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“Meaning…?”
“Meaning Ilarion isn’t cruel without cause. He’s not sadistic or power-hungry. He meets violence with violence, but always within reason. And if you’re not violent, neither is he.”
“Is there ever a reason to be violent?”
Mila meets my gaze. “Only someone who was raised in a happy home with two loving and protective parents would say something like that.”
It’s meant as a rebuke, and it has the intended effect. I clam up and look out over the spread of the garden below us. City lights twinkle in the distance. The warm night breeze tickles my nose.
Next to me, Mila looses a weary sigh. “I really am sorry about your mother,” she says. “Sometimes, it’s hard to remember that other people love their parents. It’s sort of a foreign concept for me.”
I guess, in a way, I can sympathize with that. I can certainly appreciate the thoughtful apology. “Thank you for helping me out with the funeral.”
She shrugs. “I was ordered to.”
I resist rolling my eyes.Way to ruin the moment.She takes after Ilarion in that department, too. “You act like you follow your brother’s orders, but I have a feeling you don’t do anything you don’t want to do.”
She smiles shyly. “Okay, I’ll give you that.”
“You know I’m right, don’t you?” She’s in a good mood, so I’m going to risk it by veering into forbidden territory. “About convincing Ilarion to let me claim my baby belongs to some other random guy. Anyone but him.”
She purses her lips in distaste. I admire her loyalty to him; it runs deep. But even though I respect it, I’m not above trying to whittle it down if it means I can spare Celine some pain.
Because my loyalty runs deep, too.
Her face swivels in my direction, and her eyes are thoughtful. “You’re really okay with letting your sister marry the father of your child?”
“Things didn’t exactly happen in chronological order.” I try to muster a joke to lighten the weight in my chest, but it works only a little bit. “I mean, she loves him. At least, that’s what everyone keeps telling me.”
“Who’s ‘everyone’?”
“My mother, my aunt,” I admit. “Celine told me, too, but not in so many words. In fact, she was pretty tight-lipped about Ilarion, right up until their engagement party.”
“That seems unusual, especially for sisters who seem so close.”
“We are close,” I assure her. “But it’s also…complicated.”
“See what I mean?” Mila crows. “Nothing is pure.”
I start playing with the rocks at my fingertips. The soil is packed tight around the base of the tree, but there’s still tiny little creepers growing out of the earth. Little shoots of life finding their way to the surface against the odds. “Celine’s one of those reserved people. She keeps her feelings close to the chest. I guess I just assumed if she felt strongly about something, she would tell us…or at least tell me.”
“Ah.” Mila shares a knowing nod. “This is about a boy.”
I wince. It sounds so trivial when she says it like that. In my heart, it feels like anything but. “I wish it were something better. Something more important.” I meet her eyes. “His name was Alec. He and his parents lived in the house across from ours when we first moved to Evanston. He was the only kid on the block who was in our age range. You kinda just gravitate toward each other when it’s like that.”
The memories start to flood my mind. Memories I’ve kept buried since it all happened almost a decade ago.
Even at thirteen, you could tell that Alec Miller was born to break hearts. Blond hair, blue eyes, the kind of smile that made smart girls do stupid things.
Not that I noticed, of course. I was eleven. I mostly liked the fact that he was always up for a scooter race with me on the weekends.
“You both fell for him,” Mila deduces.
I nod sadly. “There was a point when I suspected that Cee might have a crush on Alec. But every time I asked her, she flatly denied it. She told me that they were friends and that’s all it was.”
“And you believed her?”
I sigh. “She and Alec spent a lot of time together. I’d come home from swim practice, and Celine would be over at the Millers’ house, hanging out with Alec in his room. They were the same age, they had more in common… It made sense. I felt left out sometimes, but I kinda expected that friendship to, you know…evolve.”
