Chapter 7 What the Fog Left Behind #2
"I know," he said quietly.
"Promise me something."
"Anything."
"No. Not like that. Not as a reflex." She kept her hand on his chest. "Think about what I'm asking and then promise me."
He breathed. She watched him actually think about it.
"What are you asking?"
"That when you know something that touches this — our life, our family, whatever family turns out to mean — you tell me before you have it managed.
Before it's clean. I'd rather sit with you inside the mess than find out from a headline that you were in it without me.
" She paused. "I am not one of your investors, Cassian.
You don't have to prepare a prospectus before you tell me the truth. "
The silence was brief and very full.
"I promise," he said. And then, because he was Cassian Sterling and his operating system was built on precision: "I will try to promise that. Constitutionally."
She almost laughed. It came up her throat as a small, involuntary thing, and she pressed her lips together to contain it, and he looked at her — the corner of his mouth lifting barely a millimetre — and she let the laugh out, just a breath of one, and the temperature in the entrance hall changed by several degrees.
* * *
They walked the Chelsea Embankment because neither of them could sit still.
This had been the unspoken agreement — she had simply turned toward the door and reached for her coat, and he had followed without question, which was the sort of thing she had started to understand about him: he took cues from her body language with an attentiveness he did not apply to most things.
It was one of the ways he said I am paying attention to you specifically.
She had learned to receive it without deflecting it, which had taken her longer than it should have.
The Thames at this hour was dark and glossy, the embankment lights cutting long amber parallels in the water. A November wind came off the river with intent. Anya walked with her hands in her coat pockets, her shoulder close enough to his that their arms brushed on every third or fourth stride.
"Tell me about her," Anya said, when they had been walking for ten minutes.
Cassian looked sideways at her.
"Delphine," she said. "Not the facts I already have. Tell me what she was like."
He was quiet for a moment. The wind took a loose strand of hair across Anya's face and she pushed it back.
"She had a laugh that was embarrassingly loud for someone who was otherwise quite composed," he said at last. "I remember thinking that the first time I heard it — at a dinner with about fifteen people — she laughed at something someone said and the whole table turned around, and she had absolutely no interest in being embarrassed by it.
" His voice had the quality of someone retrieving something from a long-put-away drawer.
"She was from Marseille originally. She used to correct people's pronunciation of her surname in a way that somehow wasn't rude at all, just — clear. She was very clear about what she was."
"She sounds like someone I would have liked."
Cassian looked at her again, and this time the look lasted longer. "Yes," he said. "I think so."
Anya turned this over in her chest. The specific complexity of feeling sympathy for a woman you had never met, who had loved briefly and been loved briefly by the man walking beside you, who had died alone somewhere in the act of raising a child and had written a careful letter before she died to leave a door open.
Thirty-one years old. The same age Anya would be in six years.
"Are you afraid?" she asked.
"Of what specifically."
"Of the test being positive."
A long pause. The embankment stretched ahead of them, pale stone and cold air and the occasional other couple walking with their heads down against the wind.
"I don't know how to be someone's father," Cassian said finally. "I don't know that I have a useful model for it."
"You have Petra and Felix."
"That's — that is different. They were already — I didn't—" He stopped.
Tried again. "There's something different about the circumstances.
About a child who is yours in that specific, biological, fully responsible way.
Not a role I stepped into. A responsibility I would — that would be entirely mine.
" He exhaled. "I'm afraid of failing it.
Of being the kind of father mine was. Or of overcorrecting into something else that's wrong in a different direction. "
She reached out without thinking and touched his wrist — the one wearing the watch. He registered it without moving.
"You've already started thinking about what kind of father you'd want to be," she said. "That's not nothing. That's actually the only starting point that matters."
He didn't respond immediately. She'd learned not to rush the space after she said something true to him; he needed to turn it a few times before he could acknowledge it.
"What if she doesn't — Juliette. What if the test is positive and she doesn't want to know me?
She's four. She doesn't know I exist. Her mother gave her a life.
Her grandmother is raising her." His voice was even, but the underneath of it wasn't. "What do I do with being a fact in someone's life that they didn't ask for? "
"You be patient," Anya said. "You make yourself available.
You don't buy her. You don't overwhelm her.
You show up consistently in small, ordinary ways and you let her set the pace.
" She felt him looking at her. "Children make their minds up about people in the ordinary moments. Not in the grand ones."
He was quiet for a moment. "You know things," he said, and the way he said it wasn't a compliment exactly — it was more intimate than that, more like a man simply stating the fact of gravity. Things fall down. You know things.
"I know children," she said. "The rest I'm making up as I go."
"That distinction matters to you."
"That distinction is everything." She bumped his shoulder lightly with hers.
"I need you to remember that I'm also scared.
I need you to not — in your mind, I need you to not file me under Anya has this covered and step back from me while I'm supposed to be stepping forward for you.
We have to be scared at the same time. That's how this works. "
He stopped walking. She turned. He was looking at her with an expression she didn't have a name for yet — something that lived at the intersection of gratitude and pain and the specific tenderness that arises when a person becomes suddenly, fully visible to you.
"What are you scared of?" he asked, and he asked it with the deliberateness of someone who genuinely needed to know, not as politeness, not as emotional reciprocity, but as a question with a blank space he was committed to hearing filled.
Anya considered lying. The option was always there — the soft, palatable version where she said nothing really, I'm fine — and she knew the reflex well enough to recognise it pulling.
She said the truth instead.
"I'm afraid of the version of this where you handle it alone and I find out through a gossip notification that you've been identified entering a family-law building.
" She held his gaze. "I'm afraid that your instinct under pressure is to protect me by shutting me out, and that I'll let you because it's easier in the short term than fighting for a door you haven't opened yet.
" She paused. "I'm afraid of the version of me who goes back to being small and quiet and grateful for whatever scraps of his inner life he decides are safe enough to share.
I did that before you. I promised myself I wouldn't do it again. "
The wind lifted off the river. On the far bank, a line of sodium lights wavered.
"You are the least small person I have ever met," Cassian said.
"I know. I still get afraid of her."