Chapter 306: Gift for the babies
Amara came forward with Justina against her shoulder, and Madam Vale cupped her granddaughter’s face with one hand for a long moment, memorising something, before she straightened and reached into her bag.
The gifts had been prepared quietly, the way she did everything. Two small velvet boxes, opened to reveal a gold necklace and bracelet for each child, delicate, real, the kind of thing kept and passed on.
She placed them with Amara without ceremony and said only that they were for when the children were older, and Amara’s eyes went bright, and she said thank you in a voice that meant considerably more than the words.
She kissed Amara on the cheek.
"Bye, sweetheart," she said warmly, and there was a whole world of affection packed into it acceptance, welcome, and something close to pride.
Then she picked up her suitcase.
Julian walked her to the car. He could think of several things to say and found, standing there in the morning air, that none of them came out. She looked at him once, the way mothers look at their children when they want to take a photograph without a camera.
Then she got in.
The window came down.
"Mother,"
"Postcard," she said pleasantly. "Paris first."
The car pulled away down the drive, unhurried and sure of itself, and Julian stood and watched it go until it turned the corner and the sound of the engine faded into the ordinary quiet of the street.
He stood there a moment longer.
Then he went back inside, to his wife and his children and the beautiful, complicated, ribbon-adorned life waiting for him on the other side of the door.
—-
Two months is a long time to wait. It is longer still when you do not know what you are waiting for.
Yvette’s apartment had the particular stillness of a place where someone is present but not really living, dishes clean but sparse, curtains drawn against afternoons that had stopped feeling like anything, a framed ultrasound of her babies she could not bring herself to open and could not bring herself to hold.
She passed it every morning. Every night. She had stopped looking at it directly, the way you stop looking at something that hurts too consistently to keep acknowledging.
Two months. No answers. No leads. No one on the phone who could tell her anything real. And underneath all of it, sitting in the place where grief should have been, was something hotter and less dignified.
Anger.
It had found a shape, the way anger always does when it has nowhere useful to go. It had found a face, a name, a reason, and it had settled there with the stubborn permanence of something that has decided it belongs. Amara.
The name moved through Yvette’s mind at odd hours, while she was making coffee, while she was staring at the ceiling at two in the morning, while she was sitting in her car in a car park, unable to remember why she had driven there.
It was not entirely rational, and some part of her knew it.
But rationale had stopped being available to her somewhere around week three, and so she had traded it in for something simpler and more manageable.
Amara had everything.
That was the core of it, stripped down to its barest bones. The man. The name. The life. And she had had it whilst being a divorcee, a woman who had already loved and lost and apparently been given a second chance at everything Yvette had reached for and missed.
She was younger than Amara. She was, people had always told her she was pretty, and she had believed them in the easy, unexamined way of someone who has never had cause to doubt it. And still. Still, she had been invisible.
Not just to Julian. To Leo. To all of it. That was the part that sat in her chest as something swallowed wrong.
Out of options, she went to the male prison downtown to see the one person who could tell her something about her third baby.
The visiting room at the prison smelled of industrial cleaner and old coffee, and Kalian looked like a man who had aged considerably in two months, which Yvette noted without sympathy.
She sat across from him with her hands flat on the table and told him what she needed, her voice steady in the careful way of someone who has rehearsed steadiness because the alternative is falling apart completely.
The baby. Her daughter. The one who had disappeared from the hospital in those first chaotic hours. He knew something. She was certain he knew something. The person he had mentioned, the contact, the name she needed. She needed somewhere to start.
Kalian listened. Or appeared to listen. His expression across the table was difficult to read, somewhere between boredom and something colder.
Then he told her the person she was looking for didn’t exist.
"I need your help," Yvette said. The steadiness was harder to maintain now. "Please. She is my baby. She is three months old, and I don’t know where she is or who has her or,"
"You betrayed me," Kalian said.
"I didn’t," She stopped. Pressed her hands harder against the table. "There was nothing I could do. It was out of my hands. I tried, okay? I tried." Her voice cracked slightly on the last word, and she hated it. "Just help me. Please. She is just a baby."
He stood up.
He walked away without looking back, back toward the door, back toward whatever the rest of his day inside these walls looked like, and the guard moved to follow him, and Yvette sat at the table alone for a moment that lasted much longer than it should have.
—-
Yvette had spent the rest of the time rehearsing what she would say. Erasing sentences. Rewriting them. Starting over.
Maybe Leo knew something. Maybe he had heard someone talk. Maybe, despite everything he had done, despite every lie and betrayal, the news about their daughter would stir something inside him.
After all... He was still her father. That had to mean something. Didn’t it? A few minutes later, the door opened.
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