“This isn’t about your sacrifice,” Isla says.“It’s about my life.”
Her mother stares at her, stunned.
“You’re choosing chaos,” Alisa says.
Isla shakes her head.“I’m choosing freedom.”
She opens the door.
“I’m not coming home,” Isla adds.“When I find a place, I’ll have my assistant come and pack up my things.”
Alisa looks at her for a long moment, eyes cold, calculating.
“Your father was a drug addict who cheated on me.You’re choosing him over me?”
“I’m choosing freedom.I’m choosing truth.I’m choosing to make my own mistakes,” she said, feeling certainty in her bones.This is right.
“You’ll regret this,” she says.
Isla meets her gaze without flinching.“Maybe.But it will be mine alone.”
Alisa leaves without another word.
Isla closes the door and leans back against it, heart hammering.Her legs feel unsteady, her breath shallow, but beneath the adrenaline is something unfamiliar and fragile.
Relief.
She crosses the room and sinks onto the bed, staring at the ceiling.Maybe someday she can forgive her.Maybe someday they can make up.But for now, she needs this space to learn to live on her own.
She has confronted the woman who shaped her entire life.
She has cut the final thread of control.
She is alone in a New York hotel room, with no plan, no handler, no safety net.
And for the first time, the fear feels like her own.
She pulls the curtains open and looks out at the city, bright and unyielding.
Somewhere far away, there is a castle waiting.
For now, Isla lets herself sit in the quiet aftermath of choosing herself, heartbroken, furious, and finally free.
She knows her father would have been proud of her today, proud that she finally spoke for herself and for him.And yet, even in the quiet, his music plays in her head, a reminder that pride and grief can exist at the same time.
What would her father have thought of her and Callum?Would he have encouraged it, or warned her away from the man she’s fallen in love with?
Chapter26
The castle is too quiet.
Not the normal quiet of early morning, of stone and weather and distance, but the kind that follows a slammed door.The kind that means something has been said that can’t be taken back.
Once again, Callum stands in Isla’s bedroom with her letter in his hand and the legal papers spread across the bed like a verdict.He has read her words so many times, the ink feels carved into his palm.
If I stayed, I would disappear.
He keeps coming back to that line, not because it hurts the most, though it does, but because it explains everything.It explains why she left without a confrontation, why she didn’t give him another chance to hesitate.
