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I wake and reach across the bed, feeling the warmth Peeta left behind, tinged with the faint scent of terror-sweat. He is awake. I can hear him moving around in the kitchen. The clock says it’s just past one in the morning.
This happens a lot.
I pull on my robe and go downstairs.
I don’t want to tense up when I see Peeta looming over the kitchen sink, but my body decides for me. There are no knives in sight. He’s just separating egg whites. My pulse jumps. You’re safe , I remind my stupid body.
I forgive him for everything. But my sympathetic nervous system will never forget the feel of his fingers locking around my throat.
I say sorry to him in my head. This happens a lot, too.
I watch him dump the yolks and deposit the whites into a bowl beside the sink. He mumbles to himself as he goes. “Sugar, water and cream of tartar. Cook and stir till bubbly and sugar dissolves.” He drops the eggshells in the trash. “Peeta Mellark. District 12. You double-knot your shoelaces. In a small mixer bowl combine egg whites and vanilla.”
I lean against the counter and try not to look like a threat. “What are you making?”
He doesn’t look up from the egg in his hand. “Frosting.” Crack goes the egg against the edge of the sink basin.
“What are you frosting?”
Peeta separates the yolk and lets it drop into the drain. “Don’t know yet.” The whites go into the bowl, and the shells go into the trash. I watch him retrieve a bottle of vanilla extract from the cabinet.
We have so many extracts and oils and creams and spices in the house now. Things I would never have known went into the breads and cookies I’m eating, things like allspice and cloves and almond extract and cream of tartar. I still remember dousing rabbit meat in salt to stretch it as long as possible. Now I have a whole cabinet in my home just for flavor.
Peeta whisks in the dim light from the bulb above the sink. He says, in a voice soft as whipped egg whites, “What happened to our baby?”
He won’t meet my eyes, which is fine. I don’t want to make myself look into his.
“It was fake,” I tell him. “You made it up.”
His face twists. I think I said the wrong thing. (Something else that happens a lot. There is so little variety in our lives, these days. We’ve become predictable.) “No,” he says. “No, you…” A tiny bit of egg white sloshes onto the floor. There’s something in a saucepan on the stove. I hope it doesn’t burn. “You had— you were pregnant. You were pregnant, and you went into that arena anyway, and you— you hit the forcefield, you risked our baby—”
“Not real,” I tell him. Pleading. “Not real, Peeta.”
“I remember it.”
“It’s— that’s…” I swallow, hard, smelling burned sugar. I should go and turn off the stove, but I feel frozen down to my feet. Peeta’s hand doesn’t stop moving, swirling the vanilla and egg whites around and around and around. “It wasn’t one of the Capitol’s lies. It was one of yours.”
His stirring slows. “One of mine?”
“You lied about me being pregnant,” I try to remind him. “Before the Quarter Quell. So the Capitol would feel bad for us.”
He turns away from me and adds the contents of the saucepan to his mixture. “Did it work?”
Yes and no. Yes, it made people feel bad for us. No, it didn’t change anything. “Not really,” I tell him.
“There was never a baby,” he tries.
“Real.”
(I want to tell him that there probably will never be a baby. Just thinking about it makes nausea rise within me. To add another hungry, vulnerable child to this world. To lengthen the list of people whose deaths can be used against me.)
Peeta uses a hand-mixer to beat the eggs and sugar and vanilla. He says he likes the ritual of it versus the convenience of an electric mixer, but I think we’re both pretending that’s all it is. Loud noises startle us both. Easier to mix and blend and beat by hand. The last time Greasy Sae tried to turn on our garbage disposal I had to go and stand in the woods for a long time and count up and down from one to ten and back again.
“Do I lie a lot?” Peeta asks me, turning away from the stove. I’m glad. I never like when he has his back to me. I need him to see me and know that I’m not a threat.
“Only for a good cause,” I promise him. “You understand people well. You know how to work a crowd.”
“Do I lie to you a lot?” he asks me.
I try to remember the difference between lying and acting, and the things I forgive him for, and the things Snow did to him, and the distinction between lying to me and lying in front of me. “No,” I say. “We’re honest with each other.”
Something Snow said to me itches the back of my brain. I pretend not to make the connection. Honesty doesn’t have to be virtuous. It can be morally neutral. I can let it be that.
Crank-twirl goes the hand-mixer. Peeta’s arm works, muscles bunching and releasing as he whips up the frosting in the bowl. I think about frosted dolphins on a wedding cake. “I did this a lot back in the Capitol,” he admits.
“Making frosting?”
“Asking about our baby.”
“Oh.” My hands drop to my stomach, where the memory of Peeta’s fabrication weighs heavy, like I’ve swallowed stones.
“I don’t think Dr. Aurelius knew it was fake,” Peeta explains. “He showed me the clip of the interview with Caesar, the one where I told everyone about the baby. It was… confusing.” The mixer scrapes against the bottom of the bowl. “I don’t remember what my own face looks like when I’m lying.”
“You were a brilliant liar,” I tell him, but I wish it sounded more like praise. It comes out too bitter. “Public speaker. That’s what you were. You were a brilliant public speaker.” I sigh, tucking my hands into the warm pockets of my robe. “You should’ve been the Mockingjay.”
“Nah. I wouldn’t have been able to pull off the dress.”
He makes me laugh. He’s always so good at that.
“In the Capitol,” he says. “After. When I was recovering from the burns. I’d wake up and try to go looking for the baby. I got so scared and— I think… I think I didn’t want her in the presidential mansion. I could remember being there, with Snow, and it scared me so badly to think about a child in that place.”
My voice comes out hoarse. “Her?”
Peeta nods. “It was always ‘her,’” he says. “I don’t know why.” He puts some kind of wrapper over the bowl of frosting and places it in the refrigerator before putting the hand-mixer in the sink. “I don’t know how my brain gets some of the ideas it has.” He gives me a steady look and holds out his hand. “Back to bed?”
In the morning, he will make pancakes and ask me to sing him the song he likes about hearing the train blow down in the valley.
Sometimes being predictable is a good thing.