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“She’ll forgive you,” he assures me.
I hope so.
Eventually.
Preferably before I die.
Lucan tilts my chin upward. “There’s more, isn’t there?”
I look toward the snowy New York skyline beyond the studio windows, toward a future I can’t stop worrying about.
“She’s lonely,” I whisper. “Even with everything she has, she’s so lonely.”
He doesn’t argue because he knows I’m right. Artemis has everything: family, success, money, fame, an Olympic gold medal, and a career most athletes and supermodels dream of.
Yet sometimes, she looks like someone standing behind glass while the rest of the world exists happily on the other side.
My daughter has always been different. I know it the night she’s born.
As she grew older, I learned that Artemis wasn’t unhappy. She simply experienced the world differently.
While other children cried, she retreated inward. While others chased attention, she disappeared into books, patterns, and thoughts only she understood.
But that didn’t stop me from worrying.
The world is rarely kind to people it doesn’t understand. I feared her silence would be mistaken for weakness, that her differences would make her a target.
Then my daughter grew up and proved me spectacularly wrong.
My Moonbeam became fearless and lethal.
The little girl our doctors worried over became an Olympic champion who can reduce grown men to silence with a single icy stare.
Even dyslexia doesn’t defeat her. She adapts, finds her own methods, and works harder when she needs to.
That’s Artemis.
She doesn’t bend.
She endures, then conquers.
Still, I know my daughter will never ask for anything. Not comfort. Not help. Not love.
If Artemis wants something, she buries it so deeply that even she can’t find it.
Which is why I pay attention.
Because mothers notice things their children don’t.
Lucan squeezes my hand.
“She’s happy.”
“Over brunch, she couldn’t even tell me what happiness meant to her, Lucan.”
I smile sadly.
My husband considers this for a moment before changing the subject.
