Page 224 of Lau Ahi
“Ghosts are fine. I have no problem paying veneration to the ancestors that came before and enabled me to be here. But if I’m hearing sounds that aren’t there besides your voice then thatmeans I’ve truly lost my mind and I don’t know how to deal with that type of fracture. My mind is all I have, Ori. If I lose that—” She was worried about me being flesh and blood but happily hoping I wasn’t because by her logic it would mean she was sane.
“That’s not true.”
“What’s not?” When she looked up at me with watery eyes I let my chest tighten and thought about how much strain I’d put her under.
Doing the wrong thing for the right reasons was much better in theory.
“You have me.”
“You know what I mean—”
She stopped speaking as I walked closer to her, purposefully dragging my feet the way I did when I wanted to annoy her. Just like then, I wanted her to acknowledge my presence and did it to annoy her. Annoying her was much easier than making myself vulnerable. But that had come anyway.
Her breathing accelerated and despite knowing what was about to happen I was powerless to stop her from falling to her knees. I ran across the room and braced her before she could hit the ground. When our bodies made contact tears flooded her eyes and I felt her body break out in chills.
“Ori?”
“It’s me, Ka’iulani.”
A watery smile spread across her face before her eyes rolled back in her head and she passed out.
I watched the rise and fall of her chest waiting for her to wake up but not wanting to rush her. I didn’t think Asha would be so overcome that she would pass out. I thought I’d be dodging knives, books and bullets not waiting for my wife to wake up because she was unconscious.
“He referred to me as your wife, not your widow. He knew?” I glanced up at her face seeing that her eyes were finally open. She couldn’t have been awake long because her breathing patterns hadn’t changed. Keeping it steady made me wonder if it was something she’d learned when she’d been a hostage.
I knew who she was talking about because he was one of the few people who had been around Asha for the last few months. And the one who had taken it upon himself, probably out of guilt, to ensure she was okay.
“He did. Alec has always been a good friend, and his help in this was crucial. Without him and the Ortega-Castillo family, I wouldn’t have been able to make it out.”
She sat up shakily and when I moved to help her she held up her hand stopping me. It stung but I understood and kept my hands to myself. “You mean your brothers wouldn’t have been able to help you?”
“Their involvement would’ve been too much and too obvious.”
“You all were under their scrutiny.” I knew she would figure out that all of this had something to do with theConsortiumand my old job. I’d wanted her to do it while I was gone but grief had been too much for her to think about the reality that I might be alive.
“They always were. Being present at their weddings and them at mine of course solidified things. Connection doesn’t mean complicity and of course no evidence of crimes normally. But someone was working with the government trying to take us all down and I had to make a move to halt them attempting to undo over a century’s worth of progress for my family.”
She was nodding like she understood my logic, and I knew on a certain level she did. But it was the emotion that was overruling reason. And although I knew I was going to suffer for those emotions, it felt so good to be loved.
“And theSiva Tau? I had to sit there and take part in a death ritual for someone who wasn’t even dead?! How could you do that to me?”
“Because I needed to protect you! You think it was easy for me to leave you? After we had just gotten to a good place? But I wasn’t about to let my pride determine that I was going to sit here and pretend that I had all this shit under control. The old me wouldn’t have cared because I didn’t have anyone else to consider. But I did. I had you. That wasn’t something that I could lose.”
“But we lost something anyway.” The tear fell down her cheek and the tightness in my chest fractured at her words.
“What? You’re saying that you don’t want me anymore?” It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. I was supposed to come back and make things right. We were going to work through everything and I was going to earn her trust back and spoil her for the next seventy years. We were going to build and figure outthis thing called life together. She couldn’t be telling me she was giving up.
“I was pregnant. Early enough for me to know and just like that it was gone.” Asha snapped her fingers and kept her focus there, avoiding eye contact.
“Pregnant?” I looked at her body, one that was now identical in size to Sasha’s, and felt broken that she’d suffered that all by herself.
“Yeah. Guess all the damage they did didn’t have the final say in my fertility after all. You and your super sperm.” She finally looked at me and the sad half-smile on her face was almost my undoing.
“Semira—”
She shook her head and I knew the empathy in my voice was too much for her.
“Nope. I’ve done the grief. Worked through feeling like a failure for not being able to keep even the smallest part of you. I got qualified help because I truly was drowning. But I feel like that dragon lady who sacrificed her baby for the life of her husband. Only you had the audacity to come back to me whole and hale without a bloody scratch on you and I don’t know whether to be angry or happy that I lost one life but got back one that meant everything to me. What kind of person does that make me? Maybe I didn’t deserve to have a baby feeling like that.”
