Chapter 12
I finally understood why Lucia needed Camilla.
Blood.
Not my blood.
Sophia’s.
If Grant took my daughter, the family would call it kidnapping.
If Lucia took her, older captains might hesitate.
But if her mother packed the clothes, carried the child away, and told everyone Sophia needed distance from me, it became a family dispute.
Clean enough to hide inside.
Camilla sat across from me later that night.
No Lucia.
No Grant.
No captains.
Just the two of us.
“I wanted you to hurt,” she said.
I appreciated the honesty more than I wanted to.
“Why Sophia?”
Her eyes filled.
“Because nothing else reached you.”
That answer could have made me furious again.
Instead, it made me tired.
“You could have taken every room in the house. Every car. Every photograph. You could have told the whole family I was a terrible husband.”
“I did.”
“I know.”
She almost smiled.
It vanished quickly.
“I thought if Sophia stopped asking for you, you would finally understand what it felt like when I stopped asking.”
I looked at her.
Camilla had spent years turning disappointment into resentment because resentment feels stronger.
Then Lucia gave that resentment a plan.
“You heard her cry in that enclosure.”
Camilla nodded.
“And stayed.”
Another nod.
“Why?”
She cried then.
Not loudly.
“I kept telling myself one more hour.”
That sentence stayed with me.
One more hour.
The language people use when they need cruelty to remain temporary enough to tolerate.
One more hour became three days.
I did not forgive her.
She did not ask me to.
That was the first decent thing she had done since I climbed the wall.
“What happens with Sophia?” she asked.
I answered carefully.
“She decides when she wants to see you.”
Camilla looked up.
“She’s three.”
“Yes.”
“I’m her mother.”
“Yes.”
“You can’t—”
She stopped herself.
Good.
Because that was the old reflex.
Ownership.
I leaned forward.
“You taught her love could disappear if she disobeyed.”
Camilla cried harder.
May you like
“So now the first thing she learns is that love does not entitle anyone to access.”
Including me.
