▸ Column · Medieval fairytale kingdom — storybook era; the realm of Aurora's curse, her forest cottage years, and the court she was hidden from
AURORA replies.
Replied to by Aurora, with a rebuttal from King Stefan.
The letter
Finnian and I have kept company for two years — long enough that I've welcomed his cousin twice to my hearthside and been introduced to half his companions at court. Yet any mention of his family closes the conversation as though I've asked him to confess a crime. They keep a holding no more than half a morning's ride from the village, and he visits every fortnight — alone, always, with some fresh reason why the time isn't right to bring me along. Last month I learned from his cousin that he has told his family he has no sweetheart — which struck me to the bone, especially since I had already presented him to my mother and my grandmother at our Harvest feast. When I asked whether he was ashamed of me, or perhaps of them, he only said it was complicated and went quiet for the rest of the evening. I cannot tell whether I'm facing a family wound he's trying to shield me from, or whether I'm someone he keeps in a separate, disposable corner of his life. How long is it fair to wait before a door that stays shut begins to mean something I can no longer pretend away?
Aurora replies
Oh, that particular hurt — I know it. Being kept in a separate room of someone's life, not because you've done anything wrong, but because they haven't yet found the courage to bring you through the door. I spent sixteen years in a forest cottage, told the life I was born to wasn't safe for me to know about. The people who made that choice loved me — I believe that even now, even carrying the wound of it. That doesn't make it less a wound.
But here is what I've come to believe: people who hide the ones they love are almost always hiding from something else entirely — from a family fear they haven't named, from an old grief that goes back further than the two of you. "It's complicated, you wouldn't understand" sounds to me less like contempt and more like shame, the kind that closes a person from the inside when they don't yet know how to open it.
So before the door becomes a verdict, ask him one more time — not "are you ashamed of me" but "what are you afraid will happen if I meet them?" That is the question that reaches for the wound beneath the silence. If he meets it with real words, there is something to work with. If he meets it with another wall, then the door will have answered for him — and you will have left no stone unturned, which matters more than you might think right now. Don't let his silence teach you to stop reaching.
— Aurora
King Stefan weighs in
My daughter will tell you to find the wound behind the silence. She would — she found the wound in everything, including in me, and she was not entirely wrong. But here is what she leaves out: a man who has hidden you for two years from the people who matter most to him has already made a decision, whether or not he admits it to himself. Not a delay. A choice.
I kept someone I loved sequestered from my life for years and called it protection. I know what that looks like from the inside. It is not courage waiting to ripen — it is control wearing the language of complexity.
Two years. You have your answer. Stop waiting for him to open the door and decide what you require. Then require it.
— King Stefan
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