But now... Now she knew.
It had been her mother all along, talking to her. Telling her. Showing her by making her stop. By making her listen.
By coming to Anya in the only way she would hear.
She laughed a little bit, there on the floor of a desert tent, still wearing her wedding gown as she crouched there in yet another bathroom.
Because it had worked.
She’d had a panic attack before she chose her specialty in medical school, and knew she wasn’t going to choose neurosurgery. She’d another panic attack, a terrible one, the night before she’d taken her medical boards. She’d had them with regularity as a resident. Then, for a time, she’d thought she’d gotten them under control.
Until that last one she’d had while she was still an ER doctor. The one that had made her realize that if she didn’t change something, radically, she very well might die of that pressure in her chest.
“Thanks, Mama,” she said now, out loud, though her voice was scratchy. “You were pushing me where I needed to go all along.”
“Be brave, Anya,”her mother had whispered the last time Anya had seen her alive. She’d held her tight, though she’d been so thin by then. So frail.“I will be with you, always. You only have to look.”
Anya hadn’t looked, but that was okay. Her mother had kept her promise just the same.
She wiped at her face. She took a breath.
And she knew, with a new sort of certainty that reached deep into every last part of her, that she was not going to have a panic attack again. Not ever again.
Because she’d finally cracked the code.
It was love. And who had ever said that love had to be all soft plush toys, big eyes and faint trembling? Anya loved a king who happened to also be a hard man, made of this desert in its formidable starkness.
Loving a man like Tarek was a challenge. Even a calling.
Hercalling, she knew, without a shred of doubt.
And this time, Anya was choosing a calling because of love. Because her blood moved hot inside her and she had never felt so much all at once without it flattening her on cold, impersonal bathroom floors. Because she didn’t fear him, she loved him, and that meant she could take whatever came. No matter what it was.
Even if what came for them was him.
She was not a soft and trembling thing herself, and that was why he’d chosen her. Tarek could say what he liked about practicality and duty and all the rest. But he’d chosen her all the same.
Just as Anya had chosen him. Because he was absolutely right. She hadn’t spared a thought to the possibility they might make a child, and that was so unlike her it really should have been funny.
All along, no matter what they pretended—to themselves and each other—the two of them had been choosing each other.
Anya simply knew it. It was in her now, part of her DNA. And she could have stayed where she was, reveling in this new knowledge, but there was no time for that.
Because Tarek had given her golden opportunity to prove that she was truly his Queen. That she was deserving of the title, and that he might give her anything she wanted, but she would do better in return. She would give him what he needed.
If she had to walk all the way back to the palace, she would.
She staggered to her feet and wandered through room after room of this marvelous, plush palace that was something far more than atent.She found the entrance and pushed her way out, stopping outside when the beauty of the oasis hit her.
The canopy of stars. The soft lights that showed her date trees dancing in the breeze, and set to glowing all the glorious pools set into the sand.
But most beautiful by far was the figure she saw standing near the water, looking into the indigo depths as if tortured.
Anya glanced to the side and saw a jeep pulled up beneath the palms. When she had been so sure he’d driven it off. That he’d left her here.
Because that was something, she realized, her father would do without a second thought.
And she decided, then and there. This was not her childhood. She was not that daughter her father had ignored—and she was not her mother, either.