Chapter 11 Blood and Bone #2
Anya did not answer immediately. She sat with it.
She watched the fountain in the courtyard and she thought about the question seriously, the way her mother had asked her to, which meant not the rehearsed version of the answer but the real one.
The one that didn't perform emotional health.
The one that acknowledged the thing she had been carrying since the morning Cassian had said the name Juliette across a kitchen table: that her carefully tended private dream — the quiet life, the manageable life, the life that fit inside a space she could see the edges of — had sustained another significant revision.
That the life she was actually living kept exceeding its own projected dimensions in ways she had not signed up for and could not have anticipated and could not, if she was honest, have imagined.
That she was frightened. Not of Cassian. Not of Juliette. Not of any person in this. But of the size of it. The way a life could keep growing beyond the shape you'd originally assigned it.
She sat with all of that for a while, the fire and the fountain and her mother's patient silence across two time zones, and when she finally went looking for the running impulse — the one she recognized from the months before she had named what she felt for him, the one that presented as practicality and sensible self-preservation and was, underneath, pure fear — she didn't find it.
What she found instead was something she hadn't expected. Something quieter and less dramatic than either staying or leaving: a sense of being grounded in exactly the place she was. Not because the ground was easy. But because it was real.
"No," she said. "I don't want to run."
Her mother let the silence hold for one more moment. Then: "Then you already know what you're doing."
"That seems too simple."
"The true things usually do." Her mother's voice held that particular quality it got when she was talking about something she knew from the bone rather than from thought — the same quality it had when she talked about the bakery, about Anya's father, about the things that had asked the most of her and been, in some oblique way, the things that had made her most fully herself.
"Anya. You are not a woman who stumbles into things.
You came to this man clear-eyed. And you've stayed clear-eyed.
Don't stop now just because the picture got bigger. "
"The picture got significantly bigger, Mum."
"The most important pictures do."
Anya laughed — short, slightly helpless, the laugh of someone who recognizes that the person they've called is going to be, as always, irritatingly correct.
"I wanted you to tell me it was complicated," she said.
"It is complicated," her mother said. "That doesn't mean it's unclear. Those are different things, Anya. Complicated is just difficulty. Unclear is being lost. Are you lost?"
"No."
"Good." The sound of a cup being set down. "Call me tomorrow. Let me know how it goes with the little girl."
"I don't know when I'll meet her. If I meet her. It's — there's so much that has to happen legally, and Vivienne is —"
"I know. I meant: let me know how it goes inside you, when you've had more time. Not the legal things. The inside things."
"Okay," Anya said. "I love you, Mum."
"I love you, baby girl. Go to bed."
She hung up and sat for a moment longer in the library window seat, the phone warm in her hand, the throw around her shoulders, the fire making its low domestic sound behind her.
She thought about what her mother had said — not the advice, which she had already absorbed and would unpack later, but the question itself.
Do you want to run. The fact that the answer had required genuine sitting-with, that she'd had to go looking for it rather than simply producing it, felt important.
It meant she had answered honestly rather than quickly.
It meant she'd done what her mother asked.
She thought about the dream she'd had when she'd first come to this life — the private version, the one she hadn't said aloud even to Cassian.
The quiet house. The bakery rebuilt, nothing glamorous, just the smell of proving bread and her father's slightly miscalibrated drawer and the particular simplicity of a life with clear physical edges.
She had wanted that dream so completely that she'd used it as a measure for everything else: does this fit inside the edges, or does it ask me to become something I'm not.
But she was sitting here, in a Bavarian opera house that a man she loved had made into something tender and habitable, in a library that smelled like another room they had both lived in, with her legs tucked under a throw and the sound of a fountain in the courtyard — and she recognized, with a kind of slow, unlocking clarity, that the dream had never actually been about the bakery.
Not really. The bakery was the symbol. The bakery was the shape her safety had taken when she was a child, because bread proved in the same drawer every morning and the hours were predictable and her father was there.
The dream was safety. The dream was not being frightened all the time.
She looked around the library. She was not frightened.
She was in the middle of something enormous, something that would require things from her she hadn't budgeted for, something that involved a small girl in the Jura who was four years old and had no father listed anywhere that the world could find.
She was standing in the middle of that, and she was not, when she checked honestly, frightened.
She was concerned. She was moved. She was, in the quietest and most private part of herself, already beginning to think about what Juliette might need — not just from Cassian, whose love the child deserved and would, Anya was certain of this, eventually receive in the particular thorough and protective way that Cassian gave the things he finally permitted himself to give — but from the whole shape of the life that was forming around them both.
She unfolded herself from the window seat and put the throw back on the chair arm and turned off the reading lamp beside it. The fire had burned lower. She left it, because Cassian would see to it when he came through.
She went to the courtyard.