Julian did not speak. He did not offer the comfort of words, which in moments like this were only obstacles, things the mouth produced to give itself something to do while the heart stood helpless.
He held her, and he breathed, and he pressed his lips to the top of her head, and he stayed, which was the only thing available to him and the most important thing he had ever done.
His own chest was breaking.
He would not have been able to say, afterward, precisely what it felt like to hold his wife while she cried for their daughter and for the child she had just given back and for the month of love that had nowhere to go now.
There was no vocabulary adequate to it. It was the kind of pain that existed below language, in the register of the body, the specific ache of a man who would dismantle the entire infrastructure of the Vale empire with his bare hands if it would bring his family to the other side of this.
He held her tighter.
She held him back.
