His face changed.
“No, Mom. You kept digging the grave because it was easier than asking why she left.”
“I am your mother.”
“And she is my twin.”
“You hid my grandchild from me.”
“Rose isn’t a prize you lost,” Liam said. “She is a baby Livia was afraid to bring near you.”
The room seemed to tilt beneath me.
“I loved her. I gave her everything.”
“Everything except room to disappoint you.”
John stood in the doorway, silent.
I turned to him. “Tell him I only wanted to protect her.”
John looked down at the letters.
“Camila,” he said quietly, “sometimes you don’t give people room to be themselves.”
Liam wiped his face with his sleeve.
“You both made this house feel like a courtroom,” he said. “Mom judged. Dad settled. And Livia and I waited for the sentence.”
For a long time, no one spoke.
Finally, I picked up Livia’s letter.
“Where is she?”
Liam shook his head.
“No. Not if you’re going there to drag her home.”
“I need to see my daughter.”
“Then don’t arrive like the reason she left.”
I hated him for saying it.
And I loved him for saying it.
I sat there among the letters and asked the first honest question I had asked in almost a year.
“Tell me how not to scare her.”
Liam’s voice softened.
“Start by not making the first sentence about you.”
The next morning, he gave me the address.
John drove. I held Livia’s letter the entire way.
Natalie opened the door before I could knock twice.
“Camila,” she said.
“You knew.”
“Yes.”
Old anger rose in me.
“You had no right.”
Natalie stayed in the doorway.
“Your daughter was eighteen, pregnant, and crying on my porch. I had every reason to close the door because of you. But she wasn’t you. So I opened it.”
“You should have called me.”
“She begged me not to.”
“And you listened?”
“Yes,” Natalie said. “Because someone needed to.”
Then Mitchell appeared behind her with a baby bottle in his hand.
For eleven months, I had turned him into a villain.
But he only looked tired.
“I asked her to call you,” he said.
“Then why didn’t you?”
“Because I married Livia. I don’t make choices for her.”
A baby cried inside the house.
Then Livia stepped into the hallway.
Her hair was shorter. Her face was thinner.
But it was her.
