Ravi looked at her. "Is she going to remain like this forever?"
"Her eighteenth birthday hasn't been fair to her," Aine said simply.
Tesni's eyes opened immediately, the sleep dissolving the moment she registered the shift in the air around her. She sat up and looked at Aine with an expression that had skipped past drowsy entirely and arrived at alarmed.
"Aine." Her voice sharpened. "Don't tell me you are leaving."
"Tesni—"
"You are not going anywhere." She was fully upright now, her eyes wide and certain. "And I mean it."
"Do you love your sister?"
The question stopped her. She looked at Aine with an expression that said the answer was so obvious it barely deserved a question.
"I am ready to lay my life down for you."
"Then listen to me." Aine's voice was steady and careful, the voice she used when something mattered enough to say correctly. "I need to hide. There is someone after both of us and that is why Hayland came to your school. To look out for you."
Tesni's brow furrowed. "Daddy can hire any number of security to guard you. Both of us. He—"
"Tesni." A pause. "I am a married woman now."
The car went very quiet.
Tesni stared at her.
"You are nineteen." The words came out slowly, as though her mind was checking each one before releasing it. Then the control broke and everything came out at once. "Don't tell me you are happy living with that grown man. He is a murderer, Aine. He killed Silas. He almost ended daddy's life. He is a criminal. Do you want to spend the rest of your life with someone who has that much blood on his hands?" Her voice was rising, the fear underneath it audible now. "Talk to me. Say something. We are supposed to correct each other, aren't we?"
Aine removed her hands from Tesni's grip with a gentleness that was also a boundary.
"Stop calling my husband a criminal and a murderer."
Tesni blinked.
"That is my decision. To stay or to leave. And I chose to stay." Her voice was quiet but there was iron underneath every word. "Because I want to spend the rest of my life making decisions for myself. I will not be controlled because of the family I come from or the name I carry or what anyone thinks that name should mean." She looked at her sister directly. "If you call him a criminal or a murderer again I will not be happy with you. I mean that."
The silence that followed was the kind between two people who love each other and have just said something that cannot be unsaid.
Tesni looked at her for a long moment. Something shifted in her expression, the fight going out of it slowly, replaced by something softer and more frightened.
"You have never spoken to me like this before," she said quietly.
"That is why I am warning you now." Aine's voice softened fractionally. "I don't want to do something you won't like."
"Aine." Tesni moved forward and wrapped her arms around her without asking, pressing her face into her shoulder the way she had been doing since she was small enough to fit entirely in the space. "Let's not fight."
Aine's arms came around her. "Okay."
A long moment.
"I love you, Tesni. I promise to come to you whenever things settle." She pulled back and looked at her, memorising her the way people do when they are about to leave. "Take care of yourself. Don't let anyone dim that light of yours." A small, genuine smile. "I promise I will come back to you."
She pressed a kiss to her forehead.
And then she was gone.
Ravi's House
The room was quiet when she walked in.
Ravi was already there, standing with that stillness that had stopped unsettling her some time ago and had become simply the way he occupied a space. Hayland stood nearby, his expression neutral.
"Did she tell you anything?" Ravi asked.
"She hasn't spoken about what happened yet," Hayland said.
"I hope he didn't do anything to her."
"He actually didn't do anything." Aine walked past them both into the room, her voice matter of fact and her eyes straight ahead. "I'm fine."
A beat.
"I'm glad you are fine," Ravi said.
She paused at the bedroom door. Did not turn around.
"I'm going to bed."
The door closed behind her.
The room held its quiet. Ravi stood in it and said nothing, which was not the same as having nothing to think about.
"Sleep tight," Hayland said from the doorway.
Aine looked up from the room and something crossed her face that had become less rare over the past weeks. "Sure," she said, with a small smile.
He pulled the door closed behind him and found Ravi in the corridor, leaning against the wall with a glass of tequila, his eyes on the middle distance.
"I am glad she is alright," Ravi said.
"Did you do something?" Hayland asked. "Some kind of intervention I am not aware of?"
Ravi looked at him. "Why do you ask?"
"She defended you. In front of her sister. With a conviction that was not performance." He paused. "That was something personal."
Ravi turned the glass slowly in his hand. "I do not know what to call that."
"I do," Hayland said simply. "She loves you. That is the only explanation that fits all the evidence."
"I have not asked her."
"You have been living alongside this woman for months. You should not need to ask to know."
Ravi was quiet. Then, "I have plans. For her birthday."
Hayland looked at him for a moment and left it there. Some things moved at their own pace and Ravi was one of them.
Aine stood at the bathroom sink and ran cold water over her face, trying to clear away the residue of whatever had been pulling at her through the night. She had woken repeatedly, each time reaching for the edge of something she could not hold onto before it dissolved. A voice. A feeling. The outline of something that mattered.
She tried again on the tenth attempt.
Nothing came back.
The conversation from earlier that morning was gone too, sitting just beyond the reach of her memory no matter how many times she turned toward it.