In the Age of Love and Chocolate (Birthright #3)(53)

He propped a pillow behind my head. Sitting up was uncomfortable for me, but I tried not to complain. “Is this okay?” he asked gently.

I gritted my teeth and nodded. There was not a single part of me that felt or operated as it once had. I thought about Leo, when he’d been in the crash, and Yuji, and of course, my nana. I had not been patient enough with any of them.

He set the chessboard on my bed tray. “Pawns move forward. They seem boring but the game is won or lost on pawn management, which is something a politician like myself knows perfectly well. The queen is very powerful. She can do anything she wants.”

“What happens if she’s hurt?”

“The game goes on, but it’s much more difficult to win. It’s best to watch your queen.”

I cupped the black queen in my hand. “I feel so stupid, Mr. Delacroix,” I said. “You told me to hire security over and over again. If I’d listened, I wouldn’t be in the situation I’m in. You must be glad to be right.”

“In this instance, I am not glad in the least to be right, and you shouldn’t blame yourself. You would not be you if you didn’t insist upon doing things your way.”

“My way is seeming fairly stupid at this point.”

“That’s in the past, Anya,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice. “We are where we are. Sophia Bitter was a psychopath, and I am astonished that you managed to survive. Now the knight is perhaps the most difficult piece to master. He moves in an L.”

“How do you know the knight’s a he?” I asked. “There could be anything under that armor.”

He smiled at me. “Good girl.”

* * *

At the end of November, I checked out of the hospital and moved back to Yuji Ono’s house. A nurse came with me, and she set me up in Yuji’s old room, which was the most convenient room in the house. I tried not to think of the fact that the last inhabitant of this room had died slowly and painfully.

By December, I was moving around with a walker. By February, I had crutches. By the middle of March, my cast came off, revealing a spectacularly lifeless foot in sickly shades of yellow, green, and gray. Structurally, it did not look sound either: the arch was flat, my ankle was as skinny as my wrist, and my toes curled strangely and uselessly. I looked at those toes and wondered what purpose they had ever served. I would rather have avoided the spectacle of my foot, though this was not an option—I had to look at it constantly, because it didn’t work! When I set my foot down, I could not feel the ground. They gave me a brace and a cane. I lurched around like a zombie. It is beyond boring to have to instruct your brain to move your leg and then your leg to move your foot and then to have to check to see where the ground is with every step.

As for the rest of my body? It was not what I would call attractive. Thick pink scars snaked up the middle of my chest, under my shoulder, down my lower back, across my neck, down my leg and foot, under my chin. Some of the scars were from the attack; some were from the measures the doctors had taken to save my life. What I looked like was a girl who had been stabbed by a maniac and had heart surgery, which is exactly what I was. When exiting the bath, I tried not to consider myself too closely. I took to wearing long, loose, high-necked dresses, which Mr. Delacroix said made me look like a frontierswoman.

The truth was, the scars did not bother me very much. I was far more self-conscious about the fact that my foot didn’t work properly and far more annoyed by the constant pain I was in due to the nerve damage I’d sustained from being stabbed in the spine.

Pain … for a long time, that was all I could think about. The person known as Anya Balanchine had been replaced with a body that hurt. I was a throbbing, aching, monstrous, cranky ball. It did not make me pleasant to be around, I am sure. (I am not what you would call an upbeat person to start with.)

As I was afraid of slipping and falling, I stayed indoors a lot that winter.

I took up reading.

I played chess with Mr. Delacroix.

I began to feel ever so slightly better. I even considered turning on my slate, but I decided against it. In my current condition, I did not wish to hear from Win. I did however speak to Theo, Mouse, and Scarlet on the phone. Sometimes, Scarlet would put Felix on the line. He wasn’t that great a conversationalist, but I liked talking to him anyway. At the very least, he never asked me how I was feeling.

“What’s going on, kid?” I said.

What was going on was that my three-year-old godson had a girlfriend. Her name was Ruby, and she was an older woman—four. She’d proposed marriage, but he wasn’t sure he was ready. She was nice most of the time, but boy, could she be bossy. He wasn’t entirely sure, but he suspected he might have been tricked into marrying her already. There had been an ambiguous incident involving a kiss in a coat cubby and what had been either the loan or the gift of a can of clay. As he somewhat lacked for vocabulary, this story took about an hour to tell, but it was fine. I had time.

And then, because the world is relentless this way, it was spring.

The sakura trees on Yuji’s estate bloomed, the ground thawed, and I began to fear falling less. There were even signs of life in my dead foot, and I could more or less make myself end up where I wanted to go, though it took a million years.

I sometimes walked the path to the pond where I had been attacked. The trip that had taken me less than five minutes a half dozen months ago now took me forty. The fish were still alive. The blood had been scoured away. There was no evidence that I had killed someone there and had almost been killed myself. The world is relentless in this way, too.