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“What’s it like?” she suddenly asks. She looks over at me. “Being a mother?”
Nobody’s ever asked me that question before, so it takes me a moment to answer. “It’s…everything. It’s horrible and wonderful and satisfying and terrifying and incredible all at the same time.” I sigh, that one breath brimming full with every wild emotion I’ve had since I first saw him in the ultrasound. “It’s not for everyone, but as it turns out, it’s for me. I’m not sure I’d survive without him.”
“Why?” Mila asks.
“Why?”
She nods. “What’s so hard? You escaped, you’re free… That’s what you wanted, right?”
I bite my lip. “Yeah. That doesn’t mean it’s been easy.”
She scoffs. “No shit.”
I choose not to respond to that. “How’s Cee?” I ask. “Are the two of you friends?”
Mila’s eyebrows knit together. “We get along,” she says, but that answer alone tells me everything.
“How are things with Dima?” I try to ask the question as innocently as possible, but it still earns me a glare from her.
“The same.”
“Really?” I let her see my disappointment. “But—”
“Stop right there,” she snaps. “You can’t just pick up where we left off, okay? We are not there yet.”
I raise my eyebrows. “‘Yet.’ Promising word.”
She suppresses a smile and shakes her head. “I’m walking away now,” she informs me, floating over to the fountain where Adam is standing.
“I’ll be here!” I call after her.
“It’d be great if you weren’t,” she throws back over her shoulder.
I laugh, and I catch the shadow of a smile on her face before she turns her back on me and focuses on Adam.
I take a look at the gardens around me. The morning air is fresh and crisp. Everything is green, fragrant, and beautiful. And then—
I see a silhouette in the distance. She’s blurred in the shadow from a looming tree, but I don’t have to see a single scrap of detail to know who it is. To know what’s coming.
Celine.
25
TAYLOR
“Come on, Taylor,” I tell myself under my breath. “Don’t be a wuss.”
I repeat the mantra to myself silently as I swallow and go to meet my sister under the shadow of the weeping willow tree. Celine stands in the pool of shade, watching me approach. She keeps her hands clasped in front of her, unmoving.
The old Celine would have run to me with open arms. But this Celine seems more reserved, more composed. Far too cultured and elegant to be caught running across the garden with her arms outstretched.
“Hey, you,” I say, stopping at the foot of the hill.
She looms above me on the steep embankment. She’s smiling, but it’s a mysterious smile that shifts with every passing second. “Well,” she says at last, “come up here and give me a hug.”
I bound up the slope and wrap my arms around her. The moment I do, I forget about the new woman who stands in front of me. She feels like my sister again.
“You smell different.” The words slip out of my mouth before I can think them through.
