Page 119 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

She shook her head. “I’m not here for an heir. I’m not here for a transaction. I’m here because I want to know my daughter. I’m here because if I walk away now, I’m just running away. Again. And I am so… so tired of running from you.”

Tears fell, tracing slow lines down her cheeks. “I know you’ve hated me for leaving. But you never said it. You never showed me your anger. You just… locked it away.” Her eyes searched mine, desperate. “I’m here. Give it to me. Give me your anger.”

I looked at her and felt only a vast, heavy emptiness.

The anger that had once burned through me had burned itself out. The hurt had worn itself down to something dull and distant. Even the urge to react had deserted me, leaving my body strangely still, my mind stripped of everything except the weight pressing behind my ribs.

She stood there, waiting for something from me.

There was only silence inside.

“I don’t hate you, Mother. I’m not angry you left.” The words came out flat, factual. “I was forced on you. You never wanted me. I understand that. It’s the one thing about you that’s always made perfect sense to me.”

I took a slow breath. “What I resent is you deciding, decades later, that you now wanted a daughter. That you could just walk back in and claim a role you’d already abdicated. And even then, I thought… fine. Let her have this. What do I have to lose? A few afternoons? I can handle that.”

I met her shattered gaze, my own clear and still. “But I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want your company then. And I don’t want it now.

“The only reason I let you stay here now,” I said, the confession catching painfully in my chest, “was because you needed something. From me.” A tremor ran through my hands. I forced a slow breath into my lungs before continuing. “And a part of me… a stupid, hungry part… was so grateful to be needed by you that I ignored every alarm bell screaming in my head.”

Her face crumpled completely. Her mouth fell open, her shoulders shaking as the last of her strength gave way.

Maybe the regret was real. Maybe the longing was real, too. In another life, perhaps that would have mattered.

“Alessia,” she choked out between sobs, “I know I hurt you. But please, give me a chance. I just want to get to know you. Please. I love you.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” A dry, brittle chuckle scraped my throat.

I was so tired of this.

“Do you feel better now? Does saying those words make you feel like you’ve done your part? You tell me you love me, and now your conscience is clear. And if I don’t perform the grateful daughter, I’m the villain. Is that it?”

Tears streamed down her face, her shoulders trembling beneath the force of her sobs. “No, that’s not it. I mean it. I love you—”

The tired, cynical part of me went silent.

It wasn’t her words. It was her face. The vulnerability laid bare there reached past every defense I had built, slipping beneath the anger, the resentment, the years of hurt.

It found something buried deep inside me, something I had spent years refusing to acknowledge.

The child who was still waiting.

That child looked up. She had been waiting so long in the silence that the sound of it—I love you—didn’t feel like words. It felt like light hitting a room that had only known dark. It was blinding.

A high, thin whimper slipped out of me, small and helpless, carrying the unmistakable sound of a child. My hand flew over my mouth, trapping the next broken sound behind my palm.

The room seemed to fall away. In its place stood the long, empty hallway of my childhood home, stretching before me in the dimness.

And I was small again.

Waiting.

The heat behind my eyes had nothing to do with anger. It was the scalding tears of that child, finally breaking through after decades of being buried. The tremor running through my hands belonged to her. The breath snagging in my throat belonged to her, too.

The adult I had fought so hard to become had disappeared beneath the grief. What remained was a little girl, stripped of every defense, sobbing with the force of a wound that had waited years to be acknowledged.

She had just been handed the most beautiful, devastating lie in the world.

That she had been loved all along.