“Nathan, you are being utterly ridiculous.”
But Helen’s stony silence answered the question before my mother’s polished denial could land.
Instantly, a massive avalanche of suppressed memories from the past six months buried me. Audrey progressively losing her vibrant laughter. Audrey profusely apologizing for dropping a spoon. Audrey timidly asking me, late at night, if I would abandon her if the pregnancy made her “difficult to manage.” Audrey flinching when a cabinet door slammed. The day she had stared at the wall with hollow, defeated eyes and whispered that Helen “meant well,” reciting the phrase with the flat, robotic cadence of a prisoner of war.
I had been presented with every single clue. I had arrogantly, blindly filed them all under the convenient label of “hormonal stress.”
The realization of my own negligent complicity was so nauseating I had to place a hand on the console table to steady my equilibrium.
“She has been whispering things to you,” my mother suddenly accused, her voice spiking with aristocratic panic. “Hasn’t she? That girl has always possessed a tragic, manipulative imagination. Nathan, you know exactly how women extracted from those impoverished backgrounds operate. They cling like parasites. They weaponize helplessness because it effectively manipulates men like you.”
I studied her face for a long, agonizing eternity. I looked at the familiar lines around her eyes, the set of her jaw, the expensive pearls at her throat, and I felt absolutely nothing.
“Get out,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.
My mother blinked, genuinely baffled. “Excuse me?”
“You heard the directive.”
“This is my son’s estate.”
“No,” I corrected her, the ice in my veins freezing solid. “This is my wife’s sanctuary. And you have just definitively proven that you lack the capacity to respect that distinction.”
