"Serena, you're just in time!"
"Answer me. Did you and Neal really sleep together?"
Phyllis looked at the tears on Neal's face and said nothing. She walked straight over, pulled out a tissue, and wiped his cheeks.
The motion was gentle, her expression soft as water.
That softness had once belonged to me. I'd thought she was only that way with me. I never imagined she could be just as tender to another man.
Back then my father had been driven to his death by my mother, who insisted on secretly keeping Neal's father as her lover.
In those days Neal didn't carry the Delgado name at all. He was just his father's son, a Lambert.
I was still young then, and when parents fight, it's the children who suffer.
I hid outside, too afraid to go in, the rain soaking me through until I was shaking with cold.
Phyllis held an umbrella over my head. I couldn't tell what was rain and what wasn't, only that my face was wet and I looked like a wretched mess.
She crouched down and wrapped her coat around me.
"Don't be afraid, Myron. I'll protect you."
Even the marriage alliance was something she'd knelt and begged the elders for. She said she would only ever marry me.
The past was too painful to look back on. Now I only waited to hear what she would say.
"Auntie, it's true, we've already been together. The night I turned eighteen, someone got me drunk and I was nearly raped. He was the one who saved me."
"I'd been drugged. I would have died if he hadn't..."
"But I don't regret that he saved me, because his kindness moved me."
Their fingers were laced together, the picture of a love harder than gold.
There was nothing left to say. My mother asked her one last question.
"Then are you going to marry Myron, or Neal?"
"Neal!"
Neal smiled and pulled her in tight at once, burying her face against his chest.
My mother didn't hesitate for a second. "Then marry Neal. I'll handle things with Myron."
"Sweetheart, what if he makes trouble?"
"Hmph, he wouldn't dare. He'll go through life carrying the name of the eldest Delgado heir. Who would dare bully him?"
"Neal is different. He's had nothing his whole life. I'll do everything I can to make up for the mother's love he missed."
Standing outside the door, I felt everything I'd been hoping for drop straight to the bottom.
Ever since the stepfather's family showed up, who owed whom, exactly? My father was driven to his death. My mother was taken from me.
Even the company's inheritance and my fiancée were all in Neal's hands now. What was he still missing?
Did my mother really not understand? An empty title with no real power only makes you a target for mockery and cruelty.
I couldn't understand why she was so partial to him. I was the one she'd given birth to. It was her blood running through my veins.
Yet she loved another man's child, a child she wasn't even related to.
What broke me now wasn't clinging to their love. It was their favoritism and their lies.
I walked out of the hospital with heavy steps. At the entrance, my uncle called.
"My good nephew, is it true you got into Harvard?"
"Ahh, you've brought glory to the whole Delgado name!"
I gripped the phone, a wronged sob catching in my throat.
No one would ever know why I'd worked so hard to get into Harvard.
Wasn't it just so my mother might look at me a little more, care about me a little more, so the Harding family would be satisfied with me as a son-in-law?
"U-Uncle Jack..."
The sob wouldn't stay down. It forced its way up.
"What's wrong?"
"Are you just too excited, or is someone bullying you?"
I told my uncle the whole story from beginning to end, and when he'd heard it, he flew into a rage.
"That family has a death wish? They dare climb over my head and treat my nephew like dirt? Tell them to wait for me."
"Get the private jet ready. I want the next flight home!"
