“She proposed an amendment,” he says. “Educational and medical decisions for the child stay with her until age eighteen, regardless of any council interest in the succession line. Alexei is having it drafted for review.”
I sit back. “On her own.”
“On her own. Walked in alone, made her case to the full table, walked out with two votes shifted and one amendment under consideration.” He pauses. “Fedorov apologized to her afterward. For Gregor.”
I look at the window, the city already dark, the lights coming on floor by floor, the way they do every evening without fail, indifferent to whatever is happening inside any single one of them.
“Henrik?” I say.
“Didn’t move. Didn’t engage with her either, by all accounts.”
I think about Henrik’s history, his opposition to my father before I existed as anything but a name on a future birth certificate. He will fold eventually, when the weight of everyone else around him shifts far enough that holding his ground costs more than it’s worth. Not today.
What sits with me more than Henrik is the rest of it. She walked into that room without telling me beforehand what she intended to ask for.
She negotiated terms on our child’s upbringing without consulting me first, constructed an argument precise enough that Alexei is now drafting language around it, and did all of this without a single word to me before or during.
I should have known about this before Roman walked through my door with it secondhand.
I sit with that discomfort honestly instead of dismissing it. Three months ago, I would have found this unacceptable, a decision made about something that affects me without my input, the same instinct that built a contract around her without her knowledge in the first place.
I should probably be uncomfortable.
Instead, I find myself impressed.
She took the inch I would have offered and claimed a mile.
“Thank you, Roman,” I say.
He leaves.
I find her in the kitchen an hour later, still in the clothes she wore to the council session, a glass of water in front of her that she’s been nursing rather than drinking. She looks up when I come in.
“Roman told you,” she says. Not a question.
“He did.”
“And?”
I lean against the counter across from her. “You should have told me you intended to negotiate terms on our child’s upbringing before you walked into that room.”
“I know what you’re going to say next,” she says. “That you would have wanted to be there, or wanted to advise me, or wanted to know what I was asking for before I asked for it.”
“That’s not what I was going to say.”
She looks at me, waiting.
“I was going to say I’m proud of you,” I say. “And that I don’t fully know what to do with the part of me that also wishes I’d known beforehand. Both of those are true at once.”
Something in her face softens, not all the way, but enough that I notice it.
“I don’t need you to fix anything in that room,” she says. “I needed to walk in alone and find out I could hold my own without you standing beside me. That mattered more than you being there would have.”
“I understand that.”
“Do you?”
“I’m learning to,” I say, and it costs me something to say it plainly instead of wrapping it in something easier, but I’ve spent enough of the last month learning that plain costs less in the long run than the alternative.
