A Lifetime of Service

"You've been quiet all evening," Charny said, watching his wife stare into the fire longer than the conversation around them had required.

"I've been turning over an old question. I don't have a comfortable answer for it yet."

"Tell me the question, at least."

Andrée considered how to put it plainly. "Whether the woman who loves you, and the woman who's stayed loyal to the queen through everything these last years, is actually me — or whether she's simply the shape Cagliostro's manipulation carved out of me, all those years ago, before I ever got the chance to choose anything for myself."

Charny didn't answer immediately, which she appreciated more than any quick reassurance he might have offered instead. "You've asked yourself that before."

"For years. I've never managed to settle it." She turned the ring on her finger, the one he'd given her. "I became devoted to the queen first as his instrument, before I understood what was even happening to me. I only became devoted to her freely afterward, once I'd recovered myself — or believed I had. I don't know how to separate the groove his manipulation wore into me from whatever I might have chosen on my own, if I'd ever gotten the chance to choose without that groove already there waiting for me."

"And us? Where does that leave us?"

"That's the harder half of the question. We began in true difficulty, not choice — you know that as well as I do. What we've built since has felt, for years now, like real love. But I find myself wondering, some nights, whether 'felt like real love' and 'is real love' are actually the same thing, for a woman whose sense of her own choices was stolen from her once already."

"Does it matter?" Charny asked, after a long silence. "Whichever the honest answer turns out to be?"

"I've been asking myself that too, tonight." Andrée looked at him properly for the first time since the conversation began. "I don't think I'll ever fully resolve where the manipulation ends and my own choosing begins — I suspect that's simply the permanent cost of what was done to me, and no amount of honest reflection will ever fully undo it. But I've decided, sitting here tonight, that the question matters less than I've let it matter. Whatever forces first steered me toward loving you and toward serving her, the loving and the serving are mine now, completely, in every way that actually governs how I intend to spend whatever time we have left. I don't need the philosophy settled to know that much for certain."

Charny took her hand, and neither of them said anything further about it that evening, understanding that some questions are carried rather than answered, and that carrying this one together was itself a kind of answer Andrée had needed considerably more than any tidier resolution could have offered her.