Chapter 326: You raised her
Watching this wasn’t satisfying. There was no part of her that felt vindicated by Amira’s grief. It was simply unbearable and doubly so, because the child in the middle of it understood nothing except that the one constant of her short life was being taken away.
"When she calms down," Amira said, voice wrecked, still holding Hope close, "I swear I’ll leave. I’ll never look for her again." She pressed her face briefly to the top of Hope’s head. "I’m sorry. Please. Just give me a few more minutes with her."
Yvette didn’t move toward them. She didn’t argue.
She simply stood there with her arms still half-raised from where Hope had been pulled out of them, and let herself understand something she clearly hadn’t expected to have to understand today, that getting her daughter back was not going to be the clean, simple thing she’d imagined for three years. Hope was still recovering. Hope was frightened and small and exhausted from a surgery she hadn’t chosen, and the one face in the world she trusted completely belonged to someone else.
Three years was a long time to a child who was not yet four.
Yvette’s jaw tightened, but she stayed where she was. She got it. However much it cost her to get it, she got it.
Behind Amara, quiet footsteps approached, and Julian’s hand found the small of her back without a word.
He didn’t say anything for a while. He didn’t need to. He could see, in the rigid line of her shoulders, in the way her own eyes had gone glassy watching the scene in front of her, exactly what was moving through her.
"You’re thinking about Justina," he said eventually, low, just for her.
Amara nodded once, throat too tight to answer properly.
"I know," Julian said. He didn’t try to talk her out of the feeling. He just stood there with his hand steady against her back, letting her have it.
They watched together as Amira rocked the now-quieting child, murmuring something too low to hear, and as Yvette stood a few feet off with her arms wrapped around her own waist now instead of empty air, watching the daughter she’d spent three years searching for cling to someone else’s neck then walks away.
No one in that hallway was the villain of this particular moment. That, Amara thought, was somehow the worst part of all.
Amara kept her expression composed, businesslike almost, the way she did when she was making decisions she didn’t want examined too closely.
"Don’t go back to the apartment tonight," she said. "Come to the mansion. There’s a nurse there who can take better care of Hope than that place can manage right now."
She said it evenly, deliberately, framing it as logistics, recovery, medical need, the practical concerns of a child who had just been through surgery.
She kept her face still as she said it, so that Amira would hear what was being offered and not look too closely at what was underneath it.
The nurse was real. The need was real. But it wasn’t really about either of those things, and Amara wasn’t ready to let anyone, including herself, name what it actually was.
She didn’t want her sister sitting alone tonight in an apartment full of dust sheets and old ghosts, grieving a daughter who hadn’t even left the building yet.
Amira looked up at her, eyes still wet, something flickering across her face, surprise, maybe, or the beginning of understanding what was actually being handed to her.
"Thank you," she said, voice breaking on the words.
She didn’t ask why. She didn’t push for more than what was offered. She simply held Hope a little closer, nodded, and let herself be led toward the other car.
—
The car moved slowly down the road. Outside, the evening light was turning orange, the kind of light that makes everything look softer than it really is. Amara sat in the passenger seat, her hands folded in her lap, watching the trees go by one at a time.
That was when she saw him.
Sebastian. Walking along the footpath with a folder of papers pressed against his chest. His shoulders were curved forward, the way a person’s shoulders curve when life has been pressing down on them for a long time. He did not see the car.
He was too busy looking down at his own feet, too busy carrying whatever weight those papers held.
Amara turned her head away. Slowly. Carefully. As if turning too fast would mean she had seen him at all.
Julian noticed. He always noticed.
"Baby," he said, his eyes flicking from the road to her face and back again, "I heard Seren came to see you the other day. At the office."
Amara did not answer right away. She let the silence sit in the car for a moment, the way you let tea sit before you drink it, waiting for it to cool to the right temperature.
"Yes," she said finally. Her voice was calm. Too calm, maybe. "She remembers everything now. Sebastian tried to make her forget, you know. Tried hard. But it didn’t work. She came to apologize."
Julian’s hand tightened slightly on the steering wheel.
"I know you love her," he said. "You raised her. If you want to.."
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. Some sentences are heavier when they’re left open, when the person hearing them has to fill in the rest with their own heart.
"No, my love," Amara said, shaking her head slowly. "Seren is fine. From what I can see, they don’t live in luxury. But she is fine. And if it’s about her school fees, well, I could offer her an anonymous scholarship. Something quiet. Something she’d never trace back to me."
She paused. The car passed under a streetlamp, and for a second her face was lit gold, then dark again.
"But I don’t want to bring them into our lives. Not anymore. Because she comes with Sebastian. And I can’t separate the two. Not even now."