3: 3
3
Inside the room, they were still laughing.
Matilda had finished watching the video, and her eyes were already red.
"Mom, Dad, thank you."
"If it weren't for you two, I'd have been all alone abroad. I really don't know how I would've raised Noah."
Blanche took her hand at once.
"Silly girl, what are you talking about?"
"You've suffered so much. Of course your father and I want to make it up to you."
Rick Cooley sighed too.
"These five years, you're the one who had it hardest."
Matilda wiped her tears, then suddenly asked, "Is she really coming?"
Blanche was quiet for a moment.
"She wouldn't agree last night."
"But Edna's soft-hearted. Once she thinks it through, she'll come."
Matilda instinctively held Noah tighter.
"What about the child?"
"If she sees Noah, won't she hate me all over again?"
Blanche hurried to reassure her. "Before she gets here, have the nanny take Noah away."
"And if we really can't hide it, just say you adopted him abroad."
But Rick let out a cold snort.
"What's there to be afraid of?"
"Her leg's ruined now, she can't have children, and where's she supposed to go if she leaves Sawyer?"
"Even if she finds out, she won't dare do a thing."
I lowered my eyes to that left leg the crash had destroyed.
They were right.
For five years, I'd needed a cane to walk.
On damp, rainy days the pain kept me awake all night.
When it was bad, I even needed Sawyer's help to bathe.
I had always thought he never minded any of it because he loved me.
But in their eyes, these injuries had long since become the chains that trapped me.
They were certain I was disabled, barren, and incapable of living on my own.
So even if the truth was laid out right in front of me,
I would have no choice but to swallow it.
Matilda still wasn't at ease.
She looked over at Sawyer and asked softly, "And you?"
"Do you still love her?"
The room went quiet.
Sawyer said nothing for a long time.
And still my heart lifted, out of my control.
Just like the past five years, waiting, small and pleading, for him to give me one small proof.
Sawyer finally spoke.
"She lost her child, and her leg is crippled."
"If I abandoned her at a time like this, she wouldn't survive."
"That crash was caused by you. I can't let her bear the consequences alone."
He said it so calmly.
But it was as though that car had hit me all over again.
So it turned out that when Sawyer massaged my injured leg, when he held me and said he'd never leave,
none of it was because he still loved me.
It was only because I was the consequence Matilda's mistake had left behind for him to look after.
Blanche breathed a sigh of relief.
Smiling, she coaxed Matilda, "Did you hear that?"
"Sawyer's heart is with you, and the child is yours."
"Besides holding on to the title of Mrs. Whitman, what does your sister have left to fight you for?"
Laughter rose again in the room.
The photographer called them over for one more shot.
The five of them looked at the camera, every face smiling without a shadow on it.
"A family of five."
"Look right here."
The shutter clicked.
Their happiness was frozen forever.
And I curled up in the corner outside the room, pressing down hard on the injured leg that trembled with pain.
The mirrored surface threw back the wretched shape of me.
Eyes red, body hunched.
Like someone who had just finished watching a happiness that had nothing to do with her.
My phone screen lit up.
The flight information sat quietly at the top.
【Eight hours until departure.】
