Chapter 18 Silva #5
She bit her lip, frowning at just the sight of it on the paper.
And how long will that last? What will happen when her teeth come in?
Her tiny baby teeth were not the sharp little daggers she’d been mentally prepared for, but they were sharp, and now she knew what they would look like in adulthood.
They would certainly not resemble the other smiles around the table at the club.
They were already outsiders here. She’d told herself that she would be Silva of the Daytime for the rest of her life if it would make her little girl’s life easier, but they were outsiders in this enclave and always would be.
And at Cevanore, their claws were twice as sharp.
Silva remembered Dorea Eillis, her long-ago classmate, relentlessly bullied for her mother’s half-trollish heritage, thought of the conversation that had taken place over dinner while she was pregnant.
She’s simply not one of us, dear. Nothing at Cevanore had changed.
She wasn’t willing to offer up her little girl as a sacrifice for their judgment.
Then where?
There was no place she knew of that wasn’t full of humans, where they would continue to be outsiders.
Nowhere but Cambric Creek, and Silva already knew there was no way she would be able to afford that.
She didn’t want her parents to subsidize her existence any longer.
She needed to set a better example for her own daughter, needed to set her up to be free from the expectation of being a mouse.
You can sell the apartment if you have to.
The mere thought of doing so hurt. She knew it was just a place, but it was a place where he still lingered. Still. She’s the most important thing, and you need to at least look into all of your options. At the very least, you can rent it out.
If she initiated the unbinding of their marriage, she would be exiting the relationship with only a little more than she had brought into it.
Their marriage contract clearly spelled out the terms for ending their union, and unless she was leaving Tannar for cause, her exit settlement would be enough to scrape by until she went back to work full-time.
Even then, she would never be able to afford Cambric Creek on her own.
That should have been enough to put the thought from her mind entirely, but once it was there, Silva found she could not let it go.
She had loved Cambric Creek. She had wanted it to be her home with him.
And even though he still lingered there as well, after four years, the presence of his ghost wasn’t as intolerable as it had been.
She loved Cambric Creek, and she could love it again with her little girl.
Then you’ll have to ask for help. Either that, or sell the apartment.
She should never have agreed to stop working. This is why most elves don’t unbind their marriages. It may have been mercenary, but it made sense. Their menfolk lived little more than a common lifespan as it was, a scant amount of time to grit one’s teeth and make do.
It was the smarter option, but she had gritted her teeth down to nubs by then, and she wasn’t willing to let her daughter grow up thinking this was the way it had to be.
The main problem was that she had no idea where to even start.
She had no idea where the paperwork for the apartment she owned was, nor how to even find it.
She had been catatonic after he’d disappeared, and hadn't cared about a collection of empty rooms without him there. Now, she had no choice but to care.
The Plundered Pixie’s apartment continued to weigh on her mind as she made Aelin’s lunch the following afternoon — a blood soup Silva discovered she could order online from a batperson-owned deli, served in Aelin’s favorite little ceramic bowl, yellow, with a mouse wearing a tulip as a hat and a matching tiny spoon; and a cut-up apple, drizzled in honey.
Silva didn’t know what they would do once Aelin started school, if they were still stuck here, already knowing that strict vegetarianism was expected. Which is why you need an exit plan.
She was distracted, watching her happy baby eat her unconventional lunch at her little miniature table, the sound of the mail being dropped into the box making her jump.
The mail. Silva spun away from the counter, gasping at the memory of the mail she had taken that night she’d given birth, having hid them in that tucked-away cosmetic case in the closet once they’d come home.
The envelopes had her name on them. Surely they would have a starting point, an account number, something.
She was still sitting slack-jawed at the table more than an hour later, the letters spread before her.
She needed to call her father. Needed a lawyer, potentially, an accountant most assuredly.
She had been too grief-stricken to care about anything after Tate had vanished, least of all the apartment she was told had been put in her name, the apartment she had never wanted to step into again. Clearly, she had misunderstood.
He hadn’t put the apartment in her name.
He had put the entire building in her name.
The building where the Plundered Pixie operated, where the Plundered Pixie paid rent.
Silva had no idea what a triple-net lease was and didn’t understand the various percentages listed on the statements sent in her name, but she would need to learn quickly.
He had once attempted to explain to her the web of different business LLCs he had, property in one, businesses in another, paying himself from yet a third.
“Real estate, dove. That’s your investment. Everything else is a bonus if it works.”
Tate and her father would likely have had no shortage of conversational material if that daydream had ever come true. It hadn’t mattered to her at the time, and she hadn’t paid attention.
Somewhere, unbeknownst to her, there was an account in her name, with at least four years or more of passive income accumulating interest. A way for her to escape, for her to get out of this mess that she had created for herself.
Silva startled herself with the sob that came out of her, relief nearly shaking her apart, splitting open the stone of tension she’d grown so used to carrying, its weight having gone nearly unnoticed. I told you you’d always have a place to come, dove. And so you do.
She’d grown up privileged, and she already knew money didn’t buy happiness.
But it did buy security, and that was all she needed right now. He was gone, but he had given her a way out. A way to support herself, a way to support their little girl. A way out of this mess she had created, saving them from her terrible decisions.
They wouldn’t need much.
A room for each of them. A little kitchen, a place for Aelin to play.
Cambric Creek had enough green space that she wouldn’t miss a yard.
A beautiful library, parks, the community center with all its clubs and classes, and most importantly, the excellent schools, founded on a bedrock of species diversity, where the sharpness of her daughter’s teeth and her unblinking golden eyes would not be unwelcome or strange.
Where she could learn that superficial differences of appearance didn’t matter, but kindness and acceptance did.
Her tears had almost choked her at the thought.
It broke her heart to think that her baby would be made an outsider in this dreadful place they called home, that she wouldn’t have friends or feel included.
But in Cambric Creek, that wouldn’t matter.
It had been the daydream she’d held in her heart for so long, wanting a life there with Tate .
. . and now she could make it true, with the little piece of himself he’d left behind.
Aelin found her in a panic, crying when she saw Silva’s own tears, burying her tiny face in Silva’s side.
“It’s okay. We’re going to be okay. Finally.”
Things moved quickly after that.
Tannar couldn’t pretend to be anything but relieved when she told him she was leaving.
Relief, swiftly followed by a bright stab of guilt that Silva would have missed if she’d not been holding his eye.
She could have pushed the issue, discovered if he was indeed having an affair, ensuring that she would exit the marriage with a well-padded settlement .
. . but it didn’t matter at that point. She just wanted out.
Children belonged to the mother, and there was nothing stopping her from leaving.
Their unbinding would go to arbitration, a process that would likely take time, made marginally easier by the fact that they were mutually seeking to end their marriage contract.
She would keep the ring he put on her finger as collateral, to be returned to him in the unbinding.
Elvish divorces were rare, and the few couples she’d known to go through the process had dispensed with the ring-returning ceremony, but Silva had no doubt that his mother would insist upon it as a way to humiliate her.
Joke’s on you. I can’t wait to give it back.
Aelin’s only concern, when Silva sat her down to explain that she and Mommy were going on an adventure and would live somewhere else without Tannar, was that her cat could come too.
She called Tannar ‘Daddy,’ when he was there, looking back to Silva for approval, as if she knew the truth and was in on the performance.
She would let him read her stories and draw pictures with her in the scant time he spent with them, but the time was scant. Not enough to be missed.
Aelin kissed him on the cheek, hugged him, and waved from the car window the day they pulled away, and as her soon-to-be ex breathed a small sigh of relief from the curb, Silva breathed one of her own, having no doubt that her daughter would forget him by tomorrow’s lunch.
They would live in the apartment above the Pixie until she found something in town that she could afford. A house was out of her budget. A condo would be ideal. She would settle for an apartment if it were all she could find. She would go back to work, freelance until she found something full-time.
The day the moving van pulled away from the tiny little house that had never once felt like home, carrying them away from that inhospitable beige wasteland, Silva cried tears of relief.
This escape had felt necessary four years ago when her world imploded, but now it was no longer necessary.
She was going home. No more running away.
Time to start building an actual life. Your puppet days are over.
Time marched ever forward. And finally, at long last, so did she.