18
Geneva
I missed my daughter’s birthday.
I’ve never missed one of her birthdays.
And yet, here I am, riding a clunky Mosacian railroader from the northern coast towards the plains. It’s transcontinental, and far larger than any train system I’d seen in Urovia, even in Broadcove. But according to Ren, who has been accustomed to transports far more upscale than this one, the railroader up north tends to move at a snail’s pace.
“Innovation always improves the closer you travel to the center of the continent,” Ren told me yesterday as I tried not to let my anxiety show about missing the chance to celebrate Pandora, or at least hold her in my arms for a minute.
But as I watched the sun set on my daughter’s first day of a new year, my soul ached in the darkness. I broke down the minute I woke up this morning, consumed with despair and self-loathing, feeling like a wretched mother for not having ripped the world apart to find Pandora by now. And I haven’t stopped crying since.
The only kindness has been the fact that no one deigned to fill the two apportioned vacancies in our private cabin—likely because I reek of hopelessness. The divider that closes us off from the public, free-moving aisle is a glass sliding door that is only slightly frosted for privacy, and poor Ren has spent the last hour assuring other passengers and railroad attendants that I just received devastating news about a relative and to kindly give the two of us space.
The two of us —like we’re together, or something.
When I feel a brief reprieve from my sobbing, I blubber out the words, “I’m sorry,” while trying not to wipe my tears in a way that smears the kohl along my eyes. It’s bad enough that I’m an ugly crier. There’s no need to make myself look like I’ve crawled my way out of my gravesite. “I don’t mean to be a bother, which I know I have been, but—”
“I’m not sure why you’re apologizing for the grief you feel,” Ren says softly, but with full enunciation. His eyes drift to mine with endless compassion, having stomached the sounds of my smothered sobs as I brokenly went on and on about missing her big day. Missing her . “It’s clear that the love you have for your daughter knows no bounds.”
“But I can’t stop —”
“You will when you’re able,” he soothes, laying a hand on my shoulder. “But there’s no rush. Your pain is no imposition to me.”
Stunned by the words, the last of my sobs die in my throat. For now, at least.
I sniff, the movement a hard jerk. “Why are you being so kind to me?”
Truthfully, I’d been wanting to know the answer since the moment Ren agreed to my terms and introduced himself back on the coast. A man with his charm and his looks should’ve kept him far from available to catering to my whims, yet Ren appeared to have no conflicts to mitigate before insisting we head for the train station twenty miles eastward. It also didn’t hurt that he was the nicest man I’d ever met, both inside and outside of Broadcove.
Talking to Ren felt like talking to a friend. A real one—the kind I would have had to make on my own if our family never made it out of the marshes all those years ago. Whether in the market, at my old job, over dinner at one of the dingy pubs, wherever I could. The normalcy of truly knowing one another, despite our limited time, made it all too easy to share the intricate details of my circumstance—my status as Duchess, what I knew about Pandora’s disappearance, the relationship with my sister and her husband, the king. Whether Venus and Jericho would hound me for being too trusting, if they ever found out somehow, I don’t care anymore. I’m a mother on the edge.
“You want the short answer or the long one?”
I shrug. “Both.”
Ren cracks a smile that sends warmth skittering about our cabin. “Long answer, after the Seagraves fell, my friends and I had this epiphany that we shouldn’t waste our time living in one place—that we ought to see the world before it turned into something devastating. So we ended up traveling the continent, which was fun and all, until my friends started meeting women who’d become their wives and they decided to settle down wherever we were at the time. I eventually got sick of traveling to see all of them and tried to plant roots along the northern coast. I was wading through life there for the last few years . . . until you.”
I try not to let the blush that those last few words summon to the surface overtake me. I picture it then: Ren watching his companions dwindling over time, growing weary to the beauty of the world when he lost out on his friends to women they’d never known beforehand. It reminds me of how, in some senses, I lost parts of Venus and Calliope when they chose to get married and start their families. Perhaps they felt the same when Pandora entered into existence as well.
“And the short answer?” I ask, almost as an afterthought.
Ren tilts his head at me, his gaze deepening. “I thought you were the most gorgeous woman I’d ever laid eyes on. To refuse your request, no matter how complicated the conditions were, would have been irrevocably stupid.”
I remember then that his first words to me back in the street, both directly and indirectly, were compliments of my appearance. The depth of his attention towards me, however, rattles my nerves more than I expected it to.
“Are you going to make it a habit of flirting with me, Ren?”
“I’ll flirt with you until I’m blue in the face if it keeps those tears from staining your pretty face,” he says.
He’s right. My tears haven’t just stopped . They’ve dried up, now replaced by a childlike smile that has my cheeks pinching the sides of my face. I’m so flustered by the realization of it that I nearly swat at myself to stop. I laugh as I tell him, “Sorry, it’s just been . . . a long time since anyone’s made me feel this way.”
“Feel what way?” he asks innocently.
A tender smile blooms across my mouth, like a flower emerging from a long, harsh winter. “Young.”
We both quiet within our cabin, my gaze drifting to the sweeping hills beyond the glass of our window. I shut my eyes for a moment, imagining how the summer air likely turns colder the further north one may climb. Snow dusts the peaks of faraway mountains, even in July, and a herd of humped animals I can’t place graze the valleys below without a care in the world—
“Young, as in, before Pandora?” Ren’s voice softly pulls me back into the train car.
I swallow, hoping the sound isn’t as visible as it feels. “Not that I resent her in any way, but yes. Before I became a mother.”
“Tell me about it,” he whispers, crossing his legs in his cushioned seat and positioning his body to face me fully. To let me know that I have his full, undivided attention.
Tongue stumbling over half-formed words, I try and spit out, “Well, I was the youngest of three sisters. I’d heard that in wealthier families, the baby tends to get spoiled compared to their older siblings, but my family . . .” I try not to dwell too long on the horrors of poverty, which I had only grasped in its totality the longer we lived in Broadcove. “I don’t think I was supposed to happen. We were so poor, but my parents had loved one another so deeply, so they made it work for a while. When Mother died though, things really took a plunge.”
“I’m so sorry,” Ren offers up, his eyes as empathetic as a hand on my shoulder would be.
I don’t allow myself to linger on the sadness of that time in my life. “Her death brought out the worst in Father. His devastation turned into rage, and, to make a long story short, brought about his demise, too. That left my older sisters to play parents for me, and the only thing they could afford to spoil me with was security. They never said it aloud, but when we were fighting for scraps, or trying to keep out of trouble, I could sense their unified agreement—that they would take the brunt of whatever suffering we’d face before they’d let it touch me. And maybe, knowing that, I started to look for a way to alleviate their problems.”
The railroader jostles a bit, likely converting from one set of tracks to another. I catch Ren surveying the aisle beyond our cabin, waiting to see if the sound had arisen from a stumbled passenger or two. No one draws near, and he settles deeper into his seat.
“Kurt Prokium was a boy I’d seen a few times at the Trading Block,” I tell him, casually observing the way the rising sun spotlights Ren’s golden features through the window. “It was the marshes’ bartering hotspot since most residents didn’t have enough coins to outright buy anything. My sister, Venus, was going toe to toe with some sleazy baker, trying desperately to get our oldest sister ingredients for some semblance of a birthday cake, and I just remember being so furious at the way the men of the town thought they could walk all over her. Over us . But Venus never balked. She was the strongest of all of us. I just stupidly stood there and watched in awe as she haggled the price down to a tolerable amount.”
“A family trait, I see,” Ren comments casually.
If he weren’t sitting across from me, I’d have swat Ren across the shoulder. Instead, I flash him a dimly humored glance and roll my eyes, to which he smiles and further reclines in his seat.
“And then, Kurt came up by my side, asked if Venus was going easy on the baker, and if I was the true muscle of the operation. I told him I wouldn’t hurt a fly.” I feel warmth in my cheeks, the wind from that autumn day nearly twenty years ago coursing through my hair somehow. Ren senses it, too, eyes on fire with silent ponderings.
“I wasn’t looking to fall in love if that’s what you are wondering. Your eyes have a way about them that makes them all too readable, Ren.” I don’t know why the second statement is phrased aloud, but I let it hang there for a moment. “But I was looking for a way out. Out of my family’s house and into the arms of someone that could provide for me without feeling like my existence was a burden to them.”
“You’re not a burden, Genny,” he says so sadly it pierces deep.
“I’m not anymore,” I say, knowing the sentiment he’s trying to reassure me of. “But I was, then. They loved me despite it, but that doesn’t change the fact that I was. And I clung to Kurt because of it. I think, without going into the nitty-gritty of it, I went along with his insistence for privacy as we navigated us—what we were to each other—because of the guilt I felt. Even after I fell for Kurt, I couldn’t escape the fact that I had allowed him to pursue me out of an opportunistic mindset.”
I shut my eyes so that I can choke out the words, “He died before he could tell me he loved me, if that was even on his mind. And he never got to know—I didn’t know, then—that I was . . .”
Ren’s hand rests upon my knee, and the touch unfurls the knot that was beginning to tighten in my chest, my stomach. “You don’t have to keep going if it hurts too much,” he murmurs. “Not for my sake.”
I shake my head, opening my eyes despite knowing they’ve gone glassy again. “The worst part about it all is that it’s not his permanent absence that eats away at me, and it wasn’t even that way when Pandora was born. It’s that I’ll never know what his intentions would’ve been. For me. For our daughter. Kurt was already so on guard about keeping our relationship private—sneaking me in and out of his house, insisting I burn every note that he ever wrote me and slipped in my pockets before I’d dash home—that had I come forward about the baby, who knows if he’d have stayed with me or scorned the both of us.”
Ren’s expression saddens, his tone gentle. “That’s such a harmful way of thinking, Genny.”
My name on his lips wounds me, the responding ache so insufferable that I lash out. “Well, it felt better to assume the worst in him rather than grieve the only man who ever considered loving me.”
I hear the snap in my tone once it’s too late to rein it in, and while I begin to form an apology, Ren merely holds out a hand. “Not for my sake,” he repeats. Still, a question reflects in the depth of his warm eyes. “You never thought about . . . trying again?”
With someone else.
“There’s a very slim margin of men interested in pursuing a woman who has already been so clearly shared with another,” I say, the laugh in my throat bitter. “Besides, Jericho became the center of Venus’s universe, and Calliope’s husband hers. But my little girl . . . she’s everything to me. I had created something that brought me enough joy to last me the rest of my lifetime, and that was enough.”
The cabin goes quiet for a series of moments, silent and serene.
Then, Ren asks, “And what now?”
I look at him sidelong, a silent demand for clarification.
“Now that she’s gone—if she stays gone—what joy will carry you through the rest of your life?”
The only thing that keeps me from gaping at his question is the sound of an unanticipated knocking of a fist on the cabin door. The sound jolts us upright, Ren nearly stumbling over his own feet.
A steward pulls open our door and flashes me, in particular, a bright smile. “Care for some refreshments, Miss?”
“She’s not thirsty,” Ren pipes in, not even a whisper of his genteel demeanor to be found as he stares down the uniformed gentleman. “You have plenty of water left, don’t you, sweetheart?”
“ Ren ,” I snarl, embarrassed by his territorial outburst. Then again, maybe going along with whatever makeshift relationship ploy he’s pulling out of his ass might serve me well. “Be nice—”
“The conductor would like to lay eyes on you,” the steward explains, undeterred by Ren’s unwarranted distaste. “He wants to know that you’re doing well, now.”
Part of me wishes to go with him to get a free pass from where my and Ren’s conversation was swiftly heading, but the look on Ren’s face . . . that’s panic. True, utter panic.
I then see that the steward isn’t looking at me anymore, but at Ren.
As if to keep him in line. Silent.
It’s while his neck remains craned Ren’s way that I see a nasty bruise that dips below his neck, a surface-level gash wound slowly staining his shirt crimson—his shirt that, I realize, isn’t buttoned in the right spots, the collar of it drooping on one side.
“I’ll come with you, then,” Ren insists, rising to his feet.
Even before I’m able to play along, the steward bristles. “That won’t be necessary. Only the lady is required up front.” His Mosacian accent deepens in irritation before he evens it out, looking at me once more. “I can assure you, Miss, your husband will not be kept waiting long.”
Ren says my name, the sound of it uncharacteristically harsh. Desperate, even.
That’s when I catch a passing glimpse of the menacing blade in the steward’s pocket, blood speckling its jagged edge when it catches light from beyond the window.
“Let’s go,” the steward demands, and with a piercing clamp, he grabs me by the wrist and begins to pull me out of the cabin.
I’m not my daughter. I haven’t been brought up with proper self-defense training, and I don’t wish to bet my survival odds on the mere guess that sweet-as-sugar Ren Setare knows anything about fending off an attacker.
Though, maybe I’m selling Ren short—because he bares his teeth at the man before freeing my wrist.
“ Nobody puts their hands on my wife .”
And then, Ren drives his foot right between the steward’s legs with all the force he can muster and yanks me from the cabin.