Chapter 184 *
Viviana looked at Zelda.
She did not know this person.
Not this one. Not the one who had sat across from Miranda at a candlelit table and laughed. Not the one who had sat on the edge of her hospital bed and held her hand and said you're going to be okay, Mom, I'm right here while already calculating the timing.
Viviana had not known that person existed. She thought about Miranda.
Decades of phone calls and lunches and shared bottles of wine and the particular kind of friendship that becomes its own kind of marriage — the person who knows the version of you that exists before you've put yourself together for the day, the person you call first when something falls apart. Miranda had been that person. Miranda had been at her hospital bedside both times. Miranda had held her hand in that same room with the window that didn't open all the way, and said the same things Zelda had said, and meant none of it any more than Zelda had.
They had both been watching her. Learning her. Waiting.
And then the image arrived, the one she could not stop — two columns running side by side in her head.
Zelda. The black card that never came back declined. The walk-in closet she'd had renovated twice because Zelda's taste changed. Every Christmas morning. Every school play, every graduation, every ordinary Tuesday where Viviana had looked across the breakfast table and felt grateful that she had this, that she had her.
Scarlett. Her own daughter. Flesh of her flesh. The room at the end of the servants' hall because Viviana hadn't wanted Zelda to feel displaced. The clothes — God, the clothes — Zelda's castoffs, things Zelda had grown bored of, handed down the hall like charity. The dinners where Scarlett sat at the far end of the table and Viviana looked through her. The things Viviana had said. The things she had allowed to be said.
She pressed her hand against her sternum like she could hold the feeling in.
She couldn't.
Her legs were unsteady when she stood. Lorenzo moved toward her and she put her hand up without looking at him. She crossed the room slowly, one step at a time, until she was standing at Scarlett's end of the table.
Scarlett had not moved from her chair. Her hands were folded in front of her on the table. She watched Viviana cross the room with an expression that had no warm in it.
Viviana's voice came out broken before she'd even finished drawing the breath to speak.
"I'm sorry." The words were barely words. "Scarlett. I am so sorry. For all of it."
She reached out her hand.
Scarlett looked at it. She looked at it the way you look at something you have already made a decision about. Her expression was not angry. It was not cruel.
"You've already used two of your three," Scarlett said. "We had a deal. I'm holding up my end."
Viviana's hand dropped.
"What?" Her voice came out barely above a whisper.
"The agreement." Scarlett's tone was patient and even. "Three wishes. That's what I offered when I came back. Three things you could ask of me, and when they were done, we were done. You've used two of them." She met Viviana's eyes. "You have one left. I'd think carefully about how you spend it."
"Scarlett, that isn't — that was never meant to be —"
"It's exactly what it was meant to be." Scarlett's voice didn't rise. "You signed off on it. Nobody put a gun to your head."
Viviana opened her mouth.
"She's right." Damon's voice came from the end of the table. He looked at Viviana.
"You should sit down," he said. There was nothing threatening in his voice.
Viviana's eyes filled with tears. She looked at Scarlett with the open, wrecked expression of someone who had just understood the full weight of what they had thrown away, and her mouth moved like she was trying to find words large enough to matter.
She turned toward Damon.
He was already looking at her. He hadn't moved from his chair.
Whatever she had been about to say, she swallowed it.
She sat back down.
"I want to be clear about something," Damon said. "Because I've been sitting here for an hour and I've watched you go through about six different versions of grief, and most of them were genuine, and I don't have anything to say about that." He paused. "But this one isn't."
Viviana stared at him. "I don't know what you mean."
"Yes you do." He leaned forward slightly, just enough. "You're not sorry for what you did to Scarlett. You're sorry because Zelda doesn't need you anymore. Those are two completely different things, and one of them is real and one of them isn't."
The room was very quiet.
"If Zelda were still sitting in that chair over there," Damon continued, "calling you Mom and crying on your shoulder and looking at you like you were the only person in the world who understood her — would you be standing at the end of this table right now? Would you even be looking at Scarlett?"
Viviana's mouth opened.
"Think before you answer," Damon said. "Because Scarlett already knows what the answer is, and so do I, and so does everyone else in this room. I'm asking because I want to know if you know."
Viviana looked at Scarlett. Then she looked away. Then she looked at her own hands on the table, and whatever she found there was not enough to build a defense from, because she didn't try to build one.
She was crying again by the time she looked up, but she seemed genuinely confused now about the source of it — whether she was grieving her daughter or the daughter she had chosen instead, or herself, or the thirty years that Miranda had spent sitting at her table and eating her food and building a life inside the shell of her trust.