Chapter 508: The Last Thing I Want of You

The room smelled like lavender and something clinical underneath it that no amount of lavender fully covered. A single lamp burned on the nightstand instead of the overhead light, and the machines against the wall had been turned so their screens faced away from the bed, someone’s small mercy. Her grandmother lay propped against a bank of pillows that looked too soft for a woman who’d never allowed herself anything soft in Arianne’s presence before, an IV line taped to the back of one hand, her hair braided back by someone who’d taken real care over it. Arianne closed the door behind her and crossed to the chair already pulled up beside the bed, someone else’s arrangement, not hers. Her grandmother looked up when the door moved. For a second neither of them said anything. Arianne had pictured this moment several ways on the drive out. None of them involved sitting down first.

"Arianne." Only her name, and nothing else.

"Grandmother." The word came out steadier than Arianne expected it to.

"I let your mother marry a man who never once heard her play," her grandmother said, without preamble, like she’d rehearsed the order of what she wanted to say and wasn’t going to waste what was left of her on softening it. "She had hands built for a conservatory stage, and I let Gabriel Summers talk both of us into believing marriage was the safer bet. I didn’t stop it. I had the standing to stop it, and I spent it instead on making sure the wedding photographs turned out well." She paused, breath uneven, and pressed on before Arianne could fill the space for her. "That’s the first thing. I’m not asking you to carry it. I’m telling you because I’ve run out of time to keep it to myself."

"Did she know? That you could have."

"She never asked me to." Her grandmother’s eyes stayed level, no flinch in them. "Which made it easier to tell myself she didn’t want me to. I’ve had a long time to understand how convenient that belief was."

"The conservatory that accepted her. Do you remember which one?"

"Rohan. A letter arrived twice, a year apart, both times asking if she’d reconsider. I have them somewhere in this house, if you ever want to see what she gave up."

Arianne didn’t answer that yet. She’d ask to see the letters before she left tonight, but not now, and let her grandmother keep going.

"And you." Her grandmother’s hand moved an inch on the blanket, not quite reaching. "I sent a thirteen-year-old away from the only family she had left and called it strategy. It was. It also cost you ten years you don’t get back, and I let myself believe the strategy excused the cost, because the alternative was admitting I’d chosen the trust and the name and the appearance of control over a child who needed someone to stay. I’ve had four years to apologize properly and spent most of them deciding I didn’t deserve to. I don’t have four more."

"Why now?" Arianne wasn’t being unkind. She wanted the actual answer.

"Because there isn’t a later left to postpone it to," her grandmother said. "That’s the honest reason. Everything else I could tell you would be a story about growth, and I don’t have the years left to make it a true one."

Arianne didn’t have a rehearsed order for anything. Her hands stayed folded in her lap, steady on purpose. "I know what it cost," she said. "I don’t need you to itemize it a second time."

"No. But I needed to say it once, out loud, to the person it happened to. Not to Julian. Not to a lawyer. To you."

Her grandmother’s eyes moved to the window, then back. "Your mother wanted to name you Athaliah. Did you know that?"

"I read it. In one of the journals."

"She told me herself, before you were born, in this house." Her grandmother’s fingers worked the edge of the blanket, an old habit that hadn’t died with everything else. "She said it was the one name in the world that would only ever belong to you, not to a room full of people who came before you." She nodded toward the nightstand. "Open the drawer."

Arianne did. Inside, wrapped in a handkerchief gone soft with age, was a single page of sheet music in a hand she recognized from the journals, half the staff still empty where the piece had never been finished. In the margin, in the same hand, one word had been written and circled twice — Athaliah.

"She was working on something the week you were born. Never finished it. I kept the page because it was the only thing of hers Gabriel never thought to ask about." Her grandmother’s voice thinned, but her eyes hadn’t. "Gabriel took the name. I watched him do it, at the hospital, while she was still recovering, and I said nothing, because saying something had stopped being a thing I knew how to do by then. I’m not asking you to use it. That’s not mine to ask. I’m asking you to stop carrying the name Gabriel gave you like it’s the only one you were ever given. You had a truer one first, even if you never got to answer to it."

"That’s the last thing I want of you," her grandmother said. "Not forgiveness. I know better than to ask for something I haven’t earned. Don’t let what this family did to you keep living in you after I’m gone. Live whatever’s left of your life without hauling the old bitterness through it. You have people now who never once asked you to carry it."

"I can’t promise you it disappears," Arianne said. "It doesn’t work like that. But I’m not the one drowning in it anymore. I haven’t been in a long time."

Her grandmother’s hand found hers on the blanket, cooler than Arianne expected, the grip weaker than the woman attached to it had any right to have. She didn’t let go right away, and neither did Arianne.

"I asked for the children," her grandmother said eventually. "I meant that. I’d like to see them before—"

She didn’t finish it, and didn’t need to. Arianne folded the sheet music back into its handkerchief, set it on the nightstand where she could reach it again, and went to open the door herself.

Franz came in first, Louis asleep against his shoulder, and didn’t say anything about how Arianne’s eyes looked. "Mrs. Conway," he said, and meant it like an actual greeting, not a formality he was getting through. Lily and Leo hung back half a step behind him, taking in the room like they were deciding how to hold themselves in it. Aunt Estella stayed in the doorway with a hand on each twin’s shoulder, giving them the choice to stay there or not. Lexx broke the arrangement completely, walking straight to the side of the bed and studying the stranger’s face with the same unbothered thoroughness he gave everything else in his life.

"Hi," Lexx said, and patted the blanket twice like he was checking it worked.

Her grandmother’s mouth curved, the first real smile Arianne had seen out of her in four years. "Hi yourself," she said, and reached one hand toward the boy who had no idea whose bed he was patting, only that there was a new person in it and the blanket seemed worth investigating. She studied the baby on Franz’s shoulder next. "That’s the one you named."

"Louis," Franz said, turning him so she could see his face without waking him.

"Another L." Her grandmother’s eyebrows moved, the closest thing to amusement Arianne had seen out of her all evening.

Lily stepped forward at that, tugging Leo along by the sleeve. "We started it. Lily, Leo, Lexx, Louis."

"You did."

"We did," Lily agreed, entirely satisfied with herself, and turned her attention to the flowers on the windowsill, which she seemed to feel needed rearranging.

The room that had held only the two of them a minute ago filled up with all of it at once — Louis stirring against Franz’s shoulder, Lexx repeating "hi, hi, hi" to himself at a volume too loud for the room, Leo drifting toward the window to help Lily with the flowers whether she wanted the help or not. Her grandmother watched all of it like she meant to memorize every second of it, and Arianne let her.

Later, with Leo still narrating the flower rearrangement to anyone who’d listen and Lexx trying to climb back into the same spot by the bed for no reason he could have explained, Arianne slipped the handkerchief-wrapped page into her bag rather than leaving it in the drawer. She’d come back for the letters from Rohan another time, when there was actual room in the day for them. Tonight, this was the one piece she wasn’t leaving without, and she zipped the bag before anyone could ask her why.