23. Freya
— ? —
Freya
Louisa didn’t know I was back.
That was obvious the second she came through the front door, because she was already talking, already mid-sentence, already halfway through a complaint about the state of the driveway gravel. She’d come to see her son. She had no idea I was standing in his living room.
“Rex, darling, that gate code is ridiculous. I had to call the house twice, and the girl who answered acted like I needed an appointment to visit my own…”
She stopped when she saw me.
Four months since I’d seen her, since she smiled at a table full of Wallers and announced that Annie would be joining the family. And every one of those days, I’d remembered the way she slid that checkbook across the tea table like I was something she could return to a store.
“Oh.” Her face went through something ugly and fast, and then it settled into the expression I knew best. Pleasant. Absolutely lethal. “You’re here.”
“I live here.”
“Do you?” Louisa set her handbag down on the side table like she was claiming territory. “How convenient. I heard you’d found work at some children’s riding camp. I assumed that was the end of it. Although I suppose there’s only so long a girl like you can stay away from a house like this before…”
Rex moved.
I’d seen him angry before. I’d seen him cold. But I had never seen the thing that came over his face in that moment, and neither, I think, had his mother.
“Get out.”
Louisa blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Get out of this house, Mother. Now.” His voice didn’t rise, and somehow that made it worse.
It was the voice he used on the phone with men who’d cost him millions.
“And don’t come back. If you show up at this gate again, I’ll have the sheriff put a restraining order in your hand before you make it up the drive. ”
“Rex.” Her composure cracked straight down the middle. “You cannot be serious.”
“Try me.”
“I’m your mother.”
“You tried to buy my wife.” He stepped in front of me, not blocking me, just there.
“You paraded another woman through her home. And you humiliated her in front of the whole family and then you sat in my dining room and handed me divorce papers like a birthday present. And now you walk into her house and start again before you’ve got your coat off. ”
“Her house?”
“Hers. The house, the land, and her name on the deed.” He let that sit. “So no, you don’t get to finish that sentence. You don’t get to finish any sentence in this house ever again.”
Louisa’s eyes darted to me, and that was when she saw it.
The swell beneath my fitted blouse. The hand I hadn’t realized I’d rested there.
All the color drained out of her face.
“You’re pregnant.”
“Almost five months.”
She sat down hard on the nearest chair, as if her legs had simply quit. Her mouth opened and nothing came out, and for the first time in the entire year I’d known her, Louisa Waller looked like an old woman instead of a weapon.
“A baby,” she whispered. “Rex. There’s a baby.”
“There is.”
“And you were going to cut me off.” Her voice climbed and cracked. “You were going to let me stand in a courthouse and find out from a lawyer that I have a grandchild?”
“I was going to let you find out from nobody at all.”
“Rex, please.” She reached for his hand and he didn’t take it, and she pulled back like she’d touched a stove. “Please. I didn’t mean it. What I said just now, I didn’t mean any of it, it’s just habit, I’ve been saying things like that my whole life and I don’t even hear myself anymore…”
“That’s not the defense you think it is.”
Tears spilled over, and she didn’t wipe them away. “I know. But please don’t take them from me. Not you. Not the baby. I know that’s my own doing, and I know I deserve every word of this, but please, Rex.”
The room went very quiet.
I watched a woman who had never once apologized to me beg her son not to erase her, and I felt absolutely nothing. That surprised me. Six months ago, her tears would have gutted me. Now they were just weather.
Rex looked at her for a long moment.
“You’re not asking the right person,” he said.
Louisa’s head came up.
“I’m not the one you hurt. You want back in this family?” He nodded at me, once. “Then ask my wife.”
She turned to me. And something in her expression made me realize she’d never actually looked at me before. Not once in a year of dinners and holidays and carefully aimed compliments. She’d looked past me, through me, around me. Never at me.
“Freya.” My name came out stiff, like it hurt her teeth. “I was cruel to you. From the moment he brought you into this family, I treated you like an intruder. Something that needed to be removed.”
I waited.
“I told myself I was protecting him. Protecting the family name. But the truth is I was afraid. Of losing control. Of watching my son choose someone I hadn’t vetted or approved.
And of becoming irrelevant.” Her hands twisted in her lap.
“I’ve run this family for forty years. The thought of someone else taking my place… ”
“You tried to pay me to leave,” I said. “Thirty million dollars to walk away from my marriage. You brought Annie into my home. You put her next to my husband at every meal. And you told a room full of people she’d be joining the family while I sat there.”
“That was not what I meant-”
“You made me feel worthless in my own house. And you made me question whether my husband even wanted me.”
“Yes.” Her chin came up, and there it was, the old steel showing through the tears.
“I won’t stand here and pretend I would have chosen you.
I’m too old and too honest for that. But my son chose you.
He’s never in his life looked at anything the way he looks at you, and I was wrong to fight it, and I was crueler about it than any woman should ever be to another.
” Her voice dropped. “I’m sorry. I don’t expect that to be worth much. ”
It wasn’t worth much. But it was real, and real was more than she’d ever given me.
Part of me wanted to accept it and move on. To let the past stay in the past and start fresh, because that’s what I’d done my whole life. Swallow the hurt. Keep the peace. Be easy.
I was done being easy.
“That’s not enough,” I said.
Louisa flinched. “What do you want?”
“You humiliated me in front of your family. You made all of them complicit in treating me like garbage, and every single one of them followed your lead.” I kept my voice level.
“So you’ll apologize to me the same way.
Publicly. In front of every one of them.
The aunts, the uncles, the cousins. All of them. ”
“Freya, I…”
“Those are my terms.” I met her eyes without flinching. “You want to be in this baby’s life? Then prove it where it costs you something. Not in a living room where nobody can hear you.”
She was quiet for a long moment. I could see her weighing it, the pride and the humiliation and the cost of admitting fault to people she’d spent decades controlling.
Finally, she nodded.
“All right. If that’s what you need, I’ll do it.”
“I need your word.”
“You have it.” She stood, smoothing her skirt with hands that weren’t quite steady. “When?”
I looked at Rex. He raised an eyebrow, leaving the decision to me.
“Soon,” I said. “We’ll let you know.”
Louisa left without the usual dramatic exit. Just a quiet goodbye and a promise to do better.
When the car disappeared down the driveway, Rex turned to me.
“Are you okay?”
“I think so.” I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “Would you really have done it? The restraining order?”
“Yes.”
“Rex.”
“She started on you in your own house.” He said it like it was the simplest logic in the world. “I spent a year letting that happen. I’m not doing it for one more minute.”
I kissed him then, because I couldn’t not.
He was quiet for a moment afterward, something working behind his eyes. Then he smiled, that new smile, the real one, the one that made my heart flip every single time.
“I have an idea.”
“Should I be worried?”
“Probably.” He pulled me into his arms, his hands settling on my hips. “I’m throwing a party. Here, at the ranch. A proper one, with the whole family. And I’m introducing you the way I should have a year ago, as my wife, the mother of my child, and the most important person in my life.”
“Rex.”
“And I’m inviting Annie.” His smile sharpened into something almost predatory. “So she can watch.”
I laughed despite myself. “That’s petty.”
“I prefer the term ‘satisfying.’” He kissed my forehead. “What do you say? Ready to face the wolves?”
“With you? Always.”