Chapter 201| What Real Means

The journey back down the mountain passed in near-total silence, the strike team’s own considerable exhaustion mingling with something heavier, more personal, and Allen found himself, watching his wives process the day’s devastating revelation in their own particular, private ways, uncertain how to properly begin addressing the fear he could see settling behind each of their careful, composed expressions.

It was Everlyn who finally broke the silence, her notepad trembling slightly as she held it up for the group to see. ’Am I here because someone arranged it? Or because you actually chose me?’

The question landed with considerable, devastating weight, and Allen turned to face her fully, understanding immediately that this conversation needed his complete, undivided attention rather than some hurried reassurance offered from the corner of a moving transport.

"Can we stop somewhere?" he asked Priya. "I need to talk to my family properly, before we go any further."

Priya nodded without hesitation, directing the convoy toward a quiet rest stop nestled among the mountain’s considerable, thinning treeline, and Allen gathered his wives close together once they’d found a private moment away from the wider strike team.

"I want to say this clearly," he began, "because I think all of you deserve to hear it directly, not just from Myria’s earlier reassurance in that chamber. Whatever someone else was watching, whatever circumstances they might have quietly arranged — none of them made me love you. Nobody can arrange a feeling this real. They might have positioned pieces on a board. But I’m not a piece. I made my own choices, every single day, about how deeply to invest in each of you."

"How do you know that, though?" Irene asked, her own fierce composure cracking with genuine, vulnerable fear. "How do you know your feelings weren’t just... engineered, the same way our own memories were?"

Allen considered the question seriously, understanding its weight far too deeply to offer anything less than complete honesty. "I don’t have absolute proof," he admitted. "But I know what it felt like, choosing you, every single time. The fear of rejection. The uncertainty. The mistakes I made along the way, and the deliberate effort it took to fix them. None of that felt manufactured. It felt like the hardest, most genuine work I’ve ever done."

Vivian studied him carefully, her own composed exterior carrying visible, considerable relief at the answer. "I believe that," she said. "I think all of us do, somewhere underneath the fear this discovery just stirred up. I just needed to hear you say it plainly."

"I’ll keep saying it," Allen said, "as many times as any of you need to hear it. My love for each of you is mine. Nobody engineered that. They may have created the circumstances that brought us together. They didn’t create what we chose to build once we got there."

---

Myria, who had remained quiet through most of the exchange, finally spoke, her own careful, analytical mind clearly working through the revelation from a considerably different angle. "I think there’s something important in the distinction," she said. "The file called you a candidate. Provisional. That implies uncertainty on their part, not control. They were watching to see what happened. They weren’t dictating the outcome."

"That’s a meaningful difference," Vivian said slowly, turning the observation over. "Observation isn’t the same as authorship."

"No," Myria agreed. "And if they were only watching, uncertain, then everything genuine that actually happened between us happened despite their observation, not because of it."

Allen felt something ease in his own chest at the reframing, grateful, once again, for Myria’s own particular gift for finding clarity within genuinely overwhelming uncertainty. "I like that," he said. "I like thinking of it that way."

"So do I," Everlyn wrote, some of her earlier fear finally easing from her expression.

Irene, still visibly working through her own lingering unease, glanced toward Allen with careful, searching attention. "Can I ask you something else?" she said. "If you’d known, from the very beginning, that someone was watching, cataloguing, waiting to see if you’d ’succeed’ with us — would you have still done it? Still chosen us, the same way?"

Allen didn’t hesitate. "Yes," he said firmly. "Knowing wouldn’t have changed anything about you four. It would have made me angrier at whoever was watching. It wouldn’t have touched what I felt for any of you."

"Good answer," Irene said, something fierce and relieved breaking through her earlier fear.

They stayed at the quiet rest stop a while longer, the mountain’s considerable, cooling evening settling around them as the family worked through the day’s devastating revelation together, piece by careful piece, until something closer to steady ground finally, gradually returned beneath them.

"Whatever this actually means," Allen said finally, as they prepared to continue their journey home, "I promise you all of this. I will never stop choosing you. Not for anyone’s plan. Not for anyone’s patient, considerable design. Only because I want to, every single day, for exactly as long as you’ll have me."

"Forever, then," Irene said, managing a small, fierce smile despite the day’s considerable weight.

"Forever," Allen agreed, and drew his family close, five people bracing together once more, not against fear this time, but against it, together, exactly the way they always had.

They finished the drive home in considerably lighter silence, the day’s devastating revelation still settled heavily among them, but no longer carrying the same sharp, isolating edge it had held in that mountain chamber. Allen found himself, watching Hegeville’s own familiar lights finally rise on the horizon, grateful all over again for a town that had, so patiently, taught this entire family exactly how to hold difficult truths without letting them define everything else worth holding onto.

Farrow rode with them for the final stretch, having listened quietly to most of the earlier conversation without interjecting, and finally spoke as the transport pulled toward the guild’s entrance. "For what it’s worth," she said, "I’ve read considerable case files in my career. I’ve rarely seen a family handle something this destabilizing with the kind of honesty you all just extended each other. That’s not nothing."

"It’s practice," Myria said, managing a tired, genuine smile. "We’ve had considerable opportunity to build that particular muscle."

"Then I hope you never need it again," Farrow said, "though I suspect that hope’s probably a little naive, given everything else still waiting to be uncovered."

"Probably," Allen agreed, and let the transport carry them the rest of the way home, Hegeville’s steady, hopeful lights waiting patiently ahead, exactly as they always had.