I watched him coldly, unimpressed by his performance. The compound was quiet around us, the kind of silence that settles in a house where the wrong word can change everything. One of Ansel's men stood just outside the door, close enough to hear, pretending not to.
"Serafina, my mother and I were in the wrong back then. I'm apologizing on her behalf. Can you find it in yourself to forgive us?"
Elara's head tilted slightly to the right, her smile softening into something that looked, to anyone who didn't know better, like genuine remorse.
I turned to Ansel, my voice shaking.
"So, you think I should forgive them, both mother and daughter?"
The pain of a ruptured eardrum. The numbness from bamboo whips. The torment of seeing my mother's belongings reduced to ashes, her correspondence burned, the backup cipher keys and personal letters gone forever because Vittoria Corsetti decided the first wife's memory had no place in her house.
I didn't ask why he fell for Elara. It would have made me seem too weak.
As I stubbornly waited for his response, Ansel's guilt seemed to dissolve into the air. His fingers drifted to the base of his left ring finger, brushing the bare skin there, and then he spoke.
"Serafina, Elara was just a kid back then. She didn't understand right from wrong. She's been remorseful for years and has already apologized to you. Why hold onto the past so tightly?"
The physical and emotional abuse that threw me into an endless abyss. That's what he called the past.
Refusing to forgive Elara wasn't about being petty. He was the one who took me to the hospital back then. He knows better than anyone how deeply I loathe my stepmother and her daughter, what Vittoria and Elara did to me in the years behind my father's back. Yet he chose to fall in love with Elara and align himself against me.
When Ansel reached out to take my hand, trying to broker peace with Elara, I slapped his hand away.
"Ansel, what gives you the right to ask me to forgive them?" I asked sharply.
Behind my father's back, they abused me, tricked him into despising me. And after Don Valente's passing, they didn't even bother with the funeral rites. In this world, that alone was an act of dishonor that should have severed every tie between our families permanently.
Ansel looked at the back of his hand, now red from where I had slapped him, and frowned in confusion and discontent.
"Serafina, I'm trying to help you. You're without parents now, and Vittoria and Elara are the only family you have left. Why hold on to the past and continue to suffer?"
"You need to move forward, don't you?"
Ansel's words were meant to be comforting, but the impatience I knew so well was already showing through his otherwise calm and composed face. But there was no longer the familiar tenderness and care in his voice. He spoke the way he spoke to soldiers who had disappointed him. Measured. Already finished with the conversation before it ended.
I could feel my heart, already battered and broken, shatter into dust. The pain was so intense it left me almost speechless.
Elara's eyes, brimming with feigned sorrow, held a glint of the same smugness and provocation as before. She stood in my doorway like she belonged there, in the compound that had been built on my father's treasury, wearing a ring from the man who had been promised to me.
"Serafina, it's alright if you can't forgive me. I'll keep repenting and feeling guilty until you accept me as your family."
"Get out."
I gripped the hallway wall to keep myself from shaking too violently.
Ansel's impatience was unmistakable.
"Serafina, why are you being so unreasonable? Nobody is perfect. Where has your tolerance gone?" He raised his tone, the way a man accustomed to obedience raises it when he doesn't receive any.
He had witnessed me being driven to the brink of suicide by Elara and her mother.
Once, he had been willing to argue with them on my behalf, even to the point of furious outbursts. He had stood in front of me like a wall between me and them, his voice shaking the windows of the Corsetti parlor.
