Chapter 61
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Ayanna
There is a peculiar kind of loneliness in grieving beside someone who won’t grieve with you, and I have had weeks now to learn every shade of it.
Aric moves through the house like the tide, always there and never quite reaching me. He is infuriatingly steady while everything inside me comes undone, and I’ve come to resent him for it.
I keep waiting for one crack. One night when his voice breaks. One morning he can’t get out of bed. Anything that tells me this loss reached him too. But there is nothing. There is only the wall.
And after weeks of being the only person in this house who seems to be bleeding, the thing inside me that had been holding on so quietly finally lets go.
I call my mother.
“Mama.” The word comes out in pieces. “I can’t do this anymore. I don’t know how to do this anymore. I can’t stay in this house.”
Mother doesn’t ask me what’s wrong. She’s my mother, so she can hear it in a single word. “We’re coming,” she says. “We’re already on our way, my love. Just hold on for me.”
They arrive the next afternoon, and my mother holds me for a long time without trying to fix anything. She only rocks me the way she did when I was small, and for a few minutes, I let myself be a child again, held and hushed, someone’s baby instead of a woman who lost her own.
My father waits until she steps out to see about the tea.
“There is something else, Ayanna.” He lowers himself onto the edge of the bed, and his whole face is heavy with reluctance. “Something I’ve kept from you, because God knows you’ve borne enough. But I can’t keep it any longer and still live with myself.”
“Father.” I’m too tired for whatever this is going to be. “Please. Not now.”
“Luca.”
Cold moves through me at the name.
“I’ve been looking into his death. Quietly, since the funeral. Not the farce the Monserian police called an investigation. My own people, the real thing.” He clears his throat. “I didn’t want to find what I found.”
“Don’t.”
“Everything comes back to him, habibti.” His tone is careful and low. “I’m not telling you he pulled a trigger. I’m telling you the trail runs into his organization, to orders that came down from somewhere very near the top of it. You know what your husband is. You know what he’s capable of.”
“Aric didn’t kill Luca,” I say decisively. “He wouldn’t lie to me. He is a great many terrible things, but he is not a liar, and he would not—”
“Wouldn’t he?” My father tilts his head.
“Has he told you a single thing he’s found in all these months?
Given you one answer? Or has he told you he’s handling it, over and over, while the weeks go by and nothing changes and no one is ever caught?
” His brows crease while his eyes search mine.
“Ask yourself, not as his wife, but as my daughter, whom I raised to be sharper than this. He has resources the police could only dream of. Money, men, reach into every dark corner of this world. If he truly wanted Luca’s killer found, they would’ve been found by now. It has been months, Ayanna.”
I open my mouth, but nothing comes. There’s a splinter of truth in what he said. I hate how easily it finds the crack in my certainty. Hate the way it settles there. Hate the way it turns into doubt.
“I know you don’t believe me.” He rises.
“In your place, I wouldn’t believe me either.
That’s why I’ve shown you nothing. But when you’re ready, if you are ever ready to look at the man you married and truly ask yourself whether you know him at all, I will put everything I have in your hands.
Until then, I ask only one thing of you.
” He touches my hair, the way he hasn’t since I was a little girl small enough to sit on his knee.
“Watch him. Listen to what he tells you. And listen harder to everything he doesn’t. ”
My mother comes back with the tea and reads the room in a glance. She sets it down on the nightstand without a word.
“Come home, darling.” She takes my cold hands into her warm ones.
“Only for a while. Not forever. Just long enough to breathe air that doesn’t hurt to breathe.
You are wasting away in this place, my love.
Come somewhere you can grieve without performing being fine for a man who won’t grieve beside you. ”
I let out a heavy breath. I am so tired. I am so tired, and the grief sits on my chest like a stone, and my father’s words have lodged in me like a thorn I can’t reach, and the thought of being far away from this place that’s full of pain and memories—it undoes the last of my resistance.
“Okay,” I whisper. The tears come again, and I don’t fully know what I’m agreeing to. Only that I cannot stay standing in this house for one more day.
Moments later, Ingrid packs my cases with her mouth pressed into a thin line and won’t meet my eyes. Another moment later—because everything happens so fast—I follow my father down the stairs in a kind of fog, and I see Vidar downstairs.
He lurches, dragging his oxygen line, throwing himself into my father’s path. And for a man with so little breath left in him, the voice that comes out is enormous.
“You do not take her, Almaviri.” He’s shaking, one fist pressed to his own chest. “That girl is a Vold now. She does not walk out of this house on your word. She belongs to my son, to this family, and you will take your hands off what is ours—”
“She is my daughter,” my father snaps, and then they’re both shouting, the hall filling with raised voices and Ingrid crying out somewhere behind me when Vidar faints.
He goes down mid-word, a hand flying to his chest, crumpling onto the floor, and the sound he makes trying to drag air into his lungs makes my hair stand on its ends.
In an instant, Eero is on his knees at his father’s side, roaring for help, and the whole hall lunges as one toward the fallen thing on the floor.
“Now, habibti. We go now.” My father’s hand closes around my arm in the chaos.
He leads me toward the door, and I’m too stunned to set my feet. Behind me I hear my sister, her voice high and frightened.
“No, I don’t want to. Let go of me!”
I turn my head to see two of my father’s men walking Naomi toward the second car, one at each elbow. My father says something to her that I can’t catch, and whatever it is drains the color from her face, stills her, and she stops fighting, letting herself be put into the car.
For a moment, I wonder what I am doing. I promised to protect Naomi from Father, from things like this.
But then my father’s words echo in my mind, and the doubt presses in on me the way the weeks of grief and loneliness did, and before I know it, we’re through the gate, three cars strung in a line, the estate shrinking behind us.
The coast road runs the long way, pinned between the black water and the rock.
My father rides in the car ahead of mine. I sit in the back seat in the middle car, and I wait to feel the relief I came for. It doesn’t come. The house grows smaller behind us, and the ache only widens. But there’s no turning back now.
I rest against the backrest and watch the fjord passing behind the window for what feels like an eternity until the car brakes so hard the belt cuts across my chest. The tires scream.
The world pitches sideways. Ahead of us, my father’s car screeches to a halt, and behind, the car where Naomi and mother are stopped at the last moment.
I look through the window and beyond my father’s car is another one, thrown across the whole width of the road at a violent angle with its door already swinging open.
Aric steps out into the road, and for a moment, the world stands still.
Then my father’s men are out of their cars, hands sliding inside their jackets.
Aric stands alone in the center of the road facing every one of them with nothing in his hands and nothing on his face but a raw, stripped-open focus that is fixed entirely on me, as though the guns simply aren’t there, as though there is no one on this road but the two of us.
Then more headlights sweep in behind us—Tassilo, and men I recognize, sliding their cars in tight and stepping out—and all at once the odds even and the whole road becomes a held breath with a gun pointed on every side of it.
My father gets out of his car. “Vold.” His hands spread wide. “My daughter has chosen to come home. That is her right. I’m not taking her. She came willingly. There is nothing dramatic happening here.”
“Ayanna.” Aric doesn’t so much as glance at him. He looks only at me, through the windshield, and says my name in a voice so raw it makes my heart beat faster. “Get out of the car.”
My hand is on the door handle before my brain catches up.
“Ayanna.” My father’s voice turns sharp now, like a warning. “You don’t have to—”
“Give me a few minutes.”
“Habibti—”
“A few minutes. Please.”
Whether he hears the please or reads something in my face that tells him arguing will cost him more than it gains, my father inclines his head and steps back toward his car without another word.
I walk toward Aric, each step feels like a negotiation with gravity.
The wind off the fjord cuts through my clothes, and the road is uneven beneath my shoes, and every part of me is shaking—not from the cold but from the weight of standing this close to the man I’ve spent weeks resenting for being whole when I was in pieces.
I stop a few steps from him. Close enough to see the shadows carved beneath his eyes, the raw edge to his breathing that tells me the drive here wasn’t careful.
“You can’t stop me from leaving.” My heart stumbles as I speak, my tone quiet and pained. “You can’t block a road and—”
“You think I didn’t break.” His voice low and unsteady, in a way I have never heard from him in all our marriage.
“Aric—”
“I burned those men alive, Ayanna.”