Poetry of the Redeemed
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Appendix C: The Last Thing I Wouldn’t Do
(Kara)
She came to me at night, in the end, which is how I knew it was the real thing and not a thing she wanted to argue. Brin argues in daylight. Brin builds her case in the morning when her mind is sharp and her feet are under her, and she brings it to you across a table with her chin up, daring you to find the flaw. The things she brings at night, in the kitchen, after the others are abed, with her hair down and her shoes off and her voice gone small — those are the things she has already lost the argument about, to herself, and cannot bear it.
I was banking the fire. I heard her on the stair, the particular weight of her, and I did not turn round, because there is a kind of conversation you can only have with someone who isn’t watching your face, and I have learned which ones those are. I let her stand in the doorway a while. I put the kettle where it would catch the last of the heat. And after a bit she said, to my back, in a voice I had not heard from her since she was about nine, “Mum. Can I talk to you.”
Not can I ask you something. Not I need your advice, which is what she says when she wants to be talked out of an enemy or into a speech. Can I talk to you. The child’s whole formula, the one that means I am frightened and I have come to the one place fright is allowed.
“Sit down,” I said. “I’ll make the tea.” And I still didn’t turn round, and that was the kindest thing I did in the whole hour, and the easiest, and I want it written down because the rest of it was neither.
She sat. I heard her fold herself into the chair the way she does, all that height going down into a knot. And I made the tea with my back to her and let the quiet do the first part of the work, and when I finally brought the cups over and sat down across from her, she had her hands wrapped round nothing yet and her eyes on the table, and she said it.
“I’ve decided.” A long breath. “I think I’ve decided. About — him. About all of it.” She looked up, and her face — my fierce girl, the orator of the realm, the one who faced down armed men in a square without her voice shaking — her face was the face of someone standing at the top of something very high. “And I’m terrified, Mum. I’m so terrified I’ve been sick with it for a week and I haven’t told anyone, because who do you tell. You can’t tell him. You can’t tell the girls. There’s no one in the whole world I can say it to except you, and I’ve been afraid to say it even to you, because if I say it out loud then it’s real, and—” She stopped. Pressed her lips together. “I don’t know how to want something this much. I don’t have the — I’ve never had this. I don’t know how it works.”
“Then say it out loud,” I said. “That’s what the kitchen’s for. Say the whole of it. Don’t curate. You curate everything; don’t curate this. Just tell me what you’re frightened of, all of it, in any order, and I won’t say a word till you’re done.”
And she did. It came out of her in a flood, the way nothing ever comes out of Brin, who measures every word she’s ever spent in public like a woman counting coin — it came out unmeasured, tumbling, doubling back, and I sat and held my cup and did not say a word, because I had promised her that and because there was nothing yet to say.
Queen. That was the first one and she could barely say the word. Queen. The role. The whole crushing edifice of it — a kingdom, a kingdom, the weight of it, the no-exit of it, the way it would close over her head and never open again. She had watched me carry a city, she said, and nearly break under it, and that was a city, and she was talking about a realm, and what made anyone think she could — what if she took it up and it was too heavy and she dropped it, and it wasn’t a teapot she dropped, it was a country—
And the commitment. The forever of it. She was eighteen. She would be making a choice at eighteen that she would be living inside at fifty, at seventy, a door she could not walk back out of, and how does anyone — how do you sign a thing in ink that can’t be unsigned, at an age when you don’t even know yet who you’ll be—
And him. And here she slowed, and her voice changed, and I understood we had reached the centre of it. She was afraid of the man. Not afraid he was cruel — she knew he wasn’t, she’d watched him a year, she knew exactly what he was. She was afraid of trusting him. Of letting one person matter that much, be that load-bearing, stand that close to the middle of her. She had never done it. She had never once in her life leaned the whole of her weight on another soul, because leaning was how you got dropped, and she had built herself precisely so that she would never need to lean — and now there was a man she wanted to lean on, wanted it like breathing, and the wanting felt like standing at the edge of her own destruction.
And — she got it out in a rush, scarlet, not looking at me — the bed. That. The whole unknown country of that. She was afraid of it the way, I suppose, every young woman who has any sense is afraid of it, the vulnerability of it, the not-knowing, the giving-over of the body to another person’s keeping. She didn’t have words for that one and didn’t try to find them and I didn’t make her.
And then the two that were underneath all the others, the ones she’d saved for last because they were the worst.
That she was fooling herself. That she — she, the best arguer in the realm, the girl who could build a case for anything — had simply argued herself into this, talked herself into a feeling that wasn’t real, constructed a love the way she’d construct a closing speech, and that one day she’d wake up and the scaffolding would be there and nothing inside it. “I’m so good at making things sound true, Mum,” she said. “What if I’ve just — made this sound true? To myself? What if I want to want him and I’ve talked the wanting into being and there’s nothing actually there—”
And — last, smallest, worst — that she did not understand the strength of what she felt, and that not understanding it frightened her more than anything else in the whole list, because she had never in her life not understood herself. She was Brin. She always knew what she was doing and why. And this thing had come into her and made her a stranger to herself — made her feel something so far past her own control that she didn’t recognise the person feeling it. “I don’t know who I am when I’m — like this,” she said. “I’m not me. I’m someone who needs him, and cries about it in the kitchen, and can’t think straight, and I don’t — I’ve never been her. I don’t know her. And I’m scared she’s not as strong as me. I’m scared I’m becoming someone weaker and I can’t stop it and I don’t even want to stop it, which is the frightening part—”
She ran down at last. Sat there emptied, hands round the cold cup, eighteen years old and undone, having said more true things in five minutes than she usually says in a season.
“And anyway,” she said, very quietly, to the table, the last card, the one she clearly thought ended the matter, “I’m a commoner. I’m a slum girl who learned to talk. They’ll never let me forget it and they’ll be right not to, and I’d be a — a pretend queen, reaching for a thing I wasn’t born to, and everyone would know.”
I let the quiet come back for a moment. I drank some of my tea. And then I set the cup down, because she’d earned every word of what I was going to say and I wanted my hands free to say it.
“All right,” I said. “I’m going to answer all of that. And then I’m going to do a thing you’re going to hate, and I want you to let me do it, because it’s the most important part. Will you let me get to the end?”
She nodded.
“You’re frightened of the crown,” I said. “Good. You should be. I’m going to tell you something about that fear, and I want you to really hear it: the fear is not a sign you can’t do it. The fear is the qualification. The people who take up a crown unafraid are the people who should never be allowed near one — we’ve met one, lately, you may recall, a man who picked up a kingdom like it was a pretty stone and felt nothing, no weight, no fear, because he could not perceive the weight, and that blindness was the whole of what made him a monster. You are frightened of it because you can see exactly what it weighs. That’s not weakness. That’s the single most important thing a ruler can have, and most of them never get it, and you’ve got it before you’ve even said yes. The day a crown stops frightening you is the day you’ve stopped being fit to wear it. So keep the fear. Carry it the whole way in. It’s not the thing standing between you and the throne. It’s the thing that makes you safe to be given one.”
She was very still.
“You’re frightened it’s forever, at eighteen. It is. I won’t soften that; it’s true, and you’re right to feel the size of it. But Brin — listen — forever is not a thing you have to be ready for all at once. Nobody signs the whole of their life in one night. You don’t promise to be fifty and married; you can’t, nobody can. You promise tomorrow. And then tomorrow you promise the day after. The forever is just a very long row of mornings, and you only ever have to be ready for the one you’re standing in. I have been married to your father for twenty years and I did not do it by being ready for twenty years. I did it one morning at a time, and most of those mornings I had no idea what I was doing, and it worked anyway, because that’s how it works for everyone, and anyone who tells you they were ready is lying or wasn’t paying attention.”
I took a breath, because the next one was harder.
“You’re frightened of trusting him. Of leaning your whole weight on one person, because leaning is how you get dropped.” I looked at her. “I know. I know better than almost anyone alive how that fear is made, and I made sure — I spent twenty years making sure — that you would never have to learn it the way I learned it. But here is the thing, my love, and it’s the truest thing I’ll say tonight: you built all that strength, all that fire, all that magnificent refusal to need anyone — you built it so that one day you’d be safe enough to set it down. That was always what it was for. A person doesn’t make themselves that strong to stay alone. They make themselves that strong so that when the right one finally comes, they can afford to need him — because they’re not needing him out of weakness, out of having nowhere else to stand. They’re choosing to need him from a position of being able to stand perfectly well alone. That’s not the same thing as being dropped. That’s the opposite of it. The girl who has to lean, leans and prays. The girl who doesn’t have to lean and chooses to anyway — that girl is free. You’re not losing your strength, Brin. You’re finally getting to use it for the thing it was built for.”
Her eyes had gone bright. She didn’t speak.
“You’re frightened of the bed,” I said, gently, and I said it plainly because she is my daughter and she came to me and there is no one else on this earth better placed to say it. “I’m going to tell you one thing about that, and then we’ll leave it, because it’s yours and not mine. You know what I was. You know there is no woman in this realm who knows more than I do about the wrong version of that — about a body being a thing that’s done to you, spent, counted, owned. I carried that knowledge my whole life and I would not wish the half of it on my worst enemy. So believe me, of all the people who could tell you, when I tell you this: there is a wrong version, and there is a right one, and they are not the same act at all, they only look alike from outside. And the entire difference between them — the whole of it — is whether you are wanted as yourself, by someone you trust, who is not taking but receiving. That’s all it is. That’s the whole secret. And I have watched that man for a year with my whole attention, the attention I built over twenty years of learning to read exactly this, and I am telling you: he is the receiving kind. He wants you, the actual you, not a thing you can do for him. You are frightened of the wrong version. You are not going toward the wrong version. I’d stake the rest of my life on it, and I have earned, the hard way, the right to know the difference on sight.”
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