“No. But you’re only taking me on this trip to save face.”
“Did you need it to be personal?”
“Hardly. I’m just pointing out that it feels a little bit…a bit disingenuous for you to be unhappy with my stepmother about anything, when you haven’t treated me much different.”
“And what would you like from me? An apology? Would you like me to prostrate myself before you with abject humility?”
“No, of course not. I don’t think you’re capable of such a thing.”
Circe hadn’t pushed back with him like this. She had been cold, and she had been uninterested in engaging with him often, but it hadn’t been like this.
Birdie was, for no real reason he could discern, completely unafraid of the consequences of speaking out of turn.
“The truth is,” she said, “I was ready to run away from you. I was ready to start my life over with nothing. If you hadn’t come for me, that’s what I was going to do.”
“Is that why you speak to me like you have nothing to lose?”
“I don’t really,” she said. “It’s just been too many years of being treated like I don’t matter. It’s been too many years of having to live with people who would rather I weren’t there. This is what I was trying to tell you in the limousine that day. I’m going to be a mother. And the one thing that my father could not do for me, at any point, was put me first. Was make sure that I was living in a house where I was treated well, or where people were really nurturing me or taking care of me.”
She took a deep breath and he could see real hurt in her eyes, but also clarity. “He hid behind his busyness. Behind his position. But at the end of the day, the thing he cared most about was himself. The thing he cared about was his own comfort. I won’t do that to my child. And so if that means that I’m going to stand firm with you, then I’m going to. Because part of that is not being treated like an incidental. My child will have a good role model. Because that is the thing, my stepmother wasn’t very nice to my father either, and he just took it. That was what I learned. To take it.” She shook her head. “I cannot and will not instill being a doormat as a virtue, not in my child.”
“I don’t think I ever suggested that you should be a doormat.” He was offended by the mere suggestion. “Did you ever meet my wife,” he said.
She made a small sound. “Yes. I did. She was a very fierce woman.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “She was. Why would you think that I require something different from you?”
“Because you don’t love me. You don’t even trust me. You thought that I was lying to you about the baby.”
Something uncomfortable stirred in his stomach. “My marriage to Circe was not a love match.”
She blinked rapidly. He regretted saying that. It was dishonorable to her memory. And he certainly shouldn’t have said it to this woman that he barely knew, this woman that he’d slept with the night of Circe’s funeral, which was the height of disrespect in ways that he still felt so ashamed of.
“Oh,” she said.
“It was diplomatic,” he said. “Though, do not mistake me, I appreciated her. Her fire, her mind, her ferocity. The two of us may not have been emotionally attached to each other, but we were united in a common goal. I did not require her to give me fealty, I did not require her to do anything for me. What I required of her was that she be an exemplary queen.”
“And yet you treat me like I’m nothing, and I’m forced to assume it’s because of where I come from. If you didn’t love Circe, and that’s not the source of your admiration for her mind, for the way that she acted, then I’m forced to assume that the truth is you don’t believe a woman born to my station can be smart with her stubbornness. You called me manipulative. That’s your big fear. That a low-born woman might have manipulated you.”
“I don’t think any man relishes the idea that he might have someone else’s child foisted off upon him.”
“You believe the worst of me.”
“I had no reason to believe the best of you.”
“I’ve served you, in the palace all these years, and you thought that I was simply lying in wait to take advantage of you? I would rather be free. I’ve never been on my own. I’ve never been able to live my life on my own terms. Do you think that I crave power? I don’t. That night, when I went to you, I saw a grieving man, and I wanted to comfort you. I was not plotting anything. It was nothing more than real, that moment. And you’ve destroyed it. Desecrated the memory of it because of your shame.”
Her words hit him, square and true in the chest, and he had no good response to give her. He was treating her like she had a stake in the shame, and that wasn’t fair. It was his own, and not a reflection on her, but it was real all the same. “I do feel shame about it. Because my wife deserves better. Deserved better than for me to find myself in the arms of another woman the night of her funeral because I was free of our vows.”
He felt bad about saying that. And yet it was true. Still, though, it seemed a poor thing to say. And he could see that reflected in her gaze.
“Then your anger is with yourself,” she said. “And you’ve turned it on to me. But I’ve had my fill of that, thank you very much. So I won’t be there to be a surrogate to your self-loathing.”
She moved away from him then, sitting in a far corner of the plane, curled up and ignoring him.
It was all for the best. He didn’t know what to say to her. When they landed, there was a car waiting for them at the runway.
“This isn’t an airport,” she commented.
