Page 65 of The Silent War

He stared at me. “And?”

“And you were kind. It didn’t make you weak.”

“It made me late,” he said.

“Is that what it is now?” I asked. “You’re always late to yourself.”

He didn’t answer that. He looked at the list again, not picking it up, not pushing it back.

“We’re done,” he said finally, formal again. “Corvin will coordinate the draft. Marus will review. We reconvene in a week.”

I stood. My chair didn’t scrape. I pushed it in like a good student. I didn’t bow my head.

At the door, he said my name.

I turned.

His face had gone smooth again. “Don’t confuse loving one child with saving the world. They’re not the same skill.”

“I know. I want the first. You can keep the second.”

Something like a smile ghosted across his mouth and died there. “You always were the easiest and the hardest problem.”

“Maybe stop thinking of me as a problem,” I said. “Start thinking of me as a mother.”

“That’s the same thing,” he said, and looked back at the papers.

I should have cared that he dismissed me. I should have cared that I’d asked for something they would bend into a shape that served them first. That in a week we would sit at this table again and pretend we were in control of anything but the words.

I didn’t.

I thought of Vivienne’s, Charlotte’s mothers. Even my own. I thought of the eleven Emilia Adams that came before me. How circles don’t break unless you stop repeating it.

I walked to the elevator. My phone buzzed once in my pocket and I ignored it, just to know I could. I breathed in and out and counted to five the way a voice had taught me. Byfour, my hands had stopped shaking. Byfive, I could feel the outline of a promise I’d said out loud in a room that hated hearing it.

My child.

I didn’t have one yet.

But I had a clause. And a list. And the quiet conviction that sometimes you start a war with a sentence, and sometimes you end one the same way.

Chapter Twenty-Two

EMILIA

It had been nearly over six weeks since the accident.

The bruises were gone, the cast replaced by a lighter brace. My arm was healing better than the doctors promised. But the real fracture wasn’t that.

It was them.

Bastion and Luca hadn’t stopped. Every morning a message waiting: take your pills, don’t skip breakfast, good morning, angel. Every night the same ritual before I turned my phone face down: sleep, baby. goodnight.

During the day it was worse. Bastion asking if I’d booked the follow-up appointment, sending me links to braces that looked less clinical.

Luca reminding me to change the ice pack, to keep pressure off the joint. Sometimes it was a car waiting outside with food I hadn’t ordered.

Sometimes it was a courier with flowers that looked like nothing out of a florist, because they weren’t — they were from the greenhouse that I loved.