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As his father nodded a look of sadness flashed in his eyes. “True. Well, it was nice of you to stop by while you were passing through. Tibet will be sorry she missed you.”
“Is she not here?”
“No. She’s been dealing with some medical issues of late and today was the first day she actually felt more like herself in some time. I sent her out shopping, thinking the fresh air aught to do her good.”
“Yes, well . . . tell her I’m sorry I’ve missed her.” Truth be told, he was relieved by her absence.
His father scowled. “She’s your stepmother, you insensitive brat. Aren’t you even going to ask what’s wrong with her?”
And so it began. “That woman will never hear a title from me with the word mother in it. I had a mother and she killed her—”
“Do not go pinning that on Tibet. Your mother had cancer. Cancer, Lucian. You act as though Tibet was pricking pins in a voodoo doll for Christ’s sake!”
“She might as well have been!” he roared back. “She was letting you stick your prick in her when you should have been taking Mother to medical appointments!”
His father shook his head, and just like that all the steam seemed to leave him. “This is the way it will always be between us then?” He rubbed his brow and in a softer voice said, “I loved your mother, Lucian. I loved her and took care of her the best I knew how, but I loved Tibet too. I loved her in a different way. A way I didn’t know existed until I met her. By then it was too late. Your mother was already my fiancée.”
Lucian turned away, discarding all the same old bullshit. If not for Tibet his mother would have never suffered as she had in the end. Rather than facing her disease with the courage of her spouse and his strength available to her when she was at her weakest, she suffered through treatments while battling a broken heart.
He’d never forget the night his mother was up vomiting after a treatment. Lucian had sat with her, terrified as only a young boy could be seeing his mother so weak. She was on so much medication she was babbling about things he didn’t quite understand.
“She’s the cancer, Luche,” she had told him. “She is a cancer to this family, to my marriage, and to you children.”
“Try to rest, Mom.”
“I’ll rest when I’m dead.”
Her words angered him. He was only a boy. A world without his mother in it was unimaginable. The idea of being raised by his heartless father who showed up only to criticize them was unthinkable.
Then there was the infamous Tibet. His mother spoke of her often. She had been a name spoken in their house from the time he was a child, yet he had never set eyes on her.
Lucian had tried to settle his mother that night, asking her to please not get herself worked up. “You need to rest, Mom. Sleep and the pain will be gone in the morning.”
She laughed dryly. “You kids think it’s this disease that’s killing me, but it’s her, her and your father. I loved him, Lucian. Do you know how much I loved him?”
She began to cry. “Why wasn’t I enough? That’s what I want to know, Lucian! Why wasn’t I enough? I stood by for years while he carried on with his affair and pushed all of us aside to make his fortunes. When he fell on hard times, I was there. And where is he now? Huh, where is he?”
She had swung out her hand in anger and knocked the tray from the night table, the sound attracting the maid and Isadora. His sister climbed onto the bed and held their mother as she wept like a little girl. He backed out of the room as she cried, “Why wasn’t I enough? We will never be enough. He always has to have more, more, more.”
***
When he was a child, Isadora ripped the arm of his favorite bear. He beat her with a toy car and his father then beat him, instilling in him that a man never raised a hand to girl. It didn’t matter that Isa was bigger than him. Lucian had been four. It was the first time he ever felt enraged. However, that time was purely child’s play to what he felt that night his mother fell to pieces in his sister’s arms.
It was then, he vowed, to always be a man of his word—unlike his father—and he also vowed in that moment that if his mother did not live through this, he would personally go after everything his father loved. That was a promise, and he kept it.
He looked at his father now, that old rage bubbling up inside him again. “It was a mistake coming here.” He stood.
