Chapter 170: CLXX

Isabelll's POV

We talked for another twenty minutes, practical things, Zoe asking questions and me answering them, both of us doing what we had always done which was work through impossible things by making them as concrete as possible until they were manageable.

She told me she was coming to visit as soon as she could arrange it. I told her she didn't have to come all that way. She told me to stop saying things like that.

By the time I ended the call I felt, not better exactly, but less alone in carrying it which was what Zoe had always done.

Aria's school was a small educational facility three streets from the pack's central buildings. Xavier had enrolled her for the duration of their stay, and she had gone that morning with the complete pragmatic acceptance of a child who had moved enough times to understand that new schools were simply a feature of life.

I collected her at three-fifteen.

She came through the door of the school building and saw me and did the thing she always did, the immediate full-body orientation toward me, and crossed the pavement with purpose.

"You came," she said.

"I said I would," I said.

"I know I just like when the thing that's supposed to happen happens," she said, with the gravity of someone who had learned early that things did not always happen the way they were supposed to.

She took my hand and we walked. "How was school?" I asked.

"Good," she said.

"There is a girl called Maya who knows everything about birds. She told me things about birds for a long time."

"Did you mind?"

"No," Aria said.

"I like knowing things." She looked up at me. "Are we going to the park or home?"

"What do you want?"

She considered it. "Park first," she said. "Then home."

We went to the small park two streets from Levi's building. It had a bench near a large tree that Aria approved of, and a patch of grass that she immediately sat on despite the fact that the ground was still slightly damp from recent rain, which she either did not notice or assessed and decided was acceptable.

George was in her school bag. She retrieved him and settled him on the bench beside us. We stayed for an hour.

We talked about everything and nothing, the way we had fallen into naturally. She told me about Maya's bird knowledge.

I told her about a patient who had come into the hospital recently who had been very particular about which nurse helped him and had very politely refused anyone except the specific nurse he wanted, which Aria found both funny and completely reasonable.

We played a game she invented on the spot which involved identifying clouds and deciding what they most resembled, a game with no winning condition and entirely flexible rules that she modified in real time as the clouds changed.

She beat me comprehensively under the rules she was inventing. I watched her lie back on the slightly damp grass with George on her chest and her eyes on the sky and felt something in my chest that I did not have a prior reference point for.

A quality of presence, of being somewhere specifically and completely, that was different from how I usually existed in the world.

I had been busy for years productive and purposeful and working and moving but I had not often been simply present in a moment with no other objective than being in it.

Aria had this effect on me at four-thirty she sat up and looked at me.

"You have something to say," she said and I looked at her.

"You've been doing the thinking face," she said.

"Since we left school you think and then you look at me and then you think more."

"The thinking face," I repeated.

"Everyone has one," she said practically.

"Yours goes here." She pointed to the space between her own eyebrows. "A little line."

I took a breath. "Aria," I said.

"I need to tell you something. And I need you to know that what I'm going to say is true. It's been confirmed. It's not a feeling or a guess. It's true."

She looked at me with those steady dark eyes and waited.

"The test I did," I said.

"The one with your hair."

"Yes," she said.

"The results came back," I said.

She was very still.

"Aria," I said. "I'm your mother biologically the test confirmed that I am your mother."

The park was quiet around us. A bird moved through the tree above us. The slightly damp grass was green and ordinary and the sky behind Aria's head was the flat grey of a late afternoon.

Aria looked at me for a long moment, her eyes filled. Not fast, not dramatically slowly, the way water rose, filling from the bottom.

"I know," she said, exactly as she had said it in Levi's apartment. But this time the words were different. This time they were not the patient waiting for a child who had more certainty than the adult in front of her.

This time they were the words of a child whose certainty had just been given back to her in a form she could hold.

"I know," she said again, and her voice was small.

Then she moved.

She closed the distance between us on the grass, both arms coming around me, her face pressing into my neck, George crushed between us where her hand was still holding him, and she held on with the full-body commitment that children brought to physical affection when they meant it completely.

I put my arms around her.

She was small she was warm and real and she smelled like the outdoors and something sweet from whatever she had eaten at school, and her arms around my neck were the arms of a six-year-old who had been dreaming her mother for her entire conscious life and was now, on a patch of slightly damp grass in a park near a pack facility in the grey afternoon, holding her.

I held her back.

I did not try to speak. There was nothing to say that was not already being said by the fact that we were both there, both present, both exactly where we were.

She cried, quietly, into my neck. The same kind of crying she had done before, honest and without performance, the relief of something that had been unresolved becoming resolved.

I held her and she cried and somewhere above us the bird in the tree made a sound, and the park continued its ordinary afternoon around us, and I thought about a woman who had stood at the edge of something consuming and let go of everything, including this, including a four-month-old version of this small person pressing her face into my neck.

She had let go of this to save the world that would grow up if I understood it. I could not have made that choice from inside this moment. I could not have let go of these arms. But I understood the woman who had, because I was her, and somewhere beneath twenty-seven years of a different life, I recognized the shape of it.

"I missed you," Aria said into my neck. "In the dreams, I missed you. Even when I was in them. I missed you."

"I know," I said, against the top of her head.

"I know, baby."

The word came out without me deciding to say it. Aria's arms tightened. We stayed like that for a long time, on the grass, in the grey afternoon, while the world continued around us with complete indifference to the fact that something had just been returned that had been lost for six years.

Something that should never have been lost at all.