Page 45

Unsettled by the confusion in her eyes, I look away, my gaze falling on the coffee table. It’s a chaotic mess consisting of my laptop, the heart monitor, nursery invoices, the framed articles I’d taken off the wall for her, and a stack of old newspapers that I found in the closet. Fittingly, these things have become a sort of clock for me. Rotations of my day. Mornings with the heart monitor strapped to Verity’s belly. Afternoons spent pouring over spreadsheets and lab results. Evenings coordinating with the contractors over the phone. Nights—long nights that seem like they’ll never end—spent flipping idly through all these clippings of Forsyth’s history. This building has all kinds of tattered shreds of it lying around.

It’s why I relent, turning my hand to lace our fingers together. “Because I’m not like Wicker or Pace. My blood isn’t Royal, or warm, or full of potential, and I—” I look down, fixatedby the sight of our entwined hands, resting against our son. “I didn’t want to create a life out of emptiness. A life like mine.”

Her face goes slack, lips parting. “What?”

“It was dumb. Superstitious, I guess.” It’s never easy being faced with things I can’t quantify, and I frown as I consider her belly—the life stirring inside of it. “But what is a soul? Does it even exist? Is it just a pretty name we give to the concept of sentience, or is it something that transcends science? And if it is, are we imbued with one at birth, or is a soul something we build ourselves? Can we inherit a soul? And if we can, does that mean we can also inherit the absence of one?” Exhausted, I rub my eyes, confessing, “I don’t know. I justdon’t fucking know. But with my history, if there was a chance of that moment, the spark of creation, having any impact on genetic nature, then I wanted to at least?—”

A loud, wracking sob shatters my meandering train of thought. I lay there, stunned, as Verity rips her hand from mine, covering her crying face. There couldn’t be a more concise validation of those fears than this. I feel it in the pit of my chest, this dull, painful throb that I’d put her through it. It’s why I’d been so happy to find out our son was made from Wicker.

Wicker, whose biggest problem is that he hastoo muchsoul.

But really, who’d want to look into these dead, empty eyes while creating life? It’s harder than I thought it’d be to say, “I’m sorry I made you look.”

Her hands fly away from her face, revealing red, tear-stained cheeks. “No,” she cries, the agonized twist of her expression tugging at something painful. “Looking at you was the best part of the whole thing, Lex. I’m… I’m so glad you made me look.” She sucks in a sharp, shuddering breath, her green eyes brimming. “But Wicker didn’t.”

For a moment, all I can parse are those words.

“... the best part of the whole thing.”

And then I push up, sweeping the hair from her wet cheek. “Hey, what are you talking about?”

She grimaces, but I don’t let her twist away, thumbing a tear from her cheek. “I found out I was pregnant after the cleansing,” she explains. In my periphery, I see her hands tangling the hem of her shirt up into fists, wringing them. “What if that’s how we made him, Lex? What if it wasworsethan empty? You were all so mean and hateful, and you… you didn’t want to create with me. You hated me. You wanted tohurtme.” She untangles a fist only to push it against her diaphragm. “That hurt is stillin heresomewhere.” With wide, shining eyes, she presses a ragged whisper into the space between us. “What if it’shim, Lex? What if we bring this child into the world and I can never look into his eyes and see anything but pain?”

Her words sink into me like a knife, the thought so gutting that it’s a physical impulse to recoil from it.

Instead, I pull her close, gathering her shuddering body up to mine. “Fuck, Verity…” She smells sweet and ripe, her hair like silk against my cheek. I want to fuckinghitsomething. “You know how hard I’ve worked to analyze this pregnancy.” Every last deposit. Every ovulation. Every menstruation. Temperatures. Hormones. “You trust that, don’t you?”

Her breath hitches with another cry. “Yes.”

Nodding, I command, “Then I need you to trust this. Look at me.” Pulling away only enough to frame her face in my hands, I hold her watery stare, willing her to hear me. “That’s just not possible, Ver. Our son was conceived before the cleansing.”

She makes a quiet, miserable sound. “You can’t know that.”

“I thought you trusted me.” But really, why would she?

She pulls in a sniffle, searching my eyes. “How can you even be sure?”

“I pinned it down before…” I reach into my pocket, pulling out my phone. I began tracking her cycle that first night I puta deposit in her, and I bring up that calendar. It’s packed with tags and times and details she’s probably not even aware of herself. With only the slightest hesitation—it might put her off to realize how closely I’ve been tracking her—aware that it may seem obsessive, psychotic even, I turn the phone to show her. “It had to have happened the last week of January. See? That was almost two weeks before the cleansing. You wouldn’t have even been ovulating that day, Verity.”

She drags a wrist beneath her nose as she inspects the data, brow furrowing. “And you… you’re sure? You’repositive?”

I do her one better than that. “I’d swear it on Wicker’s life.” I tuck a lock of hair behind her ear, trying to catch her gaze again. “And hey, you and Wick had some good sex in there, didn’t you?”

She does this little half-laugh, half-grimace that makes her nose wrinkle cutely. “I think so,” she croaks. She’s still inspecting the calendar though, her forefinger landing on January 27th. “That night… Wicker and I went to that dumb party.” It’s tagged in yellow; a Wicker deposit. She glances up at me, a glow of hope in her green eyes. “We had sex in the pool downstairs. It was… it was the first time he looked at me while we were…”

I catch on, whisking a teardrop from her jaw. “I bet that’s the one that did it.”

“Yeah?” She looks so hopeful, that I can’t bring myself to tell her we can never actually know.

But I believe it. “Yeah,” I agree, gathering her close again.

She comes with me when I pull her down, tucking her head beneath my chin, and I let her keep the phone, her fingers slowly browsing all the daily details and timelines. For a little while, it’s perfect. The warmth of her against me, pressed between my side and the back of the couch. The weight of her thigh, slung over my leg. The press of her stomach—our son—resting against my hip. The rhythm of her breaths tickling against my collarbone.

By the time I speak, the phone has gone black, her breaths evening out, and I know she’s close to falling asleep. I should rouse her, tell her to lock herself inside her room, protect herself from me.

But selfishly, I don’t.

“I’m sorry we did that to you.” The whisper is little more than a breath, but I know she hears it. I don’t say that Father engineered the circumstances, or that I was too high on Scratch to stop myself, or that I was just protecting my brother from someone I thought would hurt him.