Chapter 38 See me
RORY POV
The weight on my legs was the first thing I felt.
It was a familiar, comforting pressure. I opened my eyes to see Liam, his small head resting on my knees. He looked small, his face puffy as if he'd been crying for hours.
I reached out, my hand trembling as I smoothed his hair. He jolted awake, his eyes widening with a relief so intense it broke my heart.
“Rory.”
He sat up and threw his arms around me with everything he had.
I held him back. Tight. For a long moment I just held this small boy who had somehow become the best part of my days in this house and let him hold me back.
When he pulled away his eyes were wet.
“Don’t talk,” he said immediately, reading my expression before I could even try. “Daddy said your voice needs to rest. Don’t use it.”
I nodded.
I lifted my hands and signed.
"When did you get back from your uncle’s?"
“This morning,” he said. “Daddy came and got me early.”
"How long have I been asleep?"
“Since last night,” he said. “It’s night again now.”
I had been out the whole day.
The door clicked open. My body went rigid before I even saw him. Alexander walked in, and the air in the room seemed to vanish. He looked... haunted. His white shirt was wrinkled, the top buttons undone, and the front was still marred by the dark, dried copper of my blood.
He hadn't even changed.
He didn't look like a billionaire. He looked like a man who had just crawled out of a wreck. But when our eyes met, the pity I felt died instantly.
I was too angry. Too hollowed out. Too humiliated by the memory of saying I love you to a man who looked at me and saw someone else entirely. He had made me feel worthless and stupid and small in the specific way that only people you had started to trust could manage.
I hated him.
I stared at the wall instead of his face.
“You’re awake,” he said.
I didn’t answer him. He could go to hell.
His eyes narrowed slightly.
“She’s awake,” Liam said helpfully, “but she can’t really talk.”
"I'm aware," Alexander said. He walked to the edge of the bed. "Liam, go to the kitchen. Tell the cook to prepare the broth the doctor ordered. Bring Rory some candies on your way back."
Liam beamed, kissed my cheek, and scurried out. The moment the door shut, the room felt like a vacuum.
“You didn’t tell me you were practically mute,” he said.
I reached for the notepad and pen sitting on the nightstand — someone had placed them there, the doctor probably — and wrote without looking at him.
I didn't know you cared.
He chuckled. Low and short.
“If I didn’t know better,” he said, “sometimes I could swear you were my wife.”
The pang hit exactly where it always hit. Sharp and specific and right in the centre of everything.
I wrote again.
Do I look like your wife?
“Yes,” he said simply. “You’re a spitting image of her. Without the curves. And she wasn’t deaf or practically mute.”
So brutal. So casual about it. Like he was describing the weather.
I wrote.
Is that why you bought me? Because I look like her?
“Yes,” he said.
I stared at the notepad for a moment.
He had loved her so much that he had gone out and found her face on another woman and built a life around it. Whatever kind of love that was — obsessive, consuming, the kind that didn’t leave room for anything else — I had never been loved like that. Not even close. Not even by the people who were supposed to.
I wrote.
You must have really loved her.
"She is the only woman I have ever loved," he said, his jaw ticking. He stepped closer, shadows dancing in the hollows of his cheeks.
"I cannot love another. If I ever do something-if I touch you, or look at you in a way that makes you think there is more... don't believe it. It's her l'm seeing. Always."
The air left my lungs. I felt smaller than I ever had. I was a vessel. A mannequin. I was a fool for letting my heart beat faster for a man who was literally looking through me.
I wrote: I understand now. I was stupid. I'm sorry I trespassed.
He didn't respond to that. He just stared at the paper, his expression unreadable.
I looked up at him then. Directly. For the first time since he walked in.
“Can I see a picture of her?” I said out loud. The burning in my throat made me wince immediately but I needed to say that one with my actual voice. I needed him to hear it.
“No,” he said.
I picked up the pen.
please I need to see her.
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone.
He turned the screen toward me, I looked at the picture.
The air left my body.
I had known. Logically I had known we looked alike —he had told me, the old woman at the ballroom had called me by her name, everything had been pointing to it. But knowing and seeing were completely different things.
She was me.
The same face looking back from the screen. The same hazel eyes. The same jaw. The same small freckles scattered across the nose and cheeks that I had spent my whole life being self conscious about. The same mouth.
But where I was plus sized she was slim. Where my hair was the brunette Alexander had forced on me she wore it naturally, styled and graceful.
Where I stood in the world with the particular exhaustion of someone who had always had to fight for basic dignity she looked like someone the world had always been kind to. Warm. Graceful.
Effortlessly beautiful in a way that came from being seen and loved and cherished.
She looked like a better version of me.
Slim. Beautiful. Graceful. Everything I would never be.
Just like he said.
I handed the phone back without a word.
Will he ever see me?
I already knew the answer. But something in me had needed to see her face to make it real. To look at the ghost I was apparently jealous of and understand completely and finally why I had never stood a chance.
He put his phone back in his pocket.
“Rest,” he said. “The doctor is coming to check on you.”
I picked up the pen.
"Can she come to my room?"
“No,” he said. “You’ll be staying in this room from now on. The maids will move your things in here.”
I stared at him in horror.
He was moving me into his room. After everything.
How was I supposed to do that knowing I was nothing but a face he recognized?
I wrote slowly.
I'm a person.
“I know,” he said.
I have my own parents.
“I know.”
I'm not Anastasia. I'm a real person. I have my own identity.
“I know that.”
I'm not a replacement. I don't want to be a replacement. I don't want to be in your dead's wife shadow.
He looked at what I had written for a long moment.
“You are a replacement,” he said. “You will always live in her shadow. That is the entire reason behind this marriage.” He held my gaze. “The earlier you accept that the better.”
I put the pen down, I looked at the window.
I didn’t write anything else, there was nothing left to write.