Chapter 12: 12

Chapter Twelve

Carmen

Rosaria put me to work in the herb garden.

I didn't mind. My hands knew what to do with soil and I was grateful for something concrete to focus on, something with clear edges, this needs cutting, this needs water, this is dying and can be saved. The garden was large and well-tended but it had the slightly overgrown quality of something that had been managed by someone competent who had recently gotten too busy. I worked through the morning quietly and Rosaria checked on me twice and both times looked satisfied and left without making conversation, which I appreciated.

The pack moved around me. I felt them noticing me, the careful peripheral attention of people who had been told something without being told everything. Nobody approached. Nobody stared too long. But I was aware of it, the awareness of me, a new variable in a system that had been running without one.

I was used to being noticed for the wrong reasons. This felt different but I didn't trust the difference yet.

I was cutting back a section of overgrown rosemary when I heard footsteps behind me and felt the change in the air a half second before I turned. Not Xavier. The weight of it was different, familiar in a way that hit me low and unwelcome, the particular frequency of a person who had been part of my life so long that my body recognized them before my mind caught up.

Hannibal stopped at the edge of the garden.

He looked different in daylight. Thinner than I remembered, or maybe I was seeing him differently, without the haze of fear and desperate hope I had always looked at him through before. He was still handsome, that hadn't changed, but it no longer did the thing to me it used to do, that helpless lurching response I had spent years being ashamed of. He looked tired. He looked like someone who had been having a difficult internal conversation for a long time and hadn't resolved it.

I turned back to the rosemary.

"Carmen," he said.

"I said not yet," I said. My voice came out steady, which surprised me and apparently surprised him too because he was quiet for a moment.

"I know. I'm sorry. I just—" He stopped. "I needed to see that you were alright."

"I'm alright."

"Carmen."

"I'm working." I cut another stem. The smell of the rosemary rose up sharp and green and clean. "If you have something to say then say it quickly because I'm not going to stop."

He came a few steps closer and I kept my back to him and my hands moving, not because I was performing indifference but because I genuinely needed the motion, something to do with the energy that had arrived with him.

"I followed you," he said. "After you left. I tracked you for four days."

"Why."

A pause. "Because I made a mistake."

"Which one." My hands stilled briefly. "There were several."

"The rejection." His voice was low. "Rejecting you was wrong. I knew it when I did it and I did it anyway and I have been—" He exhaled. "I've been living inside that decision every day since."

I set the shears down and turned to look at him because it felt dishonest not to, because whatever else was true I had never been the kind of person who could have a real conversation with her back turned.

He looked worse close up. The tiredness went deeper than I'd seen from the garden's edge, something worn down behind his eyes that hadn't been there before, or that I hadn't been allowed close enough to see before.

"You were right," I said. "When you rejected me. About what I am."

"No."

"I don't have a wolf. My heart is weak. I'm not—"

"Stop." His jaw tightened. "Don't do that. Don't use my words against yourself."

"I'm not. I'm being accurate." I kept my voice level. "I'm not saying it to punish you or punish myself. I'm saying it because it's true and I've always known it was true and the rejection didn't break me because I already understood it. What broke me was something else."

He looked at me carefully. "What."

"That you knew," I said. "Before you said it. You knew and you said it anyway, in that particular way, making sure I understood I should keep it secret, that I should be ashamed of it. As if the worst part wasn't the rejection but the fact that anyone might find out you'd been given someone like me." I picked up the shears again. "That's what broke me. Not the rejection itself."

The garden was very quiet. Somewhere across the yard someone was training, the rhythmic sounds of it carrying over the walls, and a bird I'd been listening to all morning kept up its bright repeated call from somewhere in the pines.

Hannibal stood very still.

"You're right," he said finally. His voice was different now, the shape of it changed. "That's exactly what I did and there's no version of it that isn't what it was."

"No," I agreed.

"I don't know how to fix it."

"I don't know if it can be fixed." I looked at him directly. "I'm not saying that to be cruel. I'm saying it because I think you need to hear it from me plainly rather than from some softened version of it."

He nodded slowly. His eyes were bright in a way that made me look away.

I became aware then of a presence at the garden's entrance and looked up to find Xavier standing there, very still, watching us both. I didn't know how long he had been there. His face was unreadable but his eyes were on me, not on Hannibal, and there was a question in them he wasn't asking.

I looked back at my rosemary.

"I need to finish this," I said, to both of them and neither of them, and neither of them moved, and the three of us stayed like that in the thin winter light, the air between us pulled tight as a string waiting to be plucked.