Page 111 of Ash and his Dragon

I'd hated him for most of my life.

Every birthday my mother had missed, every Christmas, graduation, draft day, my first NHL game—I'd looked back at seven-year-old me and thought you did this. Whenever something good happened, some part of me had whispered that I didn't deserve it because Mom wasn't there to see it, and she wasn't there because of me.

Except she wasn't.

Not because of me, or not because of something I’d done deliberately.

My hands began shaking against the table, and I didn't realize Max had moved until his fingers closed carefully around my wrist.

This time I didn't need him to wait for permission.

I turned and grabbed him.

He caught me immediately, one arm going around my back while the other protected my injured side, and I buried my face against his neck because suddenly standing by myself didn't seem important anymore.

“I didn't push her.”

“No.” Max's mouth pressed against my hair as his arms tightened. “You didn't.”

The first sob tore out of me so violently that pain flashed through my ribs, but even that couldn't compete with what was happening inside my chest. I'd always imagined relief as something light, a burden lifting and leaving freedom behind, but this felt more like something being ripped out by the roots. The guilt had been inside me too long. It had grown around everything else until I didn't know where it ended and I began, and losing it hurt almost as much as carrying it had.

I clutched the front of Max's shirt and tried to breathe through it.

“I didn't kill her.”

His own voice sounded rough when he answered. “No, Ash. You didn't.”

I cried harder.

There was grief in it because my mother was still dead and nothing on Doryu's computer could change that. There was rage because I'd spent most of my life believing something that wasn't true, and underneath both was a relief so enormous I didn't know what to do with it.

Mom was still gone.

But I hadn't deliberately pushed her.

I kept coming back to that because my brain seemed incapable of holding it for more than a few seconds at a time.

Eventually, the worst of it passed. Max stayed exactly where he was until I loosened my grip on him, and when I finally pulled back, he didn't make a joke about the state of his shirt or pretend not to notice me wiping my face.

Ignatius had moved to the far side of the suite at some point, giving us as much privacy as the room allowed, while Doryu had closed the laptop enough that I couldn't see the frozen image anymore.

I was grateful for that too, although the relief barely had time to settle before another realization pushed through it, darker and far more difficult to absorb.

I looked at Doryu. “My father knew.”

It wasn't really a question anymore.

Doryu's expression changed just enough to answer me before he spoke. “Yes.”

For a moment, I simply stared at him.

“He knew I tripped?”

“He knew.”

The room seemed to narrow around me. I looked back at the laptop even though the screen was no longer showing the footage, because my mind had already started putting together pieces I hadn't been able to see before.

“But he showed me the other version when I was seven.”