Chapter one hundred and ten

Chapter one hundred and ten
Vivienne & Emeline

Emeline sleeps beside me like she doesn’t belong to gravity. Her body curls toward mine, her breath light against my shoulder, but her presence is heavy—an anchor pressing into my chest. I don’t sleep. I haven’t, not in the way that restores. Instead, I watch her eyelids tremble, her lips part slightly as though she’s whispering secrets to her dreams.

I think of how wrong it should feel. A stepdaughter. A child who became a woman under my roof, now wrapped around me as though I am her only shore. And yet—I cannot remember what it was to live without this need. She has braided herself into my marrow.

When her eyes flicker open, there’s no confusion, no dazed transition from dream to waking. She looks at me with sharpness, like she’s been waiting for me to notice she was already watching.

“You didn’t sleep,” she says. Not a question.

I shake my head. “Neither did you.”

Her lips curve—not quite a smile. “I don’t need to, when I have you.”

It should comfort me. Instead, something colder settles inside. The way she says have. The way she makes possession sound like devotion.

“Emeline,” I whisper, “what are we doing?”

Her hand slips beneath the blanket, finds mine, laces our fingers together. She doesn’t blink when she answers:

“Staying alive.”

I feel the sting of tears before I realize I’m crying. She wipes them with the pad of her thumb, gentle, almost maternal. As though she is the one keeping me tethered, when it should be the other way around.

I try to pull away, just enough to breathe, but her grip tightens. “Don’t.” Her voice sharpens, a thread of steel. “If you leave, I disappear.”

I want to tell her that isn’t true. That she is herself, whole and separate. But I don’t believe it. She has become so much of me that I don’t know where she ends.

In the silence that follows, she rests her forehead against mine. Her pulse thunders, not with fear but with certainty. “You’ll see,” she whispers. “We’re all that’s left. And they’ll come looking, but they’ll never find us—not really.”

I close my eyes. The darkness is safer than her gaze. And yet, even in darkness, I feel the shape of her smile.