Chapter 164: CLXIV

Isabell's POV

"Inner heel from a piece of glass when you were a child in your previous life. It never fully healed despite your healing ability because you kept walking on it before it closed properly."

I said nothing. I had that scar, I had always had it. I had told my mother I couldn't remember how it happened and she had agreed she didn't know.

"You don't eat the last bite of anything," Xavier said.

"Every meal, every piece of food, there is always one bite left. I asked you about it once and you said you didn't know why you did it. You had always done it."

Levi made a very quiet sound beside me.

I had told him that once that I always left the last bite. He had asked me about it at dinner somewhere and I had said exactly what Xavier had just quoted me as saying.

"You have a mark," Xavier continued, and his voice shifted to something more careful.

"On the inside of your left upper thigh close to the body. A reddish mark, the shape isn't regular, roughly the size of a coin. It has been there your entire life your current doctor notes it as a birthmark."

Everything in the room went very still.

I had that mark, I had had it my entire life. I had never shown it to anyone except a doctor during a routine examination.

I had not told Levi about it. I had not told Zoe about it, I had not told anyone about it because it was in a location that was private and it was simply part of my body that had always been there.

"Stop," I said.

Xavier stopped.

I stood up the movement was faster than my body fully agreed with and I felt the standing up in my head briefly, but I was upright and I stayed upright.

"Stop," I said again, to fill the silence more than because he was still talking.

I picked up my bag from the floor beside the sofa. I picked it up with the focused attention of someone who needs something practical to do with their hands while the rest of them is doing something much less controlled.

Levi stood immediately. "Isabell-"

"I need to be outside," I said.

I walked to the entrance hall. I took my coat from the hook by the door with the careful deliberateness of someone managing themselves one action at a time I opened the front door.

The morning air came in cold and clean. I walked down the front steps and across the gravel to Levi's car.

The door was unlocked. I got in the passenger seat and closed the door behind me and sat in the silence of the car with my bag in my lap and my coat half on, one arm through the sleeve and one arm not.

The gravel drive in front of me was wet from last night's rain. The trees on either side of the driveway still had water on them, small drops catching the grey morning light.

I thought about the mark I had never shown it to anyone.

Xavier knew exactly where it was, what shape it was, how large it was. He had described it with the casual accuracy of someone who had seen it many times, in the normal way that people who shared a life saw each other's bodies. Without drama, without effort just knowing.

The way you knew your partner's body. The specific marks, the specific textures, the places that were particular to that one person.

He had known.

The tears came without the warning I usually had. They just arrived, filling my eyes and spilling before I had decided anything about them, running down my face in the way tears ran when they had been waiting for a long time and the containing structure had finally given way.

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth.

My whole life. Twenty-seven years of a life that I had believed was simply mine, simply the life I had been born into, simply what was true about me.

My mother was not my mother. Not in the way she believed she was. The woman who had sung me that song had learned it from someone who had heard it from me, because in a life I could not remember I had made it up and sung it to a baby while I thought she was sleeping.

That baby was in a playroom in this house behind me my daughter.

Six years old and she knew the last verse of a song and she knew I left the last bite of food and she knew I counted my steps when I was nervous.

My daughter who I had left when she was four months old not because I wanted to. Not because I chose her less than other things. But because the alternative was a world that would have been unlivable for her and everyone in it.

I had left her to save her and she had dreamed of me every night anyway.

The passenger door opened.

Levi got in and closed the door behind him and the car held both of us in the quiet interior.

He didn't speak, he looked at my face, at the tears that had not stopped, at my coat still half on, and he said nothing.

I reached for him.

Not the way I had been holding myself back from reaching for him for months. Not with the careful management of distance that I had been practicing since I left Blackwood mansion with my half-healed chest and my broken heart.

I reached for him the way a person reached for something solid when the ground had gone and there was nothing else.

My hands went into the front of his coat and I pressed my face into his shoulder and held on with a grip that was tighter than I normally allowed myself to use, the grip that acknowledged how scared I actually was rather than how scared I was prepared to show.

His arms went around me immediately, completely, without any of the carefulness he had been applying to being near me for months.

He just held me. Fully, present, both arms.

"I'm scared," I said into his shoulder. My voice came out broken into pieces. "I'm so scared."

"I know," he said, low and steady and completely there.

"My whole life," I said.

"Everything I know about myself, my mother, my childhood, who I am. It's all-" I couldn't finish.

"I know," he said again.

"I don't know how to be a person with this information," I said.

"I don't know how to go to work tomorrow and be a doctor and walk around in a life that was built on something I didn't know was built at all."

His arms tightened. "You don't have to figure that out right now," he said.

"Not today not in this car."

"When?"

"When you are ready," he said. "And not before."

I held onto him and the tears ran and the morning held still around us and he didn't tell me it would be okay because he was too honest for that and I knew too much for that and both of us understood that okay was something that existed on the other side of a very long and very difficult distance.

But he was here.

His arms were around me and he was here and he was not letting go and for right now, in this car, on this grey wet morning, that was the only thing that was solid.

And it was enough it was enough to breathe through It was enough to keep going.