Chapter 264: Chapter 266: What are you planning Victoria?
She sent it the next morning before her mother was awake, Because if her mother found out again that she had sent money to her father again, she would lecture her for it.
She sat at the kitchen counter with her laptop and her tea and moved another twenty thousand dollars across twelve thousand miles with the quiet efficiency of a woman who had grown up watching money move through shell accounts and had paid attention.
She closed the laptop.
And just sat there.
Her mother appeared at seven fifteen in her dressing gown, her hair not yet done, moving through the kitchen with the careful normality she maintained at all times. Kettle on. Two cups. The routine that had become theirs in eight months of this apartment.
"You’re up early," her mother said.
"Couldn’t sleep."
Patricia set a cup in front of her. Sat down across the counter. Looked at Victoria in the way she had....direct and patient and not asking anything out loud that Victoria wasn’t ready to answer.
Victoria looked at her tea.
"Dad called again," she said.
Her mother was quiet, As if she could already predict the next word that would come out of Victoria’s moth
"I sent him the money."
"Victoria."
"I know mom."
"That’s our savings...That is the money we are using to survive and you sent it to him knowing fully well what he wants to use it for?"
"I know, Mother." She looked up. "I know exactly what he wants to use it for, Which is to survive. I know what it means to be stranded mom, To be alone,...I felt that way when i opened my eyes on that hospital bed." She held her mother’s gaze. "I know and I sent it anyway."
Patricia looked at her for a long time. Long enough that Victoria felt it....the weight of being truly looked at by someone who loved you and was frightened of what they were seeing.
"What are you planning Victoria?" her mother asked quietly.
"I’m not planning anything."
"Victoria."
"I sent him more money." She picked up her tea. "That’s all."
It wasn’t all. They both knew it wasn’t all. But her mother looked at her face and made the decision that Victoria had seen her make a hundred times over the years....the decision to let something be, for now, because pushing would only close the door faster.
"Okay," her mother said quietly.
She got up and started breakfast.
Victoria sat at the counter and drank her tea and looked out at the Sydney morning and thought about Harold’s plan. His vagueness. His I need time. His make them pay.
She thought about what she could do with seventy thousand dollars and patience and eight months of having absolutely nothing to do except sit in this apartment and think.
Harold came at people directly. Always had. Rage and noise and the kind of plans that had too many moving parts and fell apart under pressure. She had watched him do it her entire life and loved him for it and also, quietly, always known it was a weakness.
She was not her father.
She thought about Aria Chen. Not the warehouse version....not the version that still appeared in fragments at three AM. The other version. The one she’d been observing from twelve thousand miles away for eight months through newspaper articles and photographs and the occasional piece of social media that slipped through before being taken down.
Aria Chen who had broken into Damien Blackwood’s estate with a fake name and come out the other side with his love and his home and his grandfather’s approval and a medical career.
Aria Chen who survived everything. Who landed on her feet every time. Who had looked at Victoria in a warehouse in the dark with steady hands and done the right thing anyway, and gotten credit for it, and kept going.
Victoria had been angry about it for eight months.
She was done being angry.
Anger was loud. Anger made mistakes. Anger sent tweets and made scenes and ended up unconscious in a warehouse on the wrong side of a situation that had already been decided.
She was done with anger.
She opened her laptop again.
Pulled up flights.
New York. Not today. Not this week. A month from now, maybe six weeks, something with enough buffer that no one was looking for it. Something that looked like nothing. A woman visiting a city. Staying somewhere small and unremarkable. Keeping her head down.
She had learned patience in this apartment.
She was going to use it.
The flight she found departed on a Tuesday. Early morning. Fourteen hours with a connection in Dubai.
She sat there for a long time looking at it.
Then she booked it.
One seat. Economy class, which she had not flown in her entire life before eight months ago and which she booked now without hesitating because economy class didn’t leave the kind of trail that business class left, and she had learned....slowly, painfully, at significant cost....to think about trails.
She closed the laptop.
Finished her tea.
"Victoria," her mother called from the kitchen. "Eggs or toast?"
"Both," she said.
She got up from the counter and went to help with breakfast, and her mother looked at her face and and Victoria could tell that her mother knew she was planning something but she didn’t ask any more questions, They moved around the kitchen together in the routine of it, and Victoria thought about a Tuesday morning departure and a fourteen-hour flight and a city she had been removed from unconscious and was going to return to on her own terms.
Not for her father’s plan.
Not for rage.
For the quiet, specific, carefully considered thing she had spent eight months building in the back of her mind while she did her physiotherapy exercises and stared at the harbour and read articles about a woman who kept surviving.
She pressed her thumb gently against the scar on her left hand.
Better than last week.
She intended to be considerably better by Tuesday.
