Page 80 of Bound

Of a friend that she’d sent away because...

Because it wasn’t worth the risk, was it?

“None of this has been fair to you. I am more than aware. My... my mate is aware.” There was no mistaking the strain in his voice. The acknowledgement of a woman they both worked so hard to avoid in their talk.

She couldn’t look at him. Felt like a fledgling again hiding in his coat rather than face him properly. “Does she hate me?” How often had she wondered? No matter how she told herself it wouldn’t change anything, that she’d never meet her, so it shouldn’t bother her.

But it did. When she was lonely and she missed her father, she wondered what it would be like to spend a supper in his home. With his family. What it might be like to have siblings to fill a table and...

“Wren, no.” She listened to his heart race beneath her ear, and it comforted her as much as it saddened her. That he was nervous, that she’d caused it. “It was so complicated, in the beginning. It was what... none of us wanted. And I fear, somewhere along the way, we got used to not talking about things. To pretending. And I think that has hurt you most of all.”

He pulled back slightly, his hand coming to cup her chin as he urged her to look at him. “Do you hate her?”

It was not an admission she had ever been willing to give, even to herself. Her mother had seen it. Had known. But even then, they’d never allowed it to be voiced.

She felt childish. An unforgiving, ungrateful fledgling that wanted too much, forgave too little. No one had chosen it, no one had wanted it.

But it had happened.

And she was the one that couldn’t seem to move beyond it. Couldn’t let go of the pain of him leaving.

Having to go.

Because of this nameless, faceless woman that yes.

Was far too easy to hate.

To resent. To blame. Because if she didn’t exist, then her father would have stayed. Then her mother might have been helped sooner. He might have seen, might have known when a man was a liar and no true mate at all.

“Oh, my sweet.” He pulled her back to him, and she was more grateful than she could say that he didn’t make her answer him. Hadn’t made her speak of her great shame. “Come inside,” he urged, as if... as if it was his home to bring her to. His table to sit her at while he made her tea and fetched a biscuit from the jar and bid her eat it.

But she allowed it. While she rubbed at her eyes and watched rather miserably as he took the seat across from her, his hands curled about his own mug.

Braum had sat there. When she’d talked of her parents. Her history. His posture was much the same, grave and earnest.

But she hadn’t spoken of these particular feelings, had she? She’d buried them. Kept them to herself as if she could pretend they didn’t exist at all. Like she was a better person than she really was.

“There were things we decided when... when you were still very young. Things your mother insisted upon because... because she was hurting, too.” He reached out and took her hand, and gripped it more firmly than she’d expected. “Your mother asked me not to take you to my home. And I understood why, and I suppose... I suppose I grew used to that promise. Of honouring her wishes. But not if it hurts you more.”

Her brow furrowed, and she pulled her hand free. It felt wrong, discussing Mama without her there to speak for herself. To correct anything misremembered, to share her own feelings. But this felt important. To preserve what little remained of her family and to—perhaps—be able to release some resentments that had grown as steadily as she had.

“Why would she do that?”

Her father smiled, that sad sort of twist of his mouth that came when they dared to speak of Mama, even just a little. “You were everything to her. And no matter how I tried to promise her you’d love her no less, she... she feared you would like it. The city. Living in one of the towers. A home with... with siblings and a father in it every night.”

Her stomach ached. Twisted. For all she wanted to say to her mother now that she was grown. How absurd a fear that was when she was her very best friend. When she loved their land, their home, and...

And there was a little niggle of something else. Something foreign and unwelcome.

That maybe she’d been robbed of something along the way, as well. Of belonging.

Of not being as much an outsider as her blood and birth made her.

Not as vulnerable. As lonely.

She glanced out the kitchen window to Merryweather stalking something across the yard, her body down low as she used the late summer grasses for cover.

“I think we say a lot in what we don’t say,” Da continued, taking a sip of his tea. “And you don’t say a lot, my sweet.”