He Left My Daughter With His Ex, So I Left the Sea King novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Rain on the Quay

Melina leaves the hall with one suitcase. Kyros brings a storm down on the town and kneels in it, and she still says no. That night the tide leaves a gift on Zoe's pillow.

Stavros put Zoe in his own bed above the net store and sent his neighbor for hot broth.

I stayed with her until she stopped shaking.

Then I kissed her forehead and said I was going back for our things.

"Don't let him talk you round," she said into the blanket.

"I won't."

"Promise."

"I promise."

The only door to the hall was the sea stair, cut into the harbor wall below the lowest tide mark.

For four years it had stayed dry for me, held open by a power that had never once asked my permission.

Today the stair was running with rain.

I went down it with my hand on the cold wall, past the carved doors and the pools where Zoe learned to float, and into the room I had shared with Kyros.

I took one suitcase from the top of the wardrobe.

I packed Zoe's school slate, her coin purse, her three good dresses and the wooden dolphin she slept with.

I packed my healer's roll of knives and my two plain dresses.

I left the necklace he had given me on the pillow.

Behind me, the door opened.

"Melina."

He was dripping onto the marble in his wet coat, and I did not turn around.

"I'm not here to fight," I said.

"I know."

"Then step aside."

"Let me explain what Ligeia told me."

"I don't want it."

"She said the trial would be a swim in the shallows. She said she would hold her the whole time."

"She let go."

"I know that now."

"You signed her up for this, Kyros."

His silence told me that was true.

I shut the suitcase and lifted it off the bed.

It was heavier than I expected, and he stepped forward to take it.

I pulled it back so hard the wheels squealed.

"You don't touch my things."

He lowered his hand.

I walked out past him and up the stair, and I heard him following me.

By the time I reached the top of the sea stair the whole town was shut up against the weather.

Shutters were closed.

The market stalls had been dragged under awnings, and the harbor was throwing itself at the quay wall in long grey sheets.

I walked along the stones with the suitcase rattling behind me.

Rain went down my collar and through my hair, and I kept my eyes on the lit window of the net loft ahead.

"Melina!"

His voice cracked across the quay.

I kept walking.

"Melina, please."

I had never heard him say please.

The suitcase wheel jammed in a crack between two stones, and I stopped to kick it free.

When I looked up, Kyros was on his knees.

He had gone down in the middle of the quay, in the storm he had made, with the water running off his shoulders and his silver ring bright against the wet stone.

He was kneeling in front of half the houses in Port Karyos, and a curtain twitched in the window above him.

I had never seen him kneel to anything.

"I should have been there," he said.

"Yes."

"Tell me what to do."

"Stop the rain."

He closed his eyes.

The rain did not stop, and I realized he was trying.

"I can't," he said. "It isn't anger. It doesn't answer me when it's like this."

Something in my chest ached, and I let it ache.

"Then hear me, because I'll say this once."

"I'm listening."

"You gave my daughter to the one woman who has watched me sleep in your bed for four years, and you called it a swim. She could have drowned. You knew where Ligeia stood in your house, and you left Zoe with her anyway."

"I thought she was your friend."

"She was never my friend. You just never looked."

He took that without moving.

"Here are the rules," I said. "You don't come up to the loft. You don't touch my daughter. You don't tell me it was the law."

"And if I break them?"

"Then I'll know exactly what you are."

I took hold of the suitcase and walked on.

This time he did not call after me.

The rain thinned a little at my back, though I could not have said whether that was mercy or grief.

Stavros held the door of the net store open and looked at my face and said nothing at all.

He gave me a towel and a dry shirt of his late wife's and a bowl of broth, and I drank it standing at the window.

Down on the quay, a dark shape was still kneeling.

I pulled the curtain shut.

I woke before dawn to the sound of water on the stairs.

It was a slow, steady lapping, and the loft stood forty steps above the high-water mark.

I went to the door in my bare feet.

The stair was dry.

But a trail of wet footprints, small and delicate, ran from the loft window to the head of Zoe's cot.

On the pillow beside her curls, someone had laid a crown of sea glass.

It was blue and green and clear as ice, threaded on a strand of kelp.

Zoe was sitting up with it in her hands, wide awake.

"Mama," she whispered. "I wasn't dreaming. It spoke to me in the harbor too."

"Who did?"

"The water."

She turned the crown over in the grey light.

"It called me little queen."

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