Chapter 342: Award night
Amara’s laugh was light, genuine, a little disbelieving even now. "Amazing," she said simply. "I’m so grateful for this opportunity. Grateful for every person who believed in me before there was any proof I deserved it, and my husband."
The interview wound down not long after that, the crew moving efficiently through a handful of final photographs.
Amara alone against the flame tree, Amara with the pond glittering behind her, and finally, at Adaeze’s gentle insistence, one shot with Julian and the twins called out from inside to join her, Justina propped happily on her mother’s hip and Josh clinging to his father’s leg, the four of them squinting good-naturedly into the late morning sun.
By the time the crew packed up their equipment and the cars pulled away down the long gravel drive, the garden had gone quiet again, filled only with birdsong and the soft splash of the pond, as though the entire morning had been nothing more than a beautifully staged dream.
Across the city, in a modest Creed mansion far removed from the manicured gardens of the Pedro mansion, the television flickered with an early clip from the segment, a preview, already circulating online, of Amara’s interview beneath a bold banner reading Business Woman of the Year.
Seren sat cross-legged on the worn sofa, knees pulled up to her chest, eyes fixed on the screen with an expression that hovered somewhere between pride and something quieter, more complicated.
"I’m so proud of Mummy," she said softly, almost to herself.
Beside her, Sebastian, her father, though the word had grown heavier and more complicated over the years than either of them liked to admit out loud sat with his elbows braced on his knees, watching the same footage with an expression he didn’t quite have the right to wear anymore.
"I am too," he said quietly. And then, after a pause, almost as if he needed to correct himself before the sentiment could be misread: "Though I suppose I’m not really entitled to feel proud of her anymore. Not after everything."
Seren glanced sideways at him but didn’t argue the point. There wasn’t much to argue, really. The past was the past, laid out plainly enough that neither of them needed to pretend otherwise.
Sebastian shifted, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck, and when he spoke again there was a rough, careful hope threaded through his voice, the voice of a man trying, however imperfectly, to build something worth being proud of on his own.
"I got a new job," he said. "Well, not a job, exactly. I’m starting a new company. With some youngsters, a small team, nothing glamorous. It’s going to be slow going, building it up from nothing. But I promise you, Seren, I’m going to give you everything. Whatever it takes."
He looked at her as he said it, really looked at her, the way he hadn’t allowed himself to for a long time and something in his chest ached at the sight of her.
She wasn’t his by blood. She never had been. And yet somewhere along the winding, messy road of his life, she had become the single reason left worth trying to rebuild anything at all.
Seren shook her head slowly, and when she spoke, her voice was gentle, entirely without bitterness.
"I don’t need anything from you, Dad," she said. "I just need you to be happy." She hesitated a moment, then added, almost shyly, "Someone called me yesterday, actually. Told me I’d been offered a full scholarship for college. I don’t know for certain, but I think it was Mummy Amara."
Sebastian’s throat tightened, and he lowered his gaze to the floor for a long moment before answering.
"It must have been her," he said quietly. "It has her fingerprints all over it, quiet, generous, never wanting the credit."
They sat with that for a while, the television murmuring on in the background, footage of Amara’s radiant, hard-won smile looping in the corner of the screen.
Seren pulled her knees a little tighter to her chest, resting her chin on top of them, and when she finally spoke again, her voice was smaller, more uncertain than it had been all evening.
"Do you think a day will come when she can truly forgive us?" she asked. "Truly accept us again?"
Sebastian didn’t answer right away. He sat there instead, staring at the muted glow of the screen, at the woman he had once, in some now-unrecognizable version of his life, failed so completely, the woman who had, despite everything, still found it in her to quietly change Seren’s entire future with one phone call and no expectation of thanks.
"Who knows," he finally said, his voice low, worn thin with something that wasn’t quite regret and wasn’t quite hope either, but sat somewhere uneasy in between.
And the two of them sat together in the quiet house as the evening deepened outside the window, saying nothing more, letting the silence hold whatever answer neither of them was ready to speak aloud.
—-
The next few days seemed to pass in a blur of fittings, phone calls, and quiet, breathless anticipation, until finally the night of the ceremony arrived, the night Amara would stand on a stage and be handed proof, in the form of glass and engraved lettering, that everything she had built had been seen.
Julian and Amara arrived together, stepping out of the car into a wash of camera flashes and hushed murmurs from the press line, and if either of them noticed the noise, neither let it show.
Julian walked a half-step behind her the entire way up the red carpet, not out of any old-fashioned notion of where a husband belonged, but deliberately, purposefully, because tonight belonged to her, and he wanted the whole world to see that he knew it.
He wanted every photograph to capture the truth of it plainly, that he was proud to stand in her shadow tonight, proud to let her walk a half-step ahead.