Chapter 11 Blood and Bone
The library smelled the way she remembered it smelling in Notting Hill.
That was the first thing Anya registered when she pushed open the heavy door and stood in the frame, one hand still resting on the iron handle — the old-paper smell, the faint cedar of the conditioning oil on the mahogany shelves, the particular quality of quiet that a room achieves when it has been filled with books for long enough that the silence itself becomes textured.
The Bavarian opera house was full of rooms that had been designed to impress, vaulted ceilings and original plasterwork and the occasional fresco that made you feel you'd wandered into a museum after closing time.
But this room Cassian had made himself. The same brass ladder on the same ceiling track.
The same pair of Chesterfield chairs angled before a fireplace that was, tonight, lit.
The shelves arranged not alphabetically but by some internal logic she had never fully decoded, though she suspected it was chronological by the year he'd first read them.
She had tested the theory once and found it held for the bottom three shelves at least.
She had suspected, when she first saw it replicated here, that certain rooms had become structural to him in ways he would never say aloud.
Load-bearing, in the way that grief could be load-bearing — the thing holding the ceiling up that you didn't dare remove.
She had not pressed him on it. Some things you allowed a person to carry in their own way.
She let the door close behind her without latching it and went to the window seat, the deep-cushioned bay that overlooked the courtyard, where the fountain was still running in the dark, its sound muffled now through the old glass.
The courtyard lights were low. Beyond the stone wall, the valley was invisible, swallowed entirely by the particular darkness of rural Bavaria at night, which was a different order of darkness from London dark — not absence of light so much as presence of depth, the kind of dark that had weight to it.
Cassian was in his study at the other end of the house, the door closed, his voice a low indistinguishable register through two walls and a corridor.
His legal team. She had heard the name Harriet twice before the distance made it meaningless.
She had left him to it not because she was retreating — or not only — but because some conversations required the other person to breathe, and she had learned, in these months, that the greatest act of faith she could offer Cassian Sterling was sometimes the act of leaving the room.
She tucked her legs beneath her on the window seat, pulled the soft throw from the arm of the nearest chair, and called her mother.
It rang twice. Her mother picked up on the third ring with the particular quality of someone who had been awake anyway, which meant she had been watching something competitive about baking, or possibly her phone had been face-up on the kitchen table since nine o'clock.
"Anya." Just her name. Not a question.
"Hi, Mum."
"You're calling at midnight."
"It's midnight here. It's only eleven at yours."
"I was not asleep," her mother said, which confirmed the baking programme. A pause. "What happened."
It was not a question either. Her mother did not ask questions when she already knew the shape of a thing — she simply made space for it, the way you made space in a bowl before adding something heavy.
Anya had grown up thinking this was how all mothers listened.
She had discovered, somewhere around age nineteen, that it was not.
"Something has happened with Cassian," Anya said. "I want to tell you all of it. Or — most of it. Some of it isn't mine to tell."
"Then tell me the parts that are yours."
Outside, the fountain ran on. Anya watched it through the old glass, the water catching the low courtyard lights and throwing them back slightly distorted, the way everything looked through glass that was three hundred years old and had settled into its own particular geometry. She took a breath.
She told her mother almost everything. Not the details of the legal proceedings — those belonged to Cassian and to Harriet and to a process that was still unfolding — but the shape of it, the weight of it.
A woman named Delphine Marchetti who had died suddenly at thirty-one and left the world before she could explain herself.
A four-year-old girl named Juliette. A birth certificate with an empty line where the father's name should have been, and a letter — a private letter, handwritten, not a legal instrument but something closer to a confession — that had named Cassian with the reluctant specificity of a person who had run out of other options.
She told her mother about the morning Cassian had said it aloud, the kitchen table, the particular quality of stillness in him when the thing he was carrying finally had a name.
She told her mother about the Geneva photograph circulating online and the meeting with his communications team and the way Cassian had stood at the glass of the conference room window with his hand moving toward his watch in that unconscious tell she had named once, in a moment she sometimes wished she could retrieve and swallow back down, because naming it had made him self-conscious in a way that was genuinely uncomfortable to witness.
She told her mother about the hot air balloon last night, which had been planned weeks before any of this — a pre-arranged gesture of deliberate tenderness that had arrived in the wrong weather entirely, and she had been moved by it anyway, more than she'd expected, perhaps because the contrast between the beauty of the thing and the weight of everything beneath it had made the beauty more apparent rather than less.
She told her mother that this afternoon the inquiry had been confirmed.
She said it plainly, the way you say a thing when you've already said it to yourself a few times and it has begun to find its proper dimensions.
The DNA test that had been expedited through a private medical channel — she did not know all the details of how, and she had not asked — had returned results.
The probability was above 99.97%. Juliette Marchetti, four years old, currently in the care of Delphine's older sister Vivienne in the Jura, was Cassian's daughter.
The silence on the other end of the line had a different quality now.
Her mother was doing the arithmetic, Anya knew — not the legal arithmetic, which was Harriet's department, but the human arithmetic, the one that involved a child who had been in the world for four years without her father knowing, and a man Anya loved, and what this now meant about the particular future Anya had been, quietly, constructing.
"Are you all right?" her mother said at last.
"I think so." Anya pulled the throw tighter around her shoulders. "I'm trying to be honest with myself about whether I'm all right, which is different from just saying it."
"Mm." Her mother's particular sound of acknowledgment, the one that meant she was listening to the spaces between words. "And where are you now?"
"In the library. He's in his study. I needed to — I needed some air that was just mine for a minute."
"That's sensible."
"I keep thinking about the girl." Anya turned her head toward the courtyard.
The fountain, the stone wall, the invisible valley.
"She's four, Mum. She's been in the world for four years and she didn't have — Delphine didn't tell him.
Whatever her reasons were, and I've been trying to understand them, I've been trying very hard to extend every reasonable charity to a woman who is dead and can't explain herself, but that child has been without him for four years. "
"Yes," her mother said.
"And I feel something about that." Anya pressed the phone closer against her ear, as if proximity might help her find the word. "I feel something that isn't quite grief and isn't quite anger and isn't — it's not directed at anyone living. I don't know what to do with it."
"You don't have to do anything with it yet," her mother said. "That feeling is allowed to just be a feeling for a while."
"I know. I know that intellectually."
"But you want to fix it."
"I want to help. There's a difference."
Her mother made the sound again, the acknowledgment-sound, and this time Anya could hear in it the faintest quality of a smile. "There's the thing I've always needed to talk to you about, baby girl."
"What thing?"
"You helping and you running have the same face," her mother said.
"You've always moved toward trouble when you're scared of it.
I used to watch you do it as a child. Something frightened you, you'd walk straight at it.
Picking up the spider for your cousin. Standing in front of that boy on the bus when you were fourteen.
You call it helping. Sometimes that's true.
Sometimes it's the way you metabolize fear. "
Anya opened her mouth and then closed it. The fire in the grate made a small, settling sound.
"I'm not running," she said finally. "I know what running feels like. This isn't that."
"I know it isn't. I'm not accusing you." A pause, her mother breathing, the sound of the television being muted in the background. "I want to ask you two things, and I want you to answer them honestly rather than quickly. Can you do that?"
"Yes."
"Do you love him?"
Anya answered this before the question had entirely finished, the way you answer something when the answer has been living in you so long that it doesn't require assembly. "Yes."
"Good. That's the first thing." Another pause. "Do you want to run?"