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Once upon a time, Sharon Rainsworth had known who she was. She had been an agent of Pandora, the heir to the Rainsworth dukedom, the other half of a duo with Xerxes Break and one third of a trio with Reim Lunettes. Reim was still around, but—well, they weren’t talking very much, lately. And Pandora and the Rainsworth dukedom had been dissolved, and Break was dead and gone, and—
And Reim had proposed marriage to her earlier that day, and Sharon had turned him down without a second thought, and now she was alone again, as Reim had returned to his duties and none of the Baskervilles Sharon had befriended were around. This was good: she wanted to be alone right now.
It had only been three months. Some days, Sharon swore that she could hear Xerxes’s footsteps behind her but would turn to find nobody there, or catch sight of a familiar silhouette in a crowd that turned unfamiliar the moment she focused on it. Some days, she woke up and reached out to Equus to try and get a glimpse at any possible intel she had missed while she had been sleeping only to find no Chain there. Some moments, she found herself feeling happy and whole for just a moment before all she had lost crashed over her once more, and she would be unable to get out of bed for days afterwards. Most days, though, Sharon felt like a half instead of a whole, like the person she had been had died with Xerxes and now all that was left was a shell who didn’t even know herself.
And Reim had asked her to marry him.
Sharon hadn’t been a fool. She had noticed the lingering touches, the mutual respect, the way Xerxes and Reim had looked at each other, back when there had been time for such things, back when Xerxes could still see. She had caught them, once, coming out of an empty room, mouths red and swollen, and she had pretended not to notice a thing, because they would tell her when they were ready and not a moment before.
And now Xerxes was dead, and something in Sharon had died with him, and Reim had proposed to her as if he was simply asking about the weather. He had taken her certainly not! in stride, and the day had gone on, and now it was evening, and Sharon was sitting alone on a garden bench staring at the moon.
What had Reim thought she would say? Had he thought he and Xerxes had been subtle with their affair, that Sharon hadn’t seen and hadn’t known that they had been lovers? Had he thought her so desperately lonely that she would marry anyone, anyone who knew and mourned her older brother as well? Or had it simply been an accident, a slip of the tongue brought on by too much speech and not enough thought? Did Reim even want to marry her for her, Sharon Rainsworth, or because she had been the closest one to Xerxes after him?
How could he want to marry Sharon for herself when not even she knew who she was anymore?
Sharon knew what the logical next step ought to be: she needed to get up off her bench, and go inside, and find out who Sharon Rainsworth was when she had been stripped of nearly everyone she valued. She needed to begin to walk forward once more, to be the sort of person she could love, and the sort of person she believed was worthy of Reim’s love—as much as Reim could love a woman. Who knew—maybe Reim was the sort who loved both men and women. Sharon had never asked; she would not ask now. Sharon before had thought it fitting, that Xerxes and Reim loved men and she loved women, but now she could not muster up enough sentiment to care about that sort of thing anymore, even though she had always loved a good romance. There was a part of Sharon that thought she would never love anything ever again; there was a part of her that wanted to stay seated on this bench, alone in the garden under the moon, until she died.
But she stood, and walked back inside, each step a Sisyphusian task, and went not to her bedroom but rather to the library, where she took the first volume of Lady Sylvie and her Mongrels from the shelf and then sat down to read it. Oz Vessalius’s bookmark was still inside, and Sharon stared at it, eyes going suddenly teary, before she set it to the side to give to Gilbert later and sat down to read. She felt nothing as she did so, forcing her eyes through each line of text that she had once loved, and when the book was over and it was so late as to be nearly morning, she put the book back on the shelf, and picked up the bookmark and left it outside Gilbert’s room, and then retired to her own room to go to sleep, too exhausted to even cry.
One of these days, she thought to herself as she lay down in her bed and closed her eyes against the moonlight, I’ll find myself again. But it would not, she thought, be today: she was too tired, and hurt too much, and Reim’s proposal was too raw, sticking to her ribs like poorly digested food, and when sleep claimed her it claimed her with oblivion and nothing more.