I wish he would come closer. I wish he wouldn’t just stand with his back pinned to the doorpost like that, his hand still on the knob.
“And you’re certain the pregnancy has taken?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, holding up my wrist to show him the insignia, then letting it fall limply back into my lap.
Nolan lets out a deep sigh, then runs his hand through his dark hair. The gesture itself is innocuous, but it might as well drive fangs into my heart. I miss being the one to do that—tousle my husband’s hair.
“Are you going to leave again?” I say, unable to look at him as I do.
Because of this, I don’t see the reaction on his face—only feel the pause in the room. Finally, boots traverse against creaky wooden floorboards as he finally crosses the chasm between us and finds his place on the bed next to me.
We sit like that. Both straight-backed. Frozen.
I want nothing but to melt into him, and though there is heat radiating off of him, I get the sense that touching him would result in scorch marks.
“No, Darling,” he says. “I won’t leave again.”
I close my eyes, squeezing them shut. It’s the answer I wanted, yet it aches all the same that I even have to ask.
“I thought this moment would be different,” I whisper.
Nolan turns his head toward me, though I still can barely look at him, so I have to sense it out of the corner of my eye.
“Do you know how far along you are?” he asks.
“No.”
“Do you know if there’s a way to find out?”
“Does it matter?” I ask.
What I don’t say is that the Sister will be taking this child, regardless of how far along my pregnancy is. I’ve no desire to count down the days to the birth of a child I’ll never be allowed to hold.
“I suppose there’s a possibility it could be a girl,” says Nolan. He does not sound hopeful. Not like Charlie, who sounded as if she believed herself single-handedly capable of willing it to be true.
“It doesn’t seem that we have that sort of luck, does it?” I ask.
“There are Seers,” says Nolan, “who specialize in determining this sort of thing.”
I don’t answer. I just sit there, straight-backed, staring at the clock on the wall, watching it tick.
“It wouldn’t change anything,” I say. “Knowing or not knowing.”
Nolan falls quiet. After a long moment of silence, he turns his head toward me again.
Tick, tickgoes the clock on the wall.
“My anger at you wasn’t fair,” he says. “At least not in the extremes I took it. When I recovered, when I was lying in that bed on the brink of death, and all of a sudden I felt my Mark heal, when I felt the warmth flow back through my skin, the life breathed back through my lungs… all I could think wasshe did it. My wife did it. My wife saved me.There wasn’t an ounce of anger in my body then. I didn’t care that you had left me. All I cared about was the life I would get to spend with you. All I couldthink about was that you scaled that mountain and found a way to save me. I didn’t care that you had ignored my wishes because it had turned out for my good. Or so I thought.
“It wasn’t fair of me to approve of you then, only to change my perspective of the very same action just because the results revealed themselves to differ from what I previously thought.”
“Are you saying you should have been mad at me to begin with?” I ask.
Nolan lets out a wry chuckle. “That would have been more consistent, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose.” I chew my lip, hesitating before I continue. “Maddox told me about yours and Iaso’s system.”
“It works well for me,” he says. “Did he tell you why I go away?”
