking through the weight of the conversation like sunlight through clouds. “It does sound terrible. We’ll work on the phrasing.”
“Fair.” A smile in Gabriella’s voice now, tentative but real.
“But the point stands. We love him equally. We try to make that work without destroying what we have as sisters. Because what we have… that matters too. That matters more than I realized until this morning when I thought I might lose it.”
The agreement settled between them. I could feel it even from behind the oak, the change in the air when two people who love each other decide, against all available evidence, to choose each other anyway.
The conversation continued, quieter now, details I couldn’t catch, the kind of sister-talk that moved from crisis to practicalities with the ease of people who had shared a childhood and a roof and the intimacy of knowing each other’s worst secrets.
Sabrina also suggested introducing more girls to me, and Gabriella wasn’t against it.
It made me arch an eyebrow, but I wasn’t against it either.
How could I? They both accepted that a man like me would be in high demand, and they both felt a bit turned on and excited by seeing me with other girls.
Then silence, long enough that I risked leaning further around the trunk, and what I saw nearly undid me completely.
They were hugging: Sabrina’s arms around Gabriella’s waist, Gabriella’s face buried against her sister’s shoulder, Sabrina’s damaged wings half-extended in a protective gesture.
They held each other for a long time. Long enough that the clouds moved across the sun, shadows rearranging themselves around them.