Alivia sighs. Her eyes wander over the property, as if searching for words to form an explanation. “Ian is…stubborn. He gets kind of set in his ways and a change of mind isn’t easy for him.”
I bite my lower lip, stuffing my hands into my pockets. “Not that I care if he likes me, because honestly, I really don’t. But is it just because of…our first conversation?”
She looks over at me. “In part.”
But her eyes are holding back so much information.
“What’s the other part?” I ask.
She offers a sad smile. “We’ll get to that later.”
A white gazebo comes into view and Alivia heads for it. Two cute swings hang from the edges, looking out over the river. Alivia sinks onto one, so I sit too, a large gap between us.
“I’m really glad you have a brother,” she says through the comforting dark. “I was an only child, and it was lonely. I always wanted siblings.”
“Eshan can be a punk sometimes,” I say with a huff. “But I love him. Even though we came to our parents in very different ways, from different parts of the world, we still get each other.”
Alivia nods.
She’s quiet, and I can feel the thoughts rolling through her head. Digging through the past. Sorting through the present.
“I’d like to know,” I finally say when she says nothing. “About the beginning. The…circumstances leading up to me becoming a Pierce.”
Alivia bites her lower lip, just as I did a minute ago.
Maybe we’re more alike than I realized.
“I guess it starts with my beginning,” she says. Her eyes fall to her lap, where her fingers lace together. “My mom grew up in Mississippi. She was here in Silent Bend, working for the summer after her first year of college. She met my father one night and they bonded. It was just a one-night thing, though. Their paths never crossed again. My mother was going to school in Colorado; she wanted to become a veterinarian. So at the end of the summer, she went back, and a few weeks later, realized she was pregnant with me.”
She’s barely even begun, but already she’s making my heart ache for her.
“She never told Henry about me,” Alivia says. She looks up, her eyes looking over the river, but not really seeing anything. “She was determined to do this on her own. And she did. She was a great mother, more than I probably deserved.” She smiles, her eyes going soft. “But it was hard. She dropped out of school and worked at the same diner my entire life. She’d work these crazy long hours, just to pay the bills. We lived in five different tiny apartments over my life. She was always so stressed.”
She swallows, her eyes falling back to her lap.
“But I didn’t really mind. I told myself that material things didn’t matter, and really, I was okay with it all. But I felt kind of guilty, you know? Like, because I came along, I held her back.” She gives this little shrug.
“I’d been dating this boy most of my senior year of high school, but we broke up two weeks before graduation. So, when I met this guy at the end of summer break, and he was so sweet and attentive, I jumped in to try to patch myself back together.”
She grows very still. Very quiet.
“It wasn’t fair of me, but I’d always judged my mother a little bit, for getting pregnant when she was still just a kid, had no idea what she was really doing.” Her voice grows tight, her voice a little hoarse. “And there I was, even younger than she was, pregnant. And I didn’t know a thing about the father.”
My own throat grows tight. I blink five times fast.
No one knows. No one has known who my father is.
And here’s the account, from my own mother’s lips, about him.
“I was scared out of my mind,” Alivia continues. “But I was going to do it. I was going to raise you. Mom was going to help me. She had done it, and I had turned out happy and healthy, so I was determined I could do it, too.”
Emotion thickens her voice. She stops talking and the thickness of the air doubles.
“And then she died,” I say. My eyes drift back toward the family graveyard. To where I stood before her tomb.
Alivia nods. A single tear slips down her face.
“I was wrecked,” she says. “She was walking home from work. This girl…she was on her phone, she ran the light.” She shakes her head. “I couldn’t… I didn’t know what to do. My mom was all I had. The only family I knew. I kind of shut down.” She holds her stomach and the breath stills in her chest.
“I couldn’t even take care of myself,” she says. “I knew I had no place taking care of a baby.” More tears roll down her face. She covers her mouth with her hand.
My chest hurts. It hurts to breathe. To move. To exist.
I feel Alivia’s pain in every inch of me.
“I did what I thought was best for you,” she says finally. “Let you have a family. Not just a broken kid. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. But I knew it was the right thing.”
She doesn’t look over at me, as if she can’t handle the answer in my eyes if it was the right thing or not.
I’m not always a nice person. But I can’t just let her sit in uncertainty and agony.
“You did the right thing,” I say. I begin to reach over, contemplating touching her hand. But I can’t yet. “My parents are great. My dad is enthusiastic and on board with everything. My mom’s whole life was about me and my brother. I had a great life with them.”
She smiles, and finally, looks up at me.
Her eyes are filled with tears. But there’s hope in them.
“Thank you,” she offers.
We both look back out over the river. Only a few lights are still on now. It’s the middle of the night, the darkest part.
“You were three when I found out about Henry Conrath and moved here,” she continues the story. “When I came here, and everyone tried to use me and manipulate me.” She abruptly stops. She looks down in her lap again, shaking her head.
I hadn’t really stopped to consider it. What Alivia was walking into. How hard that must have been. When she had known nothing about this world, and was suddenly expected to be a leader.
But I see it now, in the eyes of every one of those House members. They respect Alivia. They love her. Even Edmond said they had died for one another and would do it again.
“I’d never been in love before I met Cyrus,” I say. My heart is racing. But I have to ask. “Before I died. So I guess this is the part I’ve struggled with the most. Everyone has had all these things to say about you. But so much of it is about your romantic relationships. I hate to ask you to explain yourself, but can you please help me understand? Can you please tell me the truth?”
She looks over at me, and I see it there in her eyes. She knows she made mistakes. And she can’t believe my opening statement.
“These are not short stories,” she says. “There’s so much history, back story. But there’s nothing wrong with asking for the truth.”
She tucks her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. “Ian and I should never have fallen in love. We were bound to be enemies from the time we were born. I had my heritage, and at the time, he thought vampires had killed both of his parents,” she begins. “So, he was very up front with me, that we could never be together, once I had Resurrected.” The distance in her eyes tells me how hard that must have been at the time. “But, we fell in love, anyway. And then, early on, someone who wanted my House killed him, right in front of me.”
Enemies. There are always enemies in our world, no matter if you are a Born, a Royal, or the King of them all.
“But four days later, Ian came knocking on my door, Resurrected as a Born,” Alivia says. “His mother had an intentional affair and conceived him, but he never knew. And Ian just couldn’t accept himself. He hated everything about himself, and everything I was about to have to embrace.”
“You knew Cyrus was coming,” I say. “Once word got out about a new female Royal, he would have been very eager to see you die.”
Just as he had me, just a month and a half ago.
Alivia nods.