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Outside, the summer sun and the fresh air offered immediate relief. I filled my lungs with the floral scents of the gardens, and the suffocating feeling I’d felt inside eased a bit. On my rare visits when I was little, I used to play back here with Jasper, hiding in what had felt like a magically elaborate hedge maze at the time.
“How are you feeling?” Mom asked.
“Honestly?”
“Of course.”
“Exhausted.”
“I can only imagine how terrifying it must have been to forget who you were. How much energy it took for you to find your way back.”
“No,” I said. “I was fine until I knew who I was.”
She turned her chin up and stared at the clouded sky. “The Carrington name and all of the weight it carries.”
Those words could imply a positive connotation—power, prestige. But that’s not what she meant, and we both knew it.
“I should have given you my maiden name,” she said. “I considered it.”
Why didn’t she do it?
I tried to swallow the lump forming in my throat. I needed to confide my truth to someone, and she was the only person here I could trust to come close to understanding how I was feeling. “I met someone when I was out there, when I wasn’t carrying my name with me. When I didn’t know who I was. Someone special.”
“That’s wonderful.”
It was.Morganwas wonderful. “If I hadn’t come here, hadn’t called the authorities when I’d discovered I was a missing person—”
“I wouldn’t have known you were all right.” She gave me a warm smile.
That was true. I never wanted to hurt my mother.
“Mybrotherswouldn’t know either,” I said. “They would have left me alone.”
“You’re too hard on them,” she said. “They’re the ones who realized you were missing. They’ve been working to find you because they care.”
“No Carringtons have ever truly cared about us. If they had, we wouldn’t have suffered the way we did.”
Something changed in her expression. “How do you mean?”
We never talked about it. I’d always avoided speaking to my mother about money since we never had any of it when I was growing up. I didn’t want to make her feel bad. It wasn’t her fault. It was my father’s. And now, with my threshold so low, I was done filtering anything.
“You never should have been forced to work the way you did,” I said.“Walterhad more than enough to provide for us. He abandoned us. He threw me—us—away like we were nothing.”
“Oscar—”
“There’s no excuse for that. I can’t look at Jasper or Sebastian without rage simmering beneath my skin, and it’s not even their fault. It’shis.I’ll never be able to tell him how much I hate him, because he’s dead.”
“You don’t hate—”
“I do. I very much do.”
There was silence between us as the words hung over us and we walked the gardens.
“I don’t want you to hate your father. That was never my intention,” she said softly.
I clenched my jaw together so as not to snap at her. I wasn’t mad at her. She wasn’t the one who had abandoned us.
“He didn’t….” She licked her lips and took a breath. “Yes, he left. But he tried to take you with him. He wanted to. He didn’t abandon you, Oscar. I kept you with me, because you were everything to me and I needed you.”
