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Keeping my voice steady, I held her gaze. “I’m not a Blackwood anymore. I know I mentioned before that I didn’t want your name anymore, but I’m telling you again now. My name is Elena Greenwood. That’s the only name I’ll answer to from now on.”
Turning my head, I swallowed hard as I met the eyes of the policeman. “She’s all yours,” I whispered.
In the ensuing commotion, when both the policeman and Knox’s attention were focused on my ranting and screaming mother, I managed to slip away. I shouldn’t have left the hospital—I was supposed to rest for twenty-four hours after receiving my blood transfusion, but it was far more important that I got out of there.
They were better off without me.
Everyonewas.
I needed a fresh start.
We all did.
Except for my mother. She needed to face the consequences of her actions. Just like I did. But I guess I was a coward. Or was I? I just wanted to get away so the Ashcrofts didn’t have to face the person they’d made a home for, the person that had been lying to them all along.
Yes, I was a coward.
The cab detoured past the Ashcroft mansion, and I entered one last time. Just long enough to pick up my duffel bag, fighting the waves of dizziness that came from me not taking the prescribed twenty-four hours’ rest after my blood transfusion.
At the front door, I looked around me, seeing the mansion that I’d found so pretentious and intimidating at first.
The mansion that I’d come to love.
It wasn’t the bricks and mortar; it was the people who lived inside that made it a home.
Anthony, Maria, Knox, and JoJo.
Knox.
The man I’d fallen in love with, against all odds.
The man that I didn’t deserve, not in a million years.
He would be okay, I knew it. He’d become an amazing, successful lawyer, and he’d end up with a beautiful woman who deserved him and made him happy. Not someone who was so fucked up that they hadn’t even done the right thing until the last minute, who’d lied to him from the beginning, whose only family members were liars and convicted criminals.
I reminded myself of the indisputable truth. He was better off without me.
They all were.
Pulling the door closed behind me, I swallowed the lump in my throat, dropping my keys through the letterbox.
This was goodbye.
44
KNOX
It had only been five days since Elena had vanished into thin air, but it was five fucking days too long.
I understood why she’d gone. All of us had received individual letters from her with a London postmark—me, my mum, and my dad, reiterating everything that had been written in the notebook and saying how sorry she was. She said she hadn’t expected us to forgive her, that she wished that she could go back in time and never have met us. She thanked us profusely for making her feel welcome, and for all we’d done for her, and how she knew that she hadn’t deserved any of it.
In my mum’s letter, she’d written that Letitia had worked with children for years, and although Letitia’s references were falsified to make it sound as though she’d been a nanny for other well-off families, she had, in fact, done a lot of other nannying work. I guess she’d included that to let my mother know that she’d believed JoJo to be in safe hands, because she also said that she would have stepped in if there was ever any issue with JoJo. She did also mention that after seeing the way her mother had deteriorated lately, if my mum hadn’t been around to take JoJo last weekend, she would have told us all the truth even sooner.
As for my dad—she told him how sorry she was that his life had been put at risk by her mother’s actions, how she would have never forgiven herself if anything had happened to him.
And mine? She’d left a lot unsaid. She said that I would make an amazing lawyer and a load of other shit about how great my life would be in the future, which was, quite frankly, fucking bollocks. My life was great already—or it had been, right up until last Sunday, when everything went to shit. And now she was gone, and things were the very fucking opposite of great.
Lucky for her, and for me, I could read between the lines, and if she thought I was going to just let her walk away, she was about to find out just how wrong she was.
