Page 46 of The Sin

Her eyes sparkled. “I do.”

I just looked at her, and looked and looked, because I could. “I’m so happy I got to see you.”

“Same here.” She sipped on her coffee and her entire body seemed to deflate. “Okay, now I’m really dead and this is heaven.”

“You don’t get coffee beans here?”

“You can get just about anything here,” she said dryly. “Now ask me if I can afford it.”

I leaned in, elbows on the table, and asked the one thing I desperately wanted to know. “Do you have any regrets?”

Her expression dimmed, and the sheer delight in my mood crashed.

“You do have regrets.”

“Do you?” she threw back at me.

I was confused. “Regrets about what?”

“About staying? About marrying a stranger…” Her eyes widened. “Oh, crap, what happened about Daniel Edgar? Did he offer? Did you accept? Is that who you married?”

“That’s a lot of questions,” I bounced back, since that’s what we were doing. But I was stalling as well. I didn’t know if there was any point, how easily she could find out that this apartment belonged to Roman West, but I figured the less I offered, the better.

Jenna wasn’t having any of my stalling. “Are you seriously not going to tell me?”

“It’s not Daniel,” I said, and I heard the bite in my voice. Whatever else, rejection wasn’t pretty. “He’s married to Brenda.”

“You’re kidding.” The way she looked at me, she was waiting for the punchline.

“That’s all the gossip you’re getting aboutthat,” I said with a laugh, then grew serious and rephrased my original question. “Are you happy?”

“I’m happier than I would’ve been if I’d stayed. Some days, that sounds like happiness. Other days, not so much.” She shrugged. “I don’t know about regrets. I kinda feel like I wish there’d been a third option, you know? If I had to do it all over again, I guess I’d make the same choice.”

That sentiment resonated with me, more deeply than I could ever let her know. If I had to choose a husband all over again, even in some alternative reality where Daniel had offered for me, knowing what I knew now, feeling as I did now, I would choose Roman.

And it didn’t matter which side of the walls you were on, we all wished there was a third option. There wasn’t. There was only the Sisterhood, for me, and working to improve the options we did have.

We chatted for about an hour, about life back in Capra, about her life here. It wasn’t all sunshine and roses, as Roman continually warned me. Credits were doled out weekly and if you didn’t work, or couldn’t work, there was no other support mechanism in place. She had barely enough to live on, certainly not enough to move out of the dormitories, and on top of that, the Grabough family took their cut.

“They call it a protection service.” She snorted. “But it’s okay, you just have to learn the system and go with it. And there are other ways to boost my weekly credits.” She brightened, her brow hitching. “Guess what? I can have children, as many as I want. And I don’t even have to be married. I don’t even have to keep them.”

There was so much there to unpack. “How do you have children and not keep them?”

“The Protectorate takes care of them.”

The Gardens Children Home.Roman had said he’d never known his parents, neither had Amelia, he’d said that wasn’t uncommon in The Smoke.

Was he one of these children that were had, and not kept? “But why would anyone do that? Why have a child if you don’t want it?”

Jenna rubbed her middle finger and thumb together. “Credits. The Protectorate is always trying to increase the population. For every child, you get fifty credits per week for life. That’s about what I get at the community center. Two children, and I can move out of the dorm into my own place.”

A shiver went through me. Jenna had always been different, but never hard, never cold and ruthless. “That sounds an awful lot like selling your babies.”

Which made me think of Amelia, and how she’d been sold, and my stomach churned.

“That’s exactly what it is,” she said. “But isn’t that what’s happening in Capra? They dress it up all nice and pretty, but it’s really not. Women are basically baby-making machines. Just because you raise your own children, doesn’t mean it isn’t still just all a factory line. Your children don’t belong to you. Well, not your daughters, that’s for sure. We belong to Capra. Theirs to do with as they damn well please.”

I begged to differ. Okay, there wassomemerit there, pressure to have as many children as your allocated allowance of eggs allowed…Wait. What? “You said you could have as many children as you want? What about the limited supply?”

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