by Lynn, Sophia
In the days after Halil abandoned her, it felt like she was always crying. An angry customer or a casual comment from one of her co-workers could drive her from the room weeping, and she didn’t even know what was happening until Rhoda, the oldest girl at the cafe and the one least likely to laugh when tears filled Myriah’s eyes, took her to the sandwich shop nearby after her shift.
She bought Myriah a sandwich and a drink, and when that made Myriah tear up as well, she sighed.
“All right, hon. Have you decided what you’re going to do yet?”
“Do? About what?”
“About that bun in your oven.”
The moment Rhoda said it, Myriah stopped crying. At first she was simply too shocked, and then she realized that Rhoda was entirely right. Later on, there would be a test and a kind nurse practitioner who outlined her options and what she would have to decide, but at that moment, Myriah knew and her decision was made.
There were more than a few times over the next twenty months where Myriah would cry or simply feel overwhelmed. Her pregnancy with three girls was considered complicated from the get-go, and of course after she gave birth, there was everything she had to learn about being a new mother.
Through it all though, she had never, ever regretted having Leah, Katie, and Mina, and she had never regretted having her fling with Halil.
The fact that he had been called home because his cousin’s baby had been kidnapped changed things. He hadn’t been running from her or running from some kind of organized crime situation. He hadn’t wanted to leave. Myriah still wasn’t sure what to make of the information, but it felt as if her entire world had tilted on its axis.
There was no way to tell how Halil might have reacted if she had gone to him in London and could have told him that the girls existed, but when she saw how he looked at them now, she guessed that it might not have gone as badly as she sometimes feared in her darkest nightmares.
It’s a happy ending, I think. Kind of. But is it even over yet? Can it even be said to be at an end?
She rolled over in bed, and for the second time in as many days, she stared at the clock in dismay.
How in the world is it ten already? The girls must be starving . . .
She threw on an old nightgown and rushed out, only pausing when she realized that she heard no angry cries and no calls of Mama.
Instead, there was the burble of happy toddlers from the living room, and she sighed with relief. Even with Rose around, it was hard to remember that she was not entirely alone anymore.
“Good morning,” she said to Halil, who was watching over the girls playing in the living room. He had a tablet in his hands, gazing at it with a single-minded purpose that meant it was likely quite important, so she sat down on the ground with the girls instead.
“Hi, babies,” she crooned. “How are we doing this morning?”
Leah was as placid as ever, while Mina wanted to show her something in her new book and Katie was intent on tumbling into her lap as quickly as she could. Myriah buried her noise in one fluffy head of black hair and then another as her babies chatted with her in their own unique baby language.
I should probably get a recording of this, she thought with a slight smile. They’re already beginning to use more words, and there will be a time when this is just a memory.
It was a bittersweet idea in some ways. She couldn’t wait to see what her daughters were going to be like as they grew up, but there was a tiny and selfish part of her that wished that they would stay babies forever.
Leah reached in for a hug, but as Myriah gave it to her, her hand caught on something rough on the little girl’s arm.
“Huh? What’s this?”
She blinked at the bandage on Leah’s arm. “What happened to you, baby girl? Did you fall?”
Katie, apparently concerned that someone was getting attention that might rightfully belong to her, imperiously tapped Myriah’s shoulder to show the Bandaid that she had in the exact same place, and now confused and growing alarmed, Myriah reached over to check Mina as well.
Mina wasn’t in a mood to make things easy, and she squalled a little when her mother peeled up her sleeve to look at her arm, but the Bandaid was there too.
“Halil, what happened to the girls, they all have . . .”
To her surprise, Halil stood up just as she was speaking, his eyes still on the tablet in front of him.
“Halil?”
“Yes,” he said. “Oh thank heaven . . .”
She gently stood away from the girls, realizing after a moment that she had put herself between them and Halil. There was something about this entire situation that she didn’t like, and it was beginning to make her feel a little queasy.
“Halil,” she said more loudly. “What’s going on?”
He turned to her, and for a moment, she was caught off guard by how brilliant his grin was.
“Myriah . . . they’re mine.”
She stared at him, and she felt as though she was falling down a very deep, dark hole. Her stomach lurched and she simply couldn’t find the words.
“Halil . . . what are you saying? Of course they’re yours.” A terrible thought crystallized in her head. “Did you spend all this time thinking that they might not have been?”
Halil stilled, catching some of her dismay. He reached for her hand, but Myriah pulled it away.
“No, tell me.”
“I know what I felt in my heart,” he said at last. “When I laid eyes on them, I knew. But my brain, and the ruling body of Ealim, required more than that. I had Marek send the royal physician to the United States a few weeks ago, but to be honest, I had been putting it off. I think there was a part of me that was afraid that if I was wrong, if we were both wrong, that this was all over, and I didn’t want it to be over.”
“If I had actually slept with someone else and then tried to pass off the babies as yours, you mean?” she asked angrily. “Halil, I never tried to force you into anything! You were the one who listened in on my conversation in Ealim. You were the one who worked so hard to put two and two together and to find this out. I was fine—”
“You were fine keeping my children away from me forever?” he demanded, his expression clouding. “Because this test that I had the physician do this morning tells us all beyond a shadow of a doubt that those three little girls are of royal blood. Would you keep them away from the legacy that should be theirs as well? Would you let them live in poverty forever?”
“Are you freaking kidding me?” exploded Myriah. “You have tests performed on my children without my permission, and then you have the absolute gall to talk to me about what I might or might not have told you? You were the one who left! I didn’t even know where you were from, and it wasn’t like you left a forwarding address! And I never told you anything but the truth.”
“And it didn’t occur to you to tell me in Ealim, when we met again, that you had my daughters?”
“My daughters!” Myriah cried, feeling as if her heart was going to break. “They’re my daughters! You weren’t there when they were born. You weren’t there when they all had colic or when they started taking their first steps or when they needed to nurse almost around the clock! You weren’t there, and you can’t come in at any point you like and call them yours!”
She had more to say, but then they both came to a stop when the girls started howling. It was Leah first, who always seemed sensitive to the moods of the people around her, but Katie and Mina joined her, and the sound was at once horrifying and heartbreaking.
Without glancing at Halil, Myriah went down on her knees to comfort her daughters. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Halil doing the same, letting Katie tumble into his arms while Myriah gathered up Leah and Mina. The girls were too young by far to have any idea what their parents were arguing about, but they were all aware that something was going wrong, that their world was shaking on its foundations.
“We’ll talk about this later,” Halil said, and Myriah gla
red at him.
“Stop trying to make that sound like a threat,” she growled. “I’m looking forward to it.”
Then their arms were full of crying toddlers, and the matters of royal blood and betrayal had to be shelved for a little while until they could make the world right for their daughters again
***
It took almost an hour to fix things up again, and they only managed it because Rose was home with a cold and could be pressed into keeping an eye on things.
“We could have hired an au pair for this,” Halil muttered, but Myriah was willing to ignore it because she could see now that that probably would have been a good thing.
I probably do deny a lot of the good Halil could do because I feel like I should be doing it all, she mused, but then she pushed the thought away. This was not the time to start sympathizing with Halil, not after everything that had come out that morning.
Once Rose was settled with the three girls and a video about a dancing pig, Myriah and Halil went to his townhouse next door. Despite her anger and her growing fears, Myriah couldn’t stop herself from looking around. She had assumed that Halil would have it furnished as quickly and as elegantly as he had done with her own townhouse. She had been angry at the purchases at first, but she had grown used to Halil providing what he thought was necessary, whether it was furniture or replacements for appliances that had worn out.
His own place, however, was still mostly bare. She could see a bed in the open door to the bedroom, and there was a couch and of course a coffeemaker in the kitchen, but beyond that, the place looked as if someone had moved out or was just getting ready to move right in. For some reason, the idea that Halil had been living in such a bare place made her heart ache, but she pushed it away hard. She was not going to let her feelings for this man affect her decisions about her children’s lives. She was already afraid they might have done so to a degree that she couldn’t fix.
“Well, I think I’m the one who deserves an explanation,” she said when Halil did not choose to speak first.
Halil dragged his fingers through his hair, making it stand up from his head at odd angles. In another time, she might have found that endearing, but at the moment, all she could feel was frustrated, angry, and more than a little frightened.
“I already told you what I did, and you know why I did it.”
“No. Tell me from the beginning. When did you decide to bring a doctor that I don’t even know into my house, to stick my daughters with needles—”
“They’re not just your daughters,” Halil growled, and Myriah fell silent, looking at him with wide eyes.
To his credit, Halil looked suddenly guilty, and he sat down on the couch as if he was trying to make himself smaller and less threatening.
“Please, will you come sit with me?”
It was on the tip of her tongue to say no, but there was something almost pleading in Halil’s expression. She took a deep breath, because she wasn’t here for her own fears or her own issues. She was here for her girls, and that meant that she couldn’t just wall herself off behind a wall of fury and offense.
Myriah took a seat on the couch, but she kept as much space between her and Halil as she could.
“Halil. Please just be honest with me. I don’t know what’s happening, and the fact that you left me out of this decision entirely is really pissing me off and scaring me.”
Halil looked slightly stricken at the idea.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you. Believe me when I say it was not my intent.”
Though she warned herself against softening against Halil, she couldn’t help but feel herself thaw a little. Perhaps it made her a fool, but she could sense no duplicity in him, nothing malicious.
Please don’t prove me to be a fool, Halil . . .
Halil took a deep breath as if steeling himself for what came next.
“You know that it was a surprise and a shock when I found out about the girls. My mind was flooded with thoughts of all kinds, some louder than others, but my first instinct was to come see them. I couldn’t deal with the idea of knowing about them but not seeing them, not getting to meet them or to hold them.”
“I remember,” Myriah said softly. “You were almost frantic before we left Ealim. I thought you were angry with me, but it wasn’t that, was it?”
“You thought I was angry? I’m sorry, that was the last thing I wanted you to see. No. I was . . . I don’t know if there’s even a good word for it. I was anxious. I was afraid. I wanted to turn back the clock, and . . .”
He shook his head, and she could almost imagine him shelving that train of thought.
“No. There’s no way to change the past, whether it happened three years ago or three months ago. When I came to the United States, when I came to your home, the only thing in my mind was seeing the girls. I saw them, and . . . Myriah, it was love at first sight. I set eyes on them, and it was if everything in me cried out that I had to be there for them, to be who they needed me to be.”
“They don’t need—”
“I know you take care of them, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you do an amazing job. However, sense and an impulse like that one seldom coincide. All I know is that I saw three girls and that I had to do whatever I could to fit into their lives, to make sure that nothing ever hurt them.”
Myriah let out a small sigh. She didn’t want to understand, but she did. Her labor had been easy, as far as labor could go easily, but at the end, she still felt dazed and strange and in pain. Then they had started handing her the babies, and she had cried again, this time with joy as she felt a powerful love grip her heart. She had known in that small delivery room that everything had changed, and that she would love these three tiny girls forever.
“And then what happened?” she made herself ask.
“And then . . . I suppose I got used to them, in the best way possible. They weren’t abstract concepts any longer, words I heard in my head and pictures that you showed me. They were real, flesh and blood little girls with personalities and likes and dislikes and so much love to give it still takes my breath away. And they were also girls with a history.”
“A . . . a history?”
“Just like I have. A history that goes back hundreds of years back to when the first nation came out of the desert to found the city of Ealim. Ealim has the distinction of being one of the only nations in the area that was never colonized by Europe. Our traditions have changed, our government has changed, our fortunes went down with steam and up with oil, and through it all, my family has been there, shepherding the growth of the nation and tending to it as best we could.”
For a moment, Myriah was simply stunned by the scope of history that Halil had described. It was too much, far too much, and when she thought of her daughters as a part of it, the thought made her want to hold them tight.
“Halil . . .”
“Please, let me finish. My whole family serves the country. I’m not going to say that there aren’t some incredible privileges and benefits. I should know, I spent years abusing them while my father was still the sheikh and I was allowed to do as I liked. I had more money than some countries, I could see the world, learn whatever I wanted to do, and there was an inexhaustible supply of money and resources to keep me safe while I did it. I’m incredibly lucky, and I know it. And that means that everything I have been given, every opportunity, every advantage, belongs to Leah, Mina, and Katie as well.”
“We can’t give them all of that and tell them to have fun!” Myriah protested. “They need guidance. They need to learn what normal limits are, and—”
Halil laughed.
“Oh believe me. A big part of what I want as a father is to make sure that none of our girls take the risks I did or ended up as spoiled as I was. It took me years before I was ready to think of anyone but myself. They will have all the guidance and education that they need, but they also need to be who they are to receive any of it.”
“Who they are?”
“Does . . . does it matter who’s oldest or—”
“No. It is a choice that I make, or rather, that I make with a great deal of research into temperament, education, and things like that. It is not something to consider lightly. But to make sure that the girls have this as part of their future, they need to be acknowledged, and they needed to be verified as being of my blood.”
“So why didn’t you tell me about any of this?” Myriah snapped, springing to her feet. “You hinted. You let me assume. But to get the entire story, I had to wake up and find that my girls had all had blood taken from them. Do you have any idea how nightmarish that was? They are my daughters, and that was disturbing as all hell!”
Halil looked at her, his eyes calm but a warning note in his voice.
“My daughters too, Myriah. And now I have the paperwork to prove it.”
It felt as if she had run flat into a brick wall.
“You make that sound like a threat.”
“It isn’t. It’s a reminder. Sometimes it feels as if you accept my presence here, as if you are happy to have me around forever, and that we really are a family in truth. Then there are other times where you make me feel as if I am incidental to everything, a temporary thing that will leave at some point in the future, even if you don’t know when.
“I am just reminding you, Myriah, that you cannot get rid of me so easily. Those girls have my blood as well as theirs running in their veins, and I will not let you take them away from me.”
“I have no intention of taking them away!”
Myriah held on to her anger. If she didn’t, it felt as if there was a good chance that she would just collapse or fall into a weeping fit of tears.
Halil nodded, and he looked a little calmer.
“Soon, the girls should be presented to the country. They should be brought to Ealim, introduced to their new lives. I suspect that the people will fall in love with them. It’s been a while since there was an infant heir, and now there are three. It is usually a cause for some celebration . . .”