Which tells me nothing. Nothing about whether she knew my mother—her sister—was dying in a hospital in the Keys. Nothing about whether she tried to reach out and was rebuffed, or never tried at all. Nothing about what the Xavier family told her, or forbade her from doing, after they cast Elizabeth out.
I don't know this woman. I don't know what choices she made or what choices were made for her.
But I know one thing.
"She's the only living person who could tell me anything about my mother before she met my father," I say. "What Elizabeth was like as a girl. Before everything changed."
"That's true," Beck says quietly.
I have photographs. I have memories—a decade's worth before the cancer took her. But I don't have herbefore. The girl she was at nineteen, before she chose love over legacy. The sister,the daughter, the young woman who looked at everything the Xaviers offered and decided it wasn't worth the cost.
Madeline has that. Madelineisthat living link to a version of my mother I'll never know.
Whether she'd be willing to share any of it with me is a question I'm not ready to ask.
Beck pauses. Something shifts in his posture as he retrieves the final document. "And then there's this," he says quietly. "I did some further digging on your mother's side."
I don't move. Don't speak. Just wait.
"Constance Xavier." Beck's voice is careful now, aware of the ground he's walking. "Your maternal grandmother. As Sebastian told you, she's still alive, Nick. In her late eighties. Living in Boston—the family estate, possibly with in-home care. My source wasn't certain."
The woman who, with her husband, cast my mother out is living just hours away from me. The news hit me hard when Sebastian told me at the gala, but that was in a public place, where I refused to permit myself to react. Hearing Beck confirm the details to me now, in the privacy of my office, takes some of the breath from my lungs.
And there's a photo too. I reach for it, my gaze locking on to the weathered, but still lovely, face of the woman who birthed my mother. I see similarities in the eyes, in the soft jaw line and mouth that had always been ready with a warm smile whenever my mother looked at me. This other woman is unsmiling, her lips slack at the corners, a vacant sort of dullness in her blue eyes.
"She's been struggling with health issues for several years," Beck continues. "Her husband Philip—your grandfather—died about twelve years back. Before any of this could have..."
He doesn't finish the sentence. He doesn't need to.
Before any of this could have mattered. Before I could have stood in front of the people who decided their daughter wasn't worth keeping because she fell in love with a poor man whom they deemed beneath her. Before I could have shown them what their abandoned grandson built from the nothing they left us with.
Constance Xavier will likely die without ever knowing my name. Without knowing that her daughter's son commands an empire. Without meeting my extraordinary Avery, who is so much like my mother in all the best ways. Constance won't know that Elizabeth's grandchild will be born in the spring. A great-grandchild she'll never hold, never see, never understand she lost.
Maybe she deserves to lose all of those moments. She made her bed, after all. Someone that cold should be left to rot in it. Though even as I think it, my chest tightens.
I tell myself it doesn't matter. This pile of dossiers are just names in a file folder, people who meant nothing to me until the night before last. They should have no impact on me moving forward.
Except… they do.
Deep down, in a place I've kept locked since I was old enough to understand that the family who should have helped us never came, they impact me.
If I'd known about this when I was younger, when I was alone and desperate and surviving on rage because it was all I had, would it have mattered? Would knowing there was family somewhere, even family that had rejected my mother, have given me something to hold onto?
Who the fuck knows?
Now I have my own family. Avery. Our child. The legacy we're building together. Neither the Roths nor the Xaviers need to have any place in it.
But the curiosity Sebastian ignited at the gala hasn't gone out. It burns low beneath my ribs, asking questions I don't have answers to.
I glance at the clock on my desk. Late morning now. Avery should be finishing up the rest of her errands before long. She'll be here soon, and that knowledge loosens the tension in me that this morning's conversation has wound tight. I want her close. Want the weight of her leaning into me, the way she fits against my side like the space was always hers.
Beck gathers the papers, placing them back in the folder with the quiet understanding I've come to rely on over fifteen years of friendship and professional partnership. He's giving me space to process. He always knows when to push and when to wait.
"One more thing," he says, pulling a second file from his briefcase. "Better news."
He sets it in front of me, the letterhead bearing the yacht broker Julian Whitmore's name.
"Your honeymoon vessel is ready," Beck says. "TheElysiumis docked at the port in Genova, fully provisioned, the Mediterranean crew assembled and standing by. Everything is in place for you and Avery."
