Chapter 20 #2
“It’s a Cassian original. And no,” he said, taking a slow step backward toward the open door, “you can’t steal it.”
“Oh no,” I murmured dryly. “Whatever will I do now.”
He gave a final, small smile, then turned and was gone, the door clicking shut softly behind him.
I turned from the door to find two pairs of eyes fixed on me from the couch. The moment they saw me looking, they snapped their attention to each other and launched into a conspicuously loud, fake conversation about popcorn.
“What?” I asked, crossing my arms.
Naija shook her head, too quickly. “Nothing.”
I leveled a stare at Felicity.
“It’s just…” she said, gesturing vaguely toward the front door. “That’s the Cassian you actually met. The one you married. Before the workaholic zombie mode activated.”
I glanced back at the closed door, then at them, and gave a dismissive shrug. “Eh, who cares?” I moved to the couch, plucked the remote from the coffee table, and clicked on the TV. “Let’s watch The Holiday.”
My mother slid the key to my apartment across the small table.
I’d left in such a rush that day, I hadn’t even taken my bag. Or my keys. Or anything, really.
After three days of silence and starch at Felicity’s, I was ready to reclaim my space. I’d texted my mother a time and the address of this bland, busy café. Neutral territory.
I looked at the key, then up at her. Her face was carefully composed, but her eyes were red-rimmed and weary.
She raised her hands in a gesture of surrender. “I promise. I didn’t make any copies.”
I picked up the key, already making a mental note to change the locks again.
There was a reason I’d insisted on meeting her. I could have had the locks rekeyed and been done with it. I needed answers. I needed to scorch this chapter of my life so thoroughly that not even her delusions of reconciliation could take root.
“You said you didn’t care about an heir,” I began, my voice cool and level. “That you only gave me that excuse because you thought it was something I’d believe. Then why send me on all those dates?”
She didn’t answer immediately. Her eyes dropped to her hands, wrapped tightly around her coffee cup as if for warmth. When she finally spoke, her voice was thin, scraped raw by memory.
“When I sent you on that first date… I almost called the whole thing off before it started. I’d tried to find someone good, someone you’d like, but the entire day, my stomach was in knots. It felt… wrong. I told myself, ‘This is it. Never again.’” She paused, her eyes lifting to meet mine.
“But then you called me. Right after. And you went on this… this magnificent rant about how he’d been rude to the staff, how he’d talked over you, about his lack of basic human manners. You talked for twenty minutes. To me.”
A small, wistful smile touched her lips.
“You kept talking to me,” she whispered.
“So I… I kept going. I didn’t intentionally find awful men, Alessia.
I swear I didn’t. On paper, they were all perfectly acceptable.
But none of them were right for you. And after every single one, like clockwork, my phone would ring.
And it would be you. And for that half an hour, I had my daughter with me. ”
I remembered that. Every time she sent me on one of those disastrous dates, I’d be so wound up, so utterly incensed by the man’s sheer audacity or stunning lack of self-awareness, that my fingers would hit her contact before I’d even left the restaurant.
I had to call her. I had to tell her, in excruciating detail, exactly how spectacularly wrong her choice had been.
She let out a shaky breath, the confession leaving her deflated. “It was selfish. I know.”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice quieter than I intended. “Very selfish.”
She nodded, the movement heavy with sorrow. “I’m sorry.”
Time for the next question. The one that had lived in the back of my mind for decades.
My jaw tightened at the memory. “You came to Aldric’s house once when I was little,” I said, the words clipped. “Why?”
Her eyes widened, genuine shock flashing across her face. “I… I didn’t know you knew about that.” She let out a shaky breath, her fingers tracing the rim of her saucer. “I came to get you.”
The instinct to laugh—sharp and cruel—surged up immediately. I swallowed it down and stayed quiet.
She looked up, and for a moment there was almost a smile on her face, except it was too thin, too tired to be mistaken for happiness. “I know you don’t believe me. But I did.”
Her gaze drifted somewhere past me. She was remembering, I could tell, and whatever she was seeing had never really stopped happening inside her.
“When I got my freedom from Aldric, I didn’t have a plan.
I didn’t even know what came next. I just knew I had to be anywhere he wasn’t.
” She gave a small, humourless laugh. “Unfortunately, he did have a plan.”
Her voice tightened, a thread of old bitterness woven through it.
“After I left the hospital, when I went back to university to finish my degree, I found my tuition had been revoked. My father—my own father—had pulled the funding. We never discussed it. I’d assumed…
I’d hoped he’d at least let me have that. ”
She traced the rim of her cup with one fingertip. “The apartment Aldric provided was leased for one year. Just long enough for me to heal, and not a day more. So I got a job. Then two. Three when I could manage it. I lived on coffee and toast and saved every cent I could.”
She took a deep breath. “It took me three years of that just to save enough to re-enroll part-time. Four more to finish my degree in hospitality management. My first real job was as a junior travel associate for a boutique agency.”
My breath left me in a silent rush.
I hadn’t known. Not a single shred of this.
Every time she shared her stories, they were about the places she’d travelled to—the culture, the food, the beauty of it all. Never this. Never what it had cost her.
She saw the shock on my face and offered a sad smile.
“I didn’t want to tell you my sob story.
The choice was mine. And those years, however hard they were, were still better than living under his roof.
I don’t regret leaving. What I regret…” Her voice caught, her eyes glistening. “Is giving you up.”
“When I finally had my footing,” she continued, a hard edge entering her voice, “a stable job, a small apartment that was mine… I went back for you. I marched into his office and demanded my daughter.”
Her jaw clenched. “What I didn’t know was that he’d been waiting for that day. He was ready.”
A tear escaped, tracing a slow path down her cheek.
She wiped it away with a sharp, angry swipe.
“He showed me a contract. A legal document stating that I’d forfeited all parental rights and access unless he granted permission or…
until he died. I didn’t even remember signing it.
He’d had it brought to me in the hospital, just hours after you were born.
I was exhausted, medicated, and he put a pen in my hand. ”
The sheer, chilling calculation of it settled in my bones.
Her voice dropped to a raw whisper. “He said that if I ever came near you, he’d use it to have me arrested for harassment. That I wasn’t even allowed in the same city. The only time the prohibition lifted… was when he got sick.”
She let out a shaky breath, a dark, unvarnished truth in her eyes. “God, I wished for his death so much during those years.”
A tiny, involuntary smile touched my lips at that last, dark confession. It was a sentiment I understood perfectly. We had, in our separate prisons, been wishing for the same key.
“But he’d made arrangements for even after his death,” she said, bitterness lacing her voice.
“There was a clause. I wasn’t allowed to contact you, and I wasn’t even permitted to be in the same city as you for two full years after he died.
So I waited. I marked the calendar. And the day that restriction lifted, I came back. ”
Her shoulders lifted in a minuscule, helpless shrug. “But you didn’t want me here anymore.”
A bitter, disbelieving laugh escaped me. “That motherfucking asshole.” I shook my head. “He really couldn’t stand the idea of anyone but himself being happy, could he? Even from the grave.”
A watery, agreeing laugh escaped her. “That’s true.”
Silence filled the space between us, thick and heavy with the collapsed ruins of the narrative I’d built my life upon.
The story of the mother who didn’t want me lay in pieces.
In its place was a far more complicated truth: the story of a young woman systematically stripped of every resource, outmaneuvered by a ruthless strategist, and legally bound to stay away from the one person she wanted to be with.
She had come back for me. Not on a whim, not for an heir. She had fought her way through a decade of struggle, only to be legally barred from me, then forced to wait out a sentence he’d imposed from the grave.
I understood her better now. A part of me even ached for the woman she’d been. Cornered. Alone.
But understanding didn’t erase the hurt. It didn’t cauterize the wound left by my lonely childhood.
The two truths existed side by side, irreconcilable: her powerlessness and my pain. One didn’t cancel out the other. They simply sat together at the café table, a miserable inheritance from a man who had engineered loneliness for us both.
“Your father loved you.”
The words were so quiet, so simple, they cut through every other thought in my head. I looked at her, startled.
She held my gaze, her expression softening into something unbearably tender.
“We talked on the phone the night before he got on that plane.” Her voice softened, turning inward, cradling the memory.
“He was… so excited. He kept saying he had this feeling it was going to be a girl. He was scared, yeah. Terrified to be a father that young. But the excitement… it was bigger. It kept bubbling over.”