I watched her go and I didn’t feel relieved. I felt like I’d cut off something that had been part of me since childhood, even if it was a part that never fit right.
The call came the next evening. I was in the study at the estate when my phone lit up. I knew before I looked at the screen that it was Margaret. Lorraine had gone straight to her mother, Regina Ashtor, who had been best friends with Margaret since before either of us were born. Regina went straight to Margaret. The gossip chain in their families had always been faster than any communication system I’d ever built.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Finneas.” Clipped. Past the gentle patience from last week, back to default. “Lorraine called me in tears.”
“I spoke to her at the gathering. I told her the truth.”
“The truth? You humiliated her, Finneas. In front of the pack.”
“I pulled her aside for a private conversation. Nobody heard it.”
“She heard it. Her mother heard about it ten minutes later. I heard about it ten minutes after that. You told that girl, who hasbeen like family to us for thirty years, that you don’t see her as a woman?”
“Yes I did. Because I don’t. I never have.”
“Finneas...”
“Mother, I need you to hear this. I have never seen Lorraine as a woman. She was like a little sister to me, and recently not even that. Whatever you and Regina planned, whatever you imagined for us, it’s not happening. It was never going to happen.”
Silence. Long enough that I checked the screen to make sure the call was still connected. Then her voice came back trembling.
“Your father wanted this.” Her voice broke. “He and Conrad planned it together. They talked about it, Finneas, about joining the families, about what it would mean for the pack. And then your father was taken from me and I’ve been holding onto his vision for eight years because it was the last thing we talked about before he died.”
My jaw ached. She was crying on the other end of the phone and every sob reached inside me and pulled. My father’s name in her mouth did things to me that nothing else could, because I couldn’t argue with a dead man’s wishes. I couldn’t stand across from his ghost and say you’re wrong. All I could do was sit here gripping the phone while my mother weaponized the worst night of both our lives.
And it was working. Even knowing what she was doing, it was working, because the guilt didn’t care about logic. The guilt just sat on my chest and pressed.
“I’m sorry about Dad.” My voice was rougher than I wanted it to be. “I miss him too. Every damn day. But this isn’t what he would have wanted. He would have wanted me to be happy, and she doesn’t make me happy.”
“How do you know? You’ve never given her a real chance.”
“I know because I know. This is my decision, Mother. Not yours, not Dad’s, not Regina’s. Mine.”
She was crying now, softly, and every sob pulled at me, tugged at the foundation I’d spent weeks building. Because no matter how many times she did this, I could never fully separate what was real from what was calculated. She lost her husband. She was lonely. She loved me. All of that was true. And she was using all of it to get what she wanted.
“I love you,” I said. “But this conversation is over.”
I hung up. My hand was shaking when I put the phone down.
Luca was in the doorway. Leaning against the frame. He’d heard the whole thing.
“Damn,” he said quietly. “Never heard you hang up on her before.”
“First time.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like shit.”
“Yeah.” He pushed off the frame, walked in, dropped into the chair across from the desk. “But you did the right thing. She’llsurvive. They’ll both survive. Andrea deserves someone willing to say no to his mother for her.”
I rubbed my hands over my face. He was right. I also knew my mother was sitting in her house crying, she was sitting in hers furious, and the two of them were going to come at me from a different angle because that’s what they did. I held the line tonight. But the war wasn’t over.
I went to her desk the next day. She was professional, distant, peonies from that morning pushed to the side to make room for her laptop. She didn’t look up when I stopped in front of her.
“Can we talk? After hours. My office.”
