Chapter 5
Miriam asked me one question.
“Does Ottavia love you?”
I did not answer quickly.
“Yes.”
I believed that.
She nodded.
“That’s what I thought.”
Then she said something stranger.
“She loves you more than she loves being seen by you.”
I understood only after she explained.
Ottavia did not fear poverty.
Not exactly.
She feared recognition.
Being looked at by someone she admired and seeing contempt reflected back.
A maid’s daughter.
A scholarship girl.
Cheap shoes.
Secondhand dresses.
She rebuilt herself long before meeting me.
Better accent.
Better clothes.
Better stories.
Then enough years passed that the stories became biography.
Miriam never exposed her.
Why?
“She’s my daughter.”
Simple.
“But she told you I was dead.”
“Yes.”
No anger?
There was.
Under everything.
But Miriam had spent decades making excuses for a child embarrassed by survival.
“I thought she’d outgrow it.”
She didn’t.
She refined it.
I asked Miriam why she remained at Ashdown once she understood she was being hidden.
“Because every time I threatened to leave, Ottavia cried.”
Interesting.
Not guards first.
Emotion.
“She said if you saw me, you’d leave her.”
I looked around the expensive sitting room.
“And you believed that?”
Miriam smiled sadly.
“I didn’t know you.”
Fair.
Then:
“She said men like you don’t marry women like us.”
There.
Not only shame.
Prediction.
Ottavia had built me into the excuse.
Mafia boss.
Old money.
Power.
Of course Tobias needs pedigree.
Of course Tobias would reject a maid’s daughter.
Except she never asked.
Instead she punished everyone carrying evidence that her past existed.
Miriam.
Callum.
Eulalie.
Potentially anyone.
I asked:
“Did you want to attend the engagement?”
Her eyes filled.
“Yes.”
That hurt.
Ottavia had told guests both parents were dead.
The rooftop party included a memorial arrangement supposedly honoring them.
I had toasted a woman’s dead mother while she sat ninety minutes away knitting beneath controlled gates.
That was not shame anymore.
That was erasure.
May you like
And erasure requires constant maintenance.
Now I understood why the debt could never be paid.
