Chapter Twelve
Mandy
Damon's parents were on my side. Both of them.
I'd always respected the two of them, long before I ever became their daughter-in-law.
His mother, Elena, kept that household running like clockwork—warm, organized, the kind of steady presence that made a house feel like a home instead of just an address.
His father, Raymond, was a legend in the legal world, exacting but never once cruel about it.
Through every confused, aching year of my adolescence, that family had given me more grace and shelter than I probably deserved.
So, when Damon called, his voice cracking with something close to a plea, asking me to come with him to Raymond's surprise retirement party, I didn't say no.
I knew exactly what he was hoping for. He thought the weight of our parents' expectations, the decades tangled between our two families, the pressure of keeping up appearances in front of people who'd watched us grow up—he thought all of it might soften me.
Buy our dying marriage a few more hours of borrowed warmth.
He underestimated exactly how far past soft I already was.
When Elena asked me to walk with her in the garden, I didn't think anything of it.
Sunlight filtered gold through the glass roof of the conservatory, spilling over beds of roses in full bloom, the air thick with green and perfume.
Elena looked as composed as ever, a cup of black tea balanced in one hand, leading me toward a white wrought-iron bench tucked at the far end of the path.
I braced for small talk. Travel plans, maybe, for Raymond's retirement.
Instead, she set her cup down on the bench arm, turned toward me, and took my hand in both of hers. Her palm was warm. Her eyes held something I wasn't ready for—real tenderness, and underneath it, real worry.
"Mandy." Her voice came out soft, careful. "I know about you and Damon. I know you're planning to divorce him."
Something in my chest sank a fraction. My fingers tightened involuntarily around hers, but I kept my face still, my breathing even.
Elena let out a long sigh, something heavy and self-reproachful crossing her features.
"Nico told me everything. She came to me furious—told me exactly how cold he's been, how selfish, how he never once treated you the way you deserved to be treated."
A sad, rueful smile pulled at her mouth, her eyes bright with unshed tears.
"It broke my heart hearing it, Mandy. But honestly? I think the blame sits with Raymond and me. When Damon was young, we piled expectation after expectation onto him. We wanted him brilliant. Perfect. Untouchable. And somewhere in all that pressure, we raised a man obsessed with never losing face,
with winning every room he walked into, with playing the hero because he never learned how to just—be there, quietly, for someone."
Her grip tightened, her voice thickening.
"By the time we understood what we'd done to him, his character had already set like concrete. We watched you grow up too, Mandy. We know how gentle you are. How patient. And yet how clearly you see your own boundaries, even when it costs you something to hold them."
Her eyes searched my face, pleading now, her voice dropping to something almost humble.
"We genuinely believed you might be the one person who could teach him softness. Who could make him better than we managed to."
The sun caught the silver threading through her hair, and my eyes stung in a way I refused to let show. I sat with the full weight of it—her love for her son, her quiet, aching desperation—for a long moment before I gently slid my hand free of hers.
I lifted my chin and met her eyes, steady, calm, and asked her exactly one question.
"Elena. If this were Nico—if it were your daughter sitting where I am right now—would you tell her the same thing? Would you ask her to stay?"
The garden went completely silent.
Wind moved through the leaves overhead. Elena's hand hung in the air where mine had been a second earlier, her lips parted around the beginning of a sentence that never arrived.
My question had laid it bare, gently but completely—every quiet year I'd spent absorbing what this family's golden son couldn't give me, and the blind spot sitting right in the center of a mother's love for him. She had no answer. Not one that would survive being said out loud.
Elena sat with it a moment longer. Then she simply patted the back of my hand, once, and let the silence stand.