Chapter 135: The Unfolding Truth XV

Third Person POV

The ceiling had not changed in the last hour. Helen had been staring at it long enough to know every crack, every shadow, every small dip in the wood where the grain had split and never fully closed.

She could have drawn it from memory at this point. Could have described it to a stranger in enough detail that they would have been able to picture it exactly, every imperfection, every place where the wood had darkened with age and never lightened again.

None of it had moved. None of it had anything useful to offer her.

She kept staring anyway.

Because the alternative was closing her eyes, and the alternative to that was thinking, and thinking was the one thing she had been avoiding since yesterday. Since Sonita left. No note. No goodbye. Just disappeared.

Tears rolled from the corners of Helen’s eyes and slid sideways into her hair. She did not wipe them. She did not move at all. She just lay there flat on her back and let them go wherever they wanted to go, because stopping them would have required energy she did not currently have.

Footsteps crossed the floor.

She did not look. She already knew. Kai had been in the cottage since it happened, since she came back and stood in that doorway and understood what the emptiness meant.

He had made tea without being asked. Sat with her without talking because she didn’t want to talk. He had tried once, gently, and when she had not responded, he had not pushed. He had just stayed, which was more than most people would have thought to do.

His footsteps stopped somewhere near the bed.

She did not turn her head.

Until she heard a disturbing sound.

"Que será, será..."

His voice came out soft and slow at first, careful, like he was testing the temperature of something before committing his whole foot to it.

"Whatever will be, will be..."

Helen turned her head.

He was crouched down beside the bed with his elbows resting on his knees and his green eyes fixed on her face. He was not looking away. Not pretending he was doing something else and the singing was just happening incidentally.

He was looking directly at her, crouched on the floor next to her bed, singing like this was a completely reasonable and normal thing to be doing on a Tuesday.

"The future’s not ours to see..."

"Can you stop," Helen said.

He stopped immediately. His expression was a perfect picture of innocence. Eyebrows slightly raised, head tilted, the look of a person who could not imagine what the problem was.

"What? I am just trying to make you feel better."

"It is not working."

He looked genuinely wounded. The kind of wounded that went all the way to his eyes. "What do you mean it is not working? I am a good singer."

Helen looked at him. He looked back at her. He meant it. Every single word of it, with complete sincerity, without a shred of self-doubt. He had said it the way someone states a simple fact about the world. The sky is blue. Water is wet. I am a good singer.

"Kai," she said.

"Yes?"

She took a small breath. "You are actually hurting my ears."

Kai blinked.

"No, I am not."

"Yes, you are."

"My mother used to say I have the sweetest voice in the whole house."

Helen stared at him for a long moment. The kind of stare that started as disbelief and slowly became something else entirely.

Then she sat up, slowly, her hair falling around her face in a tangle, still damp at the edges from the tears she had not bothered to wipe away.

She looked at him.

He looked back at her, completely serious, waiting for her to agree with him.

"Then your mother," Helen said, very slowly and very carefully, "is a very, very good liar."

Kai’s mouth fell open.

Not dramatically. Just a small drop, like a door whose latch had not caught properly. Like he had been ready for several possible responses and none of them had been that one.

He stayed crouched on the floor with his mouth slightly open and his eyebrows pulled together, looking like a man who had been personally wronged.

And then Helen laughed.

It was small and tired and it cracked right in the middle, a little broken around the edges, but it was real. The first real one since Sonita left. The first sound that had come out of her without having to be dragged.

She could feel the difference between this and the ones she had been pressing into the corners of her face to make Kai feel like his efforts were landing. This one just came.

Kai laughed too, louder than her, his head tipping back, his shoulders shaking, the sound of it filling the small cottage in a way that made it feel less quiet than it had felt for the last day and a half.

"Okay," he said, still laughing, trying to pull it back. "Okay, fine. Maybe my voice needs a tiny bit of work."

"A tiny bit?" Helen wiped her face with the back of her hand. The smile was still sitting on her mouth. She had not noticed when it arrived.

"It is a small issue. Very fixable." He held two fingers close together to show her how small. "Barely worth mentioning."

"You sure your ears are fine?"

"They are fine. My ears are perfect. My voice is..." He paused. Considered. "A work in progress."

"That is one way to put it."

He pointed at her face. Satisfied and direct. "But it still worked. Look at that. I cannot remember the last time I saw that."

Her hand went up to her cheek before she could stop it, her fingers finding the corner of her mouth. The smile was still there. Small and uneven, the kind that had arrived without permission.

But the moment she felt it with her own fingers, she became aware of it in a way she had not been a second before, and something in her chest tried to pull it back. Like noticing you had relaxed somewhere you had not meant to.

Kai watched it happen on her face. He did not comment on it. He just shifted from his crouch and sat down properly on the floor, settling his back against the bed frame, stretching his long legs out in front of him, hands loose between his knees. The posture of someone making themselves at home somewhere without asking, and somehow doing it in a way that did not feel like an intrusion.

The laughter faded. The cottage settled back into quiet.

Not empty quiet. Just the regular kind, the kind with small sounds in it, the fire, the birds outside, the wind moving through the garden. The kind of quiet that did not press on you.

"I know you miss her," Kai said. Low. Not a question, just a fact he was setting down gently between them.

Helen looked at him.

"But she is strong enough to take care of herself. You know that, right?"

"Yeah," Helen said. "I know that."

"Then stop making yourself sick over it." He looked at her directly, his green eyes even and steady. "You know she can handle herself out there. So you should start worrying about yourself for once. She is going to be fine. She is probably already somewhere right now winning an argument she started with a stranger and feeling very good about it."

Helen’s mouth moved. The smile came back. Shorter than the last one, but genuine, because it was true. That was exactly what Sonita was probably doing. Standing somewhere with her arms crossed and her chin lifted, absolutely certain she was right about something, unwilling to hear a single word to the contrary.

"She would be so angry if she knew you described her like that," Helen said.

"I know." He smiled. "That is why I said it when she is not here."

Helen looked down at her hands in her lap. She turned them over once, looking at her palms. Then she folded them together and looked at him sitting on her floor with his back against her bed frame as if he had always sat there.

"Why are you still here, Kai?"

He looked at her like she had asked him something with a very obvious answer.

"Because I want to make you feel better." Simple. Flat. Final. "Until that happens, I am not going anywhere."

She looked at him.

He looked back at her and left it there. Did not add to it. Did not walk any part of it back. Did not fill the space after it with something smaller or safer. He just let the words sit where he had put them and held her gaze without blinking.

Something in Helen’s chest moved. Quiet and slow, like something shifting in deep water. She looked away first, back at her hands, and breathed through it.

The fire crackled once.

Outside, the birds kept going.

Helen unfolded her hands and pressed them flat against her knees. She had been in bed since yesterday. The cottage smelled like the tea Kai had made three times and she had only finished once. Sonita’s empty corner was still empty, still catching her eye every time she looked in that direction, and she was not sure when it was going to stop doing that.

But she was sitting up.

That was something.

"When Sonita comes back," Helen said slowly, mostly to herself, "I am going to let her talk first. Whatever she wants, I will accept."

Kai stared for a while then nodded once. Like he wasn’t sure of it.

"And if she never comes back?"

"She will come back," Helen said. Not even a full second of hesitation.

Kai looked at the certainty on her face. Something in his expression went quiet and warm at the same time.

"Yeah," he said. "I think she will too."

****

A sound came through the window.

Not close. Not right outside the garden gate. It was moving through the trees, traveling and softened by distance, but there and getting less distant by the second.

Hooves on packed earth. More than one horse, several, the rhythm of them overlapping. The low snort of animals being pulled from a trot to a stop, the faint jingle of metal somewhere underneath all of it.

Helen’s eyes moved toward the window.

Kai did not.

His whole body changed.

She felt it before she fully saw it, something shifted in the air around him, a heaviness that had not been there a moment before, pressing in quietly from all sides like a change in weather before the rain actually hit.

His shoulders moved back. His head lifted. His hands, which had been loose between his knees, went still. Completely still, the kind of still that was not relaxed but controlled.

His green eyes went somewhere else.

The brightness drained out of them and something older and much quieter slid in underneath, and the eyes looking at the door were not the ones that had been laughing about his mother a few minutes ago.

Helen turned to look at his face fully.

The green was still there but it had gone deep, the color of a forest where light stopped bothering to try.

"Kai?"

He stood up without looking at her.

Smooth. No rush. No scramble. Just up, like gravity had simply decided to cooperate.

"Whatever happens," he said. His voice was even and low. "Do not come outside."

He walked toward the door.

His footsteps did not speed up. Did not slow down. The same deliberate, unhurried pace he brought to everything, like nothing coming toward him had ever once been enough to make him change it.

Helen sat on the bed and watched him cross the floor.

She thought about calling his name again.

But she didn’t.

His hand reached the door. His fingers wrapped around the latch.

He paused there for exactly one second, his back to her, his hand on the door, the sound of the hooves outside now close enough that she could feel them in the floor beneath her.

Then he lifted the latch and walked out.

The door swung shut behind him.

Helen sat in the silence he left and stared at the closed door and listened to the sound of whatever was coming getting closer and closer and closer.