Page 53 of Reign
“No,” she says, and her mouth trembles. “But it might make me feel less defective over the second course.”
There it is—the wound itself finally spoken plainly. I lean back in my chair and drag a hand over my mouth because the conversation has shifted from irritating to exhausting in under a minute. I do not have the required patience for either mood.
“You’re not defective,” I say.
She lets out a low and humorless laugh. “Please don’t insult me by lying politely.”
“I am not lying,” I say. “I am saying that biology is not morality.”
“No,” she says, and the bitterness is fully awake in her. “In our world, it’s optics.”
That, unfortunately, is true.
“I can’t give you a son,” she says, her voice wet now. “I can’t give you any child at all, and every woman I know seems to have managed it by now without the need for medical intervention.”
There are a hundred better things I could say in this moment—kinder ones, gentler ones. Instead, I ask, “Why now?”
Her face changes immediately as her careful control fractures. “What do you mean, why now?”
“I mean,” I say, keeping my voice flat because something in me resents being dragged into emotional territory I never agreed tocross, “why are you asking this tonight specifically? Instead of last month, or six months ago, or even the year before? What’s changed?”
Her expression shifts all at once, composure cracking so quickly it almost looks theatrical if you don’t know her better. Arabella doesn’t cry prettily; she never has. The tears come furious, humiliating her even as they fall, and that makes the whole thing somehow worse because she hates vulnerability with almost as much discipline as I do.
She lifts a hand to her face, then drops it when she realizes there is no point salvaging elegance from this.
“Because I am tired of being the wife people feel sorry for. I’m tired of sitting in rooms full of women who have nurseries and names picked out and stupid little knitted things from grandmothers and mothers and everyone else who assumes that’s how life goes. I’m tired of seeing the way people look at me and knowing exactly what they’re thinking.”
The silence after that is not empty. It’s full of things I don’t say.
I could tell her that a son isn’t something I’ve been pining for in private. That legacy in our world is a curse dressed as privilege, and every male heir is just another child handed a polished knife and told to smile for the cameras until he’s old enough to use it.
I could tell her that I don’t lie awake at night yearning for a little boy with my eyes and my last name. I could tell her that, if anything, the thought of creating another child for families like ours to ruin makes something in me go cold.
But that would be honesty, and honesty has never done either of us any favors.
So, I say nothing, and unfortunately, silence has always been one of the few languages Arabella speaks fluently.
She sees the absence in my face; the emptiness sitting where concern should be. She sees that I’m not moved by the tears, notbecause I’m trying to punish her, but because something in me simply fails to rise to meet her pain. The realization lands on her face before she even speaks it.
“You feel nothing,” she says. Her voice is small, wrecked, and almost disbelieving. I look at her and fail to lie convincingly enough to save her from it.
Arabella laughs once, a horrible, wet little sound. “Of course you don’t.” She pushes her chair back so hard it scrapes against the floor and rises too quickly, the silk of her dress whispering around her legs. “God, I knew it. I always knew it, but seeing it…” Her hand presses hard to her mouth again, then drops as she stares at me like I’ve transformed in front of her into something uglier than she expected. “You’re a monster.”
The words should sting, but they don’t. Perhaps because they’re not entirely inaccurate. Perhaps because I’ve been called worse by men who knew me less well. Perhaps because part of me has always suspected the title fits better thanhusbandever did.
She waits, maybe for denial, maybe for apology, maybe for proof that she’s wrong. I offer none of those.
That, more than anything, seems to make up her mind for her. She turns and storms out of the dining room, tears and silk and outrage trailing behind her like a ripped veil. A second later, I hear her heels striking the marble of the corridor outside hard enough to sound like punctuation.
I sit there with the candlelight and the untouched third course and let out a quiet sigh because the whole thing feels painfully inevitable. She knew what she signed up for. That sounds cruel, even in my own head, but cruelty and truth have always been overly intimate companions.
Arabella married me for the same reason I married her: politics, structure, protection, and mutually beneficial presentation. We did not walk into this blind. She knew I wouldbe useful, reliable, and respectful. She also knew I was not built for devotion in the conventional sense.
If she expected warmth to bloom out of this arrangement simply because enough time had passed, that was optimism neither of us had any business entertaining.
Still, I know I should have handled it better. The fact that I didn’t bother is perhaps the ugliest part. I’m not stone, that would imply dignity. I’m something messier. A man with the wrong softness in the wrong places and nothing at all where a wife would reasonably want them.
I finish dinner alone.
