Chapter Ten #3
She could immediately feel that this was the wrong question because whatever opening she had seen in his gaze was gone.
He gestured at a rock that sat perched above them, and he helped her up on it to sit.
He sat next to her with his knees bent, his arms around them, his hands clasped.
It was the way he used to sit, and this only invited comparison.
His muscular legs had filled out, as had his arms, and his jaw was sharper. Yet it was still so clearly him.
Gustav said nothing, and she assumed that the subject of his mother was closed. He glanced in her direction, then looked out at the water, sparkling in the midday sun.
“My mother wasn’t much for practical things, at least not when she climbed from the position of palace housekeeper to mother of a prince.
” He frowned. “I never heard the full story of how I came to be, just snippets from what she told me. She had always loved everything about the royal family from when she was a girl, and working in the palace, even just dusting and cleaning, was a thrill. My understanding is that when the opportunity posed itself to sleep with the king, she was more than willing.”
His expression was stoic, but she did know him, because she could read the tension in his body, the pain that oozed from each sentence.
“When she found out she was pregnant, she had no illusions of becoming the queen in the short term, but she wondered if someday it might happen. It wouldn’t be the first time, as she liked to say.
In the meantime, she put all her hopes in me.
Everything was about securing my position.
We would go to see my father a few times a year in a townhouse in the city, and those days felt more exciting than my birthday.
My mother was always in an almost ecstatic mood. ”
He swiped a hand over his face, then continued. “I can’t remember when I began to notice the difference between my mother’s excitement and my father’s distracted indifference. But as I got older, it bothered me more and more.
“When I got to school, at first I was warned not to tell anyone who I was.
And that worked, or at least I thought it did, but at some point I was introduced to the term Bastard Spare.
I was angry at my mother. It felt like both a secret she had kept from me and also something I had known for a long time.
“I came back home that summer and confronted my mother, and she was shocked and hurt. She saw my position as a gift that she had given me and couldn’t understand why I didn’t see it that way.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He was quiet for a long time, long enough for her to wonder if the story was over, but finally he spoke again.
“I put a lot of things together after that. The way we rarely saw her family, the way she had so few friends. It was as if she had built a bubble with her own story and she had put all her hopes into me. And I ruined it. Although I apologized and tried to bury my anger when I was at home, it was never quite the same.”
Livia realized that she was holding her breath. His mother was the one parent who cared for him, and he so clearly still felt the weight of his mistakes. “How old were you when that happened?”
“Twelve.”
Far too young to bear the responsibility for his mother’s actions. Far too young to understand her reasons for doing what she did. And yet he so clearly felt responsible.
She put her arms around her waist and rested her head on his shoulder. Though he didn’t move, she could feel that hard tension in him soften.
“You hold yourself responsible for this?”
He shrugged.
“What about your father?”
Gustav let out a humorless laugh. “Yes, I definitely blame him, too.”
“But it doesn’t help ease that feeling of responsibility?”
Gustav’s brow furrowed, and he was quiet. “I don’t think about it that way.”
“Maybe you should,” she said, nudging him with her shoulder.
“Maybe,” he said, and his brow furrowed, as if he really was considering it. “I just think about the ways it could have gone differently. Because we never know what would have happened if we had chosen differently, do we?”
Slowly, she shook her head. “I think about that, too. My parents have changed over the years. There were times when I understood or even agreed with why they made the choices they did, but now I wonder if I should have pushed back earlier.”
It was strange that over the last year, as her plans had evolved, she had been so focused on the immediate problem of keeping both her and her sister out of harm’s way that she hadn’t stopped to assess her complacency. Maybe she should have taken them on directly.
“I don’t think this is my fault,” she added. “I’m just wondering if there were different versions of how this could’ve played out.”
“We don’t control others. We only control our own actions.”
She smiled at him. “It’s easier to see that for others than it is to believe it for ourselves, right?”
His lips twitched up, hinting at a wry smile.
“We control our actions, and we always have options which we freely choose from,” she mused, “but everyone is choosing from the options that the world around them presents. I’m just wondering what options I would have had if I’d stood up to them a long time ago.”
“We’ll never know. We only know where this one path led.” He shifted and wrapped his arm around her, and she lay her head on his shoulder, as if they had all the time in the world.