Chapter 789: Hypocritical Self Praises
The living room was bright, soft, and contemporary in a way that whispered home rather than display. Phei’s clothes — newly delivered, several large bags’ worth, the unmistakable matte black of Hell’s Paradise’s premier tailoring — were laid out across the long pale sofa in the careful, loving order of a woman who had been doing this kind of work since long before there had been any permission in the last years of her life to do it without hiding it from her husband and her very children.
Melissa went back and was standing over them; she returned to skimming, sorting, holding up one casual jacket against the light, then setting it down with a small breath of approval, like she’d been doing before Cassiopeia interrupted.
Melissa’s delicate-looking beautiful hands moved with the unconscious surety as though she had been folding her son’s clothes since she was nineteen years old, in a small apartment with no money, a baby with colic, and a husband who had not yet decided he would prefer not to be one.
Emily Hartwell was also here on the long sofa at the other end, one leg tucked under her, head bent over a tablet, scrolling through what had to be Phei’s calendar with the faint frown of a personal assistant trying to fit too many impossible things into too few hours.
Neither of them looked up after Cassiopeia entered, only Emily’s small smile and a subtle greeting.
Melissa, after a moment, did speak — without turning.
"To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit, Cassiopeia."
Cassiopeia drew a careful breath and settled herself.
She crossed to the long sofa, looked at the spread of beautiful, expensive jackets and crisp shirts and the small, careful piles of folded slacks, and offered, in the patient civil register of a Maxton woman who had been raised never to walk into a room without offering something —
"I can help you with these, if you’d like."
Melissa did not pause.
She picked up another jacket. Held it to the light. Put it down.
"I’ve been doing this his whole life."
She paused for a small civil silence before she carried on:
"Of course, with some difficulties, yes — I couldn’t always buy him what he deserved, but I managed. I can also manage now just like then, just better, with on restrains and spoil him. Yes, I can manage just fine. Surely, you expect me to ask any help just because it got better and there are more clothes in the room."
She picked up the next pair of trousers: "Can do this my entire life; I want to do this my entire life. Eternal, if he grants it."
To Emily, half-listening from the sofa, Melissa’s words were that of a doting mother/woman taking quiet pride in dressing her man, the kind of small domestic pride as his personal assistant found sweet and stay out of.
To Cassiopeia, it was something else entirely.
She caught the underlying meaning; the small, bright gleam in Melissa’s voice — the tiny, carefully sheathed edge that lived just beneath the surface of the civil.
She caught the part of the sentence that said do not dare get anywhere close to me.
She also caught the part that said not you.
She couldn’t blame the tone.
What had the Maxtons done, if not make Phei’s life a slow, patient hell?
What had the Maxtons done to Melissa, if not hold her to the small, humiliating expectation that she should make her own brother’s son’s life miserable along with them, or watch her own circumstances curdle into something considerably less pleasant than the small forgiving exile she had been granted?
Melissa had spent the last ten years being told, every single day, that Phei’s continued tolerable existence depended on her continued willingness to mistreat him as much as she could or they’d be happy to let her watch what they could do to him.
She had complied as much as she had to. She had refused, in the small corners she could keep, where she could.
And now — now that the small private corners had opened up into the wide, bright sovereign sun of his awakening and reclaiming the freedom and ownership of his life and then rescuing Melissa and her three daughters and he built a small safe realm where she could love him out loud, where she could buy him what he deserved without sneaking it past Harold — now she did not, and reasonably would never, want one of the people who had made the previous decade of her life into a small, careful exercise in survival anywhere near the boy she was trying to dress.
Cassiopeia had to watch and play along.
She set her hands, very civilly, behind her back.
"I understand."
Melissa moved on to the next jacket without saying anything.
"And for the record, Melissa —" Cassiopeia said, the hands on the jacket paused, very slightly.
"— You know I was always one of the good one."
Cassiopeia breathed and continued:
"I came to that house often enough, growing up. I noticed things I shouldn’t have; the way you’d be the one washing his clothes late at night, when nobody had saw you — when Harold said the boy or housekeeper handled the boy’s things. I saw you, always sneaking up on each time I came to your house; hands in the sink, in the dryer, folding his small old shirts on the counter when no one was watching, and then sneaking into his room to put them back on his chair before he came home or to not wake him up so he wouldn’t know it had been you."
Melissa’s hand stilled and tightened on the jacket.
"Ah, I remember the sweater you’d left on his chair that time we came for Vic’s birthday, it was new one you told everyone was for one of the cousins, except none of the cousins ever wore it, and it ended up on his shoulders by the end of the week as a hand-me down, and you pretended not to recognize it on him. I saw things like that and more, more than ten time. But Melissa, I never said a word. Not to Harold or my parents, not ever."
Melissa’s back stayed turned.
She did not, technically, move.
"And I also know how you’d leave the piano room door unlocked as the whole family was out. When it was just Phei and the staff left home."
A small, horrified silence filled the room.
Emily had stopped scrolling.
"You knew how much he liked playing that piano to keep his skills polished and grow but he wasn’t allowed to use it. You’d unlock the door just as everyone stepped out and then you’d walk away. He’d come home from school. The door would be, miraculously open with everyone gone and Maria would let him know. And he would sit at that piano for an hour before Harold came home, Maria would lock it again before anyone saw."
She paused, voice softening.
"You have to understand, Melissa. Although I have always been a Maxton — and I will not pretend I have not been, because that would be insulting both of us — I have never actively done anything to sabotage you. Or him. I have never done anything to harm him. Not once. Not in all those years. I watched. I noticed. I kept it to myself. And that is not a Maxton woman is permitted to do — and I did it anyway."
Melissa’s back stayed turned on Cassiopeia and she did not, technically, move.
But Cassiopeia saw the grip on one the trousers Melissa was holding now.
And her knuckles had whiten; there was a tremor in Melissa fingers that had gone, in the last fifteen seconds, from folding clothes to simply holding on.
The trousers in Melissa’s hand were being gripped tight enough to crease.
Melissa was burning with white-hot rage!
