Chapter 259: Chapter 261: Be careful, Mum
Her mother arrived at ten past ten with a bag over one arm and the expression of a woman who had been maintaining composure for two weeks and was now, in the safety of Aria’s bedroom, allowing herself to let some of it down.
She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at Aria for a long moment without saying anything.
"Mum," Aria said.
"I know." Mei reached out and touched her face, palm against her cheek, the way she’d been doing since Aria was small. "I know. I just need a minute."
Aria let her have it.
Outside, the estate gardens were bright in the late morning light, and Lucy had opened the window slightly before she left and there was a breeze coming through that smelled like cut grass and something floral that Aria couldn’t identify, and her mother’s hand was warm against her face and everything was, for right now, okay.
"The soup was Mrs. Chen’s," Aria said finally.
Mei dropped her hand. "I know. I asked her to make it. I gave her the recipe."
"You gave her your soup recipe."
"She called me at seven AM to ask what would be good for you to eat and I gave it to her, yes." Mei looked entirely unbothered by this. "She’s a good woman. She cares about this household."
"She told me Damien came to the kitchen when I first arrived as a maid."
Mei’s expression did something complicated....that specific face she made when she was filing information away for later consideration. "Did she."
"She said he’d never done it before."
"Mm." Mei opened the bag she’d brought and started taking things out....a small container of something, what looked like vitamins, a book, a hand cream that Aria recognised as the one she’d run out of two weeks ago. "He’s always been that way about you. Since the beginning." She set the hand cream on the bedside table. "You just couldn’t see it clearly because you were terrified of him finding out who you were."
"I was a little busy trying not to get caught."
"You were a lot busy falling in love with him and refusing to admit it." Mei sat back. "I watched it happen from the outside. It was very obvious."
"You watched from....Mum!, you were in the hospital when I was here as a maid."
"I had some good days," Mei said serenely. "On the good days you came to visit and I could tell. The way you talked about the estate. The way you didn’t mention him directly but he was in everything you said." She smiled, small and certain. "A mother knows."
Aria looked at her mother. "You never said anything."
"You weren’t ready to hear it."
That was probably true.
She thought about who she’d been when she first walked through the gates of this estate....the false name, the desperate plan, the terror of being found out and the specific complicated guilt of staying longer than she’d meant to because she kept finding reasons to. She’d told herself it was about the plant. About her mother. About the mission.
She’d been lying to herself from about week two.
"How are you actually feeling?" Mei asked, shifting into the tone that meant she was asking the real question now, not the social version. "Not fine. Actually."
Aria considered it properly. "Like I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop," she said. "Like I keep expecting something to go wrong because things have been wrong for so long." She looked at her hands in her lap. "Dr. Morrison says that’s normal after trauma. That the nervous system takes time to believe it’s safe even when the evidence says it is."
"Dr. Morrison is right."
"I know. I just wish my body had read the same memo as my brain."
Mei was quiet for a moment. Then: "It will." She reached over and covered Aria’s hands with her own. "It took time for me too. After we left your father. After all of it. My body didn’t trust safe for a long time." A pause. "But eventually it does. Eventually you wake up and realise you didn’t spend the night waiting for something to go wrong." Her hands tightened slightly. "It comes."
Aria looked at her mother.
Twenty four years of watching this woman hold everything together with both hands and make it look effortless, and she was still finding new things to learn from her.
"When did you and Alexander start talking again?" she asked. "Actually talking. Not just being civil about me."
Mei’s expression shifted into something she recognized as her mother choosing how much to say. "In the hospital. The corridor outside your room at two in the morning when neither of us could sleep."
"And?"
"And he apologized. Properly. Not the way he used to apologize, where the apology was mostly about what he had lost." Mei looked at the window. "He explained. He was honest about what he’d been." A long pause. "He’s changed, Aria. I’m not saying I know what that means yet or what to do with it. But he has."
"You believe him, You believe that he has changed?"
"I believe that the man who drove me away at twenty three would not have sat in a corridor at two in the morning and asked me how I was." She looked back at Aria. "He asked me how I was. Not what I was going to do, not what it meant for us. Just....how was I." Something in her face settled. "I hadn’t been asked that by him in twenty five years."
Aria held that for a moment.
"Be careful, Mum," she said finally. Not a warning. Just....love. Wanting good things for the person who had given up the most.
"I’m always careful baby," Mei said, and it almost sounded like she was talking to herself as much as to Aria. "It’s a hard habit to break."
