Celeste’s voice cut through the room. “Because you hid it?”
Patricia nodded once.
The sound that left Marcus was barely human. Not anger. Not grief. Something between them. “Mom.”
“I believed she was manipulating you,” Patricia said quickly, words spilling now. “You were upset. You were drinking too much. You had lost the Denver contract. You told me the marriage was already failing.”
“Our marriage was failing because he disappeared every time life got difficult,” I said.
Marcus looked at me then, and for once he did not defend himself.
Patricia continued, “I opened the envelope. I saw the ultrasound. I saw… I saw more than one heartbeat mentioned. I didn’t read carefully. I panicked.”
“You panicked,” I repeated.
“I called your old apartment,” she said. “You had already left. I told myself if it were real, you would come back. You would fight harder.”
The words landed quietly, but they struck something deep.
I thought of myself at twenty-five, swollen with four fragile lives, sleeping upright because breathing hurt, answering calls from creditors, building a business from a borrowed laptop while pretending I wasn’t terrified. I thought of hospital lights, tiny cries, incubators, my mother’s hands rubbing circles on my back before she died, and nights when I whispered to four cribs that I was sorry their father wasn’t there.
“You wanted a pregnant woman to fight harder for a family that had locked the door,” I said.
Patricia wept then. Silently. Completely.
Marcus turned away, gripping the mantel. “You let me believe there was no proof.”
“You wanted to believe it,” Harold said.
That brought Marcus around. “What does that mean?”
Harold’s jaw tightened. “It means your mother hid the envelope, but she didn’t make you cruel. She didn’t make you refuse Kesha’s calls. She didn’t make you sign divorce papers without meeting her face to face. She didn’t make you vanish.”
Marcus stared at him, stunned.
The house seemed to shrink around us. Christmas music played faintly from another room, cheerful and horribly out of place.
Celeste removed the ring from her finger.
Marcus noticed immediately. “Celeste, wait.”
