Chapter 56
Amy
We talk for a long time that morning.
I listen the way I have learned to listen to him, completely, without flinching, without the performed empathy that sometimes passes for listening when, really, it is waiting for your turn to speak.
The things he says have edges, and the honest ones cut a little on the way through, and I let them, because that is what it means to be in the same room with the real thing.
I tell him about my mother. Not my father and not Roman.
My mother, who I have almost never talked about to anyone, because talking about her requires the courage of revisiting something good before it was gone, which is a different kind of grief than the ones I know how to carry.
I tell him she was funny. That she sang in the kitchen, and her singing was always slightly off-pitch, and she did not care at all.
That she called me her best thing, and I was old enough when she died to understand what a gift it was to be someone’s best thing before you knew enough to earn it.
That after she died, the house went quiet in a way that houses should not, and the quiet was what my father filled with his hands. The abuse. All of it.
Saint listens. He doesn’t say I’m sorry or that must have been so hard or any of the things people say because language has slots for grief, and we fill them automatically. He just listens. When I’m done, he is quiet for a moment, and then he says, “She would have seen you correctly.”
I look at him.
“Your mother,” he says. “She would have loved to see how beautiful you are.”
I don’t say anything for a moment.
Then I put my face against his chest and let him hold it for me for a while, because I have been holding it alone for twelve years, and it is very heavy, and he is very steady, and I’m done proving to myself that I can carry things alone.
After a while, he says into my hair, “I want you to have what she had. The singing in the kitchen. The thing that makes a house into a home.”
I tip my head back and look at him.
He looks back steadily.
“Are you saying you’ll sing in the kitchen?” I tease with a smile.
Something moves in his face. “God, no,” he says. “I will do other things in the kitchen, preferably with me inside you.”
I laugh. He watches me laugh with the expression that I have decided is the truest thing about him, the one that is not rage or patience or calculation but something simpler and more difficult than all of them.
“Okay,” I say when I can speak again.
“Okay, what?”
“Okay, yes. All of it. The permanent version. The one that starts here.”
His hands come up and frame my face.
He kisses me. Not the slow, deliberate kind from the gray mornings. Something fuller than that. Something that has weeks and months and a white room and a photograph and a note slid under a door all the way back at the beginning, all of it arriving at once in this one gesture.
I hold on.
I hold on, and I think, This is the version where nothing gets to take this away.
Not the Order. Not Victor. Not Roman. Not the family connection index or the scholarship or the invisible asterisk next to my name.
Not anything.
We are here.
And this is ours.