Chapter 14 - You will be fine
"You'll be fine," she says.
I almost laugh again, but the sound catches in my throat and dies there before it can become anything real.
Fine. The word feels too small for what is inside me.
Too clean. Too easy. There is nothing fine about the way my chest still aches from trying to hold too much at once, or the way my hands have not entirely stopped shaking, or the fact that the future something I once treated like a distant, irrelevant thing is now standing in front of me with my wife's face and my child's heartbeat hidden beneath it.
"That sounds optimistic," I say.
"It is not optimism," she replies, and her mouth curves only slightly. "It is pattern recognition."
I lift my eyes to hers then.
She is not soft. Not in the way the world understands softness.
She is still Veronica, still sharp, still difficult, still terrifying to anyone with even the smallest instinct for self-preservation.
There is steel in her even now. There always will be.
She is not the sort of woman who was made gentle by survival.
She was made dangerous by it. But beneath all of that, beneath the cruelty she wears so easily and the discipline she hands out like punishment and prayer, there is something older.
Something deeper. Something that has always known how to hold grief without mocking it.
"You will be fine," she says quietly. "Because you are no longer the same fool I met all those years ago."
"Thank you ?"
"Look." There is a strange warmth in her expression that does not hide itself.
"You have become a phenomenal man," she says.
"A better man than you have ever allowed yourself to believe.
You are a great husband already, whether you know it or not, and you will be an extraordinary father, whether you are frightened of it or not. "
The scar on my face tightens faintly when I smile, a familiar pull I have long since stopped noticing.I know what she sees when she looks at it.
Not just the wound.
The choice.
The son she lost long before I came into her life.
The boy she found in me without either of us planning it.
And I know what I see when I look at her.
The mother I never had.
The thought settles in me with an ache so old it feels like part of my bones.
I do not say it aloud. I never have. I do not need to.
Some truths become too sacred to survive careless speech.
They live in the way she stood over me when I was young and bleeding and too proud to admit either.
They live in the way she held me when i broke, after my hands were red with the blood of everything I had loved and lost. They live in the way she never once told me to stop crying, to be a man, to act my age, never once told me to be a king.
She was there when I became something harder.
And before that, she was there when I was still soft enough to shatter.
I drag a hand through my hair and stare down at the floor for a moment because looking at her too long makes honesty easier than I know what to do with.
"But i don't know what I'm doing," I admit.
The words leave me more quietly than I intended. They sound Small and pathetic. Less like a king and more like what I am in this moment a man sitting in front of the closest thing he has ever had to a mother, terrified of how much there is to lose.
"No one does," she says.
I look up again.
She has not moved away from me. If anything, she seems more present now, more focused, as if she understands this is not the sort of fear that can be answered with instructions or strategy.
"When it comes to love," she says, and this time her voice is softer than I have heard it in years, lower and slower, as though she is choosing each word with care, "no one knows what they are doing.
Not really. People pretend they do. They write books about it and poems about it and stand in temples swearing they understand it because they survived the easy parts.
But they don't. No one does. Love is not one thing.
It is not clean, and it is not the same in every body that carries it.
Some people feel like a breath of fresh air after being trapped too long in a room with no windows.
Some feel it like rushing water... violent and overwhelming, powerful enough to drag them somewhere they never meant to go.
And some..." Her eyes stay on mine. "Some feel it like finding water in the desert after searching so long they had already started to believe they were meant to die thirsty. "
Her expression changes, not into pity, never that, but into something like fierce understanding.
"You are not doing it wrong just because it frightens you," she continues. "And you are not weak because suddenly you care enough to be terrified. If anything, that means your love is real. It means you have finally found something precious enough to make you fear the future instead of mocking it."
I breathe in slowly, but it catches halfway.
For years, I did not care if I lived.
That is the ugliest truth of me, and yet also the simplest. I woke because I had not died in my sleep.
I ruled because no one else could do it well enough.
I fought because duty required it, because bloodlines and borders and law all demanded a body willing to stand in front of ruin and call it governance.
But I did not want anything from the future.
I did not hunger for it. I did not imagine old age.
I did not picture mornings that were not sharpened by responsibility.
I existed because dying would have been too easy and because I had been built for harder things than surrender.
Now I want to live.
And wanting it feels more dangerous than death ever did.
"And being a parent," she says, and something almost like amusement passes through her eyes, not because it is funny but because she knows exactly how little comfort will be found in what comes next, "is no easier.
No one knows how to do that either. Every book in every kingdom claims to know best. Every parent will tell you they did it the right way.
Every old fool who kept a child alive long enough to watch them become loud and stubborn will stand there and speak like that alone makes them wise.
Most of them are lying. Some to others. Most to themselves. "
That almost makes me laugh.
"Children are strange creatures," she continues, and this time there is something deeply human in her expression, something weathered and fond and sad all at once.
"They need structure, yes. They need guidance.
They need to be corrected when they are wrong and stopped when they become cruel, and taught that the world is not theirs simply because they entered it screaming.
They need rules. They need discipline. They need someone willing to stand in the doorway and say no, even when they hate you for it. "
"But they also need softness," she says.
"Not weakness. Not indulgence. Softness.
A place to run when they are hurt. A place to fall apart when the world feels too large.
A person who will not push them away when they wake, frightened from a nightmare, or come to you, shaking because something has broken inside them and they do not yet know how to name it.
They need someone who can be stronger than they are without making them ashamed for needing strength. "
"You will never truly know if you were a great parent," she says.
"That is the cruelest part. You will doubt yourself every step of the way.
You will wonder if you are too harsh, too cold, too distant, too afraid.
You will wonder if one wrong word will become a wound they carry for years.
You will wonder if love is supposed to feel steadier than this. It never does."
Her voice softens further.
"You only find out what kind of parent you were much later.
When you watch your child become an adult with a life of their own.
And if the gods are merciful enough to let you live that long, you will know it in the way they raise their child.
When you watch the way they soothe them.
Protect them. Correct them. Love them. That is when you learn what they carried forward from you. "
My chest aches so badly I almost have to look away.
"All you can do," she says, "is your best. That is all any of us ever do, no matter how wise we claim to be. You do your best, and then you pray."