And I can’t believe I didn’t tell him the truth before I left. But there’s no going back now. If he finds out that I’m pregnant, he’ll have to tell the Council, and then there will be hell to pay.
For me, for him, for our child.
No. I’ll never tell him now.
Never.
This is my baby.
I have built a home for us in this realm. With animals, and a small farm.
She will grow up happy, and loved, and I will pray every day that they never find out who she is.
It would be too dangerous for her, and that’s an understatement.
I stopped and swallowed hard. How right she’d been.
Matlock had been right too. My mother was fearless, and strong, and brave. She’d only been young, and stupid to get pregnant when she did. And to whom she’d got pregnant to.
I wasn’t sure I could forgive her for the rest though. To go back and get pregnant on purpose with my sisters. That had been intentional. From what I’d read, though, my pregnancy was not.
I still didn’t understand why she felt the need to pursue a relationship with him after me. It angered me trying to rationalize it, so I tried not to.
However, from reading this part of her diary, I knew that it was never her intention to have her life turn out the way it did. I didn’t know what she wanted, exactly, but I was sure it wasn’t this.
I shook my head and shut the book.
When I looked up, the whole room was silent.
Still.
Shocked, I think.
Then Charity, of course, broke the silence. “That is fabricated,” she said as though it was obvious. “A lie.”
I groaned, nearly dropping my head in my hands, the book carefully held under my arm. “Which part?” I asked. “That my mother loved your husband, or that she never told him about... me?”
I’d almost said, us, and that would have screwed it all. I’d managed to keep my sisters out of this, and I wanted to continue to do so.
I swallowed hard and pushed through the pain. I had to protect my sisters, at all costs.
“The... the...” Charity floundered and as the people of the Council began to chatter around her, I realized that my mother’s testament had affected them more than I’d expected.
The women especially, and luckily for us, half of the Council was female.
I tucked the book under my arm and walked forward, still feeling the tight stiffness of Tavlor’s magic wrapped around me.
“I will make copies of this chapter for you all,” I told them fiercely. “You can thoroughly dissect it as much as you want, but I’ve read it a couple hundred times, for my own peace of mind as well as the trial.”
“What do you mean?” a dark haired woman in the back asked.
“I mean...” I sighed heavily. “I... I’m still mad at my mother for all this. Even though I know I can’t change the past, and it’s obvious from reading her journal that she never meant for any of this to happen. But when it comes down to it, she knew my father was off limits, but fell in love with him anyway. She kept her pregnancy when she could have taken another path. She hid me, kept me isolated, my whole life... and I just...” I ran a shaky hand through my hair. “I have things I need to forgive her for too.”
There was a strange silence in the room, almost as though the mood had shifted. The tide had changed.
Was it possible?
I glanced over at Tavlor, who was looking a little worried still. No one would be able to tell except for me, but the way he sucked in his bottom lip told me he didn’t think we were quite out of the woods just yet.