CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
ISABELLA
My mother opens the door, sees Alexander, and closes it in his face again.
The movement is so quick that neither of us has time to react. I stand frozen in the hallway, torn between indignation and an entirely inappropriate urge to laugh.
“Mum.”
Her answer comes from the other side of the door.
“No.”
“You agreed to hear him out.”
“I changed my mind when I saw his face.”
Alexander does not look offended. He simply adjusts the cuff of his coat and glances at me.
“I can leave. I don’t want to force her to have me in the house.”
The door opens again. My mother points at him before he can take a single step.
“You are staying because my daughter asked me to listen, not because I want you inside my home.”
“Understood.”
“And don’t use that polite tone to make me sound unreasonable.”
“That wasn’t my intention.”
“Your intentions have already caused enough trouble. Come in.”
Alexander obeys.
He was the one who asked for this conversation. He would have preferred to speak to my mother without me there, but I refused. Not because I want to protect him; I know the woman who raised me, and I consider it prudent to have a witness present in case she decides to commit murder.
My mother leads us into the sitting room.
Photographs of Lily occupy almost every available surface: newborn in hospital, covered in cake on her first birthday, wearing swimming goggles, asleep in her grandmother’s arms. Alexander sees each one but does not move closer to examine them.
He seems to understand that he was not invited here to browse through memories.
We sit.
My mother does not offer coffee, which in Portugal, Brazil, Italy, or any other civilized part of the world amounts to a formal declaration of war.
“Speak,” she orders.
Alexander sits on the edge of the armchair, hands resting on his knees.
“I’m sorry.”
My mother gives an incredulous laugh.
“You had five years to prepare an explanation, and you brought two words?”
“I know they’re inadequate. There is no sentence proportionate to what I did.”
The honesty stops her.
“I didn’t come to ask you to forgive me,” he continues. “I also don’t want you to speak well of me to Isabella, defend my choices, or try to convince her that I’ve changed.”
My mother looks at me. I did not expect that part either.
“Then why are you here?” she asks.
“Because I left you carrying consequences that belonged to me. I can’t divide that burden retroactively, but I need to acknowledge what I did to your daughter and to your family.”
“You have no idea what I carried.”
“Probably not all of it.”
Alexander holds her gaze.
“I want to hear it, if you’re willing to tell me.”
My mother leans forward.
“I watched my daughter arrive at my house unable to breathe.”
My chest closes.
“Mum…”
She does not look at me.
“You insisted on being here, Isabella. It’s too late to stop him hearing it now.”
Alexander does not look away either.
“Go on.”
My mother’s voice remains steady, but her hands are trembling.
“She was dragging a suitcase with one hand and protecting her stomach with the other, even though she had barely had time to understand that she was pregnant. I thought she’d been in an accident. Isabella tried to explain, but she was crying so hard she couldn’t finish a sentence.”
I close my eyes.
I can return to that night with an ease I hate: Clara’s front door, the narrow corridor, my mother arriving in a taxi because Clara did not know what to do with me.
“For the first few weeks, she hardly slept,” my mother continues. “When she did, she woke frightened and reached for her phone. Sometimes she spent hours looking out the window because part of her still expected you to appear.”
Alexander’s fingers tighten against his knees.
“I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t. To know, you would have had to look.”
He takes the correction without defending himself.
“Isabella barely ate. She was nauseous, worked too much, and cried in the shower because she thought I couldn’t hear her. I heard everything from the other side of the door and could do nothing because my daughter still loved the man who had destroyed her.”
“Stop,” I say.
My mother finally looks at me.
“You do not need to be ashamed of what you lived through.”
“It isn’t shame.”
It is something harder to name. Alexander had no right to know those moments when they happened. Hearing them now makes it feel as though the walls I built around the pain are being dismantled in front of him.
“If Isabella wants you to stop, you should stop,” Alexander says.
My mother turns back to him.
“Do not use your newfound respect as an escape. She asked me to speak to you because there is a child between you, so you are going to hear at least the part that concerns Lily.”
I look at Alexander. There is no defense in his expression and no attempt to dramatize his guilt.
I give my mother a small nod.
“Your daughter spent that entire pregnancy inside a woman who had to convince herself every day that she could raise her alone,” my mother says.
“Bella planned the crib while calculating rent, chose names while answering clients, and pretended she was fine so no one would treat her like an abandoned woman.”
Alexander lowers his head for a few seconds, then lifts it again.
“Yes.”
“No, we haven’t reached the ‘yes’ yet. When Lily was born, Isabella spent almost twenty minutes staring at her face without saying anything.”
My mother’s voice breaks.
“Because the baby had your mouth.”
Silence fills the room.
Alexander loses color. His gaze shifts involuntarily toward a photograph on the sideboard where newborn Lily is sleeping wrapped in a white blanket.
A bitter part of me thinks he needs to endure that image. Another part wants to remove the photograph before the pain on his face becomes unbearable for all of us.
I do neither.
“You don’t deserve my daughter,” my mother says.
“I know.”
“You don’t deserve my granddaughter either.”
Alexander raises his eyes again.
“Not yet.”
The answer leaves her silent.
“I’m not going to claim that a DNA result, the marriage, or any document gave me a place I haven’t built,” he explains.
“I am Lily’s biological father, but I still have to prove that I can be her father in real life.
I want to earn her trust through what I do repeatedly, without forcing her to give me affection because I regret what happened. ”
“Children forgive quickly,” my mother warns. “That doesn’t mean they cannot be hurt again.”
“I know.”
“If you promise to collect Lily and don’t show up, she won’t think about meetings, traffic, or shareholders. She’ll think she wasn’t important enough.”
Alexander looks at the photograph.
“Then I’ll only make promises I can keep. If something genuinely prevents me, I’ll speak to her before, rather than sending someone else to explain.”
“And when Lily is angry with you?”
“I won’t buy her something to make her forget.”
“When she says she doesn’t like you?”
The question hits him, but he answers.
“I will still be her father.”
My mother gives me a brief look before turning back to him.
“And Isabella?”
My body tightens.
Alexander takes longer this time.
“I have no right to ask anything from her.”
“That wasn’t an answer.”
“I love her. I would like a life with her, and I know that may never happen. Wanting that does not turn Isabella into a reward for finally trying to do the right thing.”
My mother studies him with a different kind of attention.
“And if she decides she will never come back to you?”
“I will still respect the limits we agreed on and everything I promised Lily. My relationship with our daughter cannot depend on Isabella loving me again.”
“And if she falls in love with another man?”
Alexander’s jaw tightens. For the first time, the answer visibly costs him something.
“I’ll hate it.”
My mother raises an eyebrow.
“At least that’s honest.”
“The feeling will be mine. I won’t use Lily, money, or any other power I have to interfere in Isabella’s life.”
My mother looks at me.
It is not forgiveness in her face, but perhaps it is the first possibility that she is looking at someone different from the man she has imagined strangling for five years.
“Good,” she says at last.
She stands, ending the conversation.
“Now leave before I remember in greater detail how I felt back then.”
Alexander stands too.
“Thank you for hearing me.”
“Do not thank me. I still haven’t done anything for you.”
He walks toward the door. My mother follows him, probably to make sure he does not steal any photographs on the way out.
When Alexander is already in the hallway, she says his name.
“Lily likes cinnamon on her pancakes. Isabella doesn’t add it because she thinks it’s too much sugar.”
“Mum!”
She ignores me.
“A pinch won’t kill anyone, and the child shouldn’t have to suffer because her mother developed an obsession with balanced nutrition.”
Alexander almost smiles.
“I’ll remember. A pinch.”
“And don’t overdo it. You look like the kind of man who would solve the problem by dumping in the entire jar.”
“That is a fair observation.”
The door closes behind him.
I turn to my mother.
“Seriously?”
“What?”
“After telling him you wanted to kill him, you decided to share culinary secrets?”
“The two things can coexist. I still want to hit him with a frying pan, but he needs to know how to make my granddaughter’s breakfast.”
“Do you believe him?”
My mother returns to the sitting room and begins rearranging cushions that do not need rearranging.
“I believe he feels guilty. I don’t yet know whether guilt will transform him or merely make him suffer.”
“What’s the difference?”
She smooths the throw over the sofa.
“Suffering can pass, or it can harden a person. Transformation shows in what someone chooses to do when no one is watching.”
I think about Alexander collecting Lily from school, staying awake through her fever, returning the toys, and withdrawing my company from the tender when he realized what he had done.
“He is trying.”
“He is,” my mother agrees. “That does not obligate you to forgive him, love him, or go back.”
“I know.”
“Are you sure?”
I do not answer.
Two days later, Alexander asks to speak to Clara. She agrees with far too much enthusiasm and chooses a public café, probably so she can humiliate him without risking arrest.
I do not go.
Clara gives me a full report that evening while drinking wine in my kitchen and criticizing me for not buying the brand she likes.
“He arrived fifteen minutes early,” she tells me. “He waited outside because I said I didn’t want to find him already sitting there like he owned the table.”
“That sounds like one of your conditions.”
“It was. I also chose the loudest part of the café to prevent any emotional speeches.”
“Did it work?”
“There was no speech.”
Clara turns the glass slowly between her fingers.
“Alexander apologized for making you doubt everyone who stood beside you. He said that when he accused Daniel and threw you out, he also treated your friends like accomplices in some elaborate lie.”
“He never accused you directly.”
“He didn’t have to. I was the woman whose home was sheltering the supposedly unfaithful fiancée. People asked me whether I knew about the affair.”
I did not know that.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“Because you already had enough to deal with.”
Guilt shifts inside me, but Clara does not allow me to make the conversation about that.
“I asked him whether he thought suffering for five years entitled him to a second chance.”
My heart tightens.
“What did he say?”
“No. He said that if suffering could buy forgiveness, he would be turning pain into currency, and he didn’t want to do that.”
I close my eyes.
“That sounds rehearsed.”
“I told him exactly that.”
“And?”
“He said he spends too much time with lawyers and unfortunately now thinks in financial metaphors.”
A laugh escapes before I can stop it.
“You’re supposed to be on my side.”
Clara sets down her glass.
“I am on your side. That’s why I also asked what he would do if you used the contract to protect Lily and then asked for a divorce.”
“What did he say?”
“That he would sign the papers.”
“That’s all?”
“Then he corrected himself. He said he would be devastated, that he would try to show you he still wanted a life with you, and that he would stop the moment you asked him to stop. But he would sign.”
I look down at the wine in my glass.
“And did you believe him?”
Clara takes her time before answering.
“I believe he believes it now. Whether he’ll be able to do it when it actually hurts is something only time can prove.”
It is almost exactly what my mother said.
“You’re angry because he’s doing the right things,” Clara adds.
“Deeply.”
She laughs.
“I’m not saying you have to go back. I’m saying Alexander is finally looking straight at what he did without searching for a side door, a convenient person to blame, or a solution he can buy.”
That much I know.
Perhaps that is exactly the problem.
The Alexander from five years ago was easy to love until the moment he destroyed me. The man living with us now is becoming difficult to hate because he finally understands that he was the one who destroyed everything.
Forgiveness and love are still very far from being the same thing.
I am beginning, however, to fear that neither of them is as dead as I once believed.