I just shake my head. "No. Your mummy did."
Amauri's face lights up instantly. He giggles. An actual giggle. Like the world hasn't taught him yet that those can be stolen.
"I knew it," he nods proudly as if this had been a given fact all along. "You think she looks like that lady, too, huh?"
I frown. "What lady?"
He gives me a look, patient, indulgent. "The one from The Mummy. Duh."
I blink. He goes back to eating like that explained everything.
"This is good," he says between bites. "I knew Mummy would come for us." He nods to himself, completely certain.
I swallow hard. "Your mummy is…" I search for a word, feel clumsy reaching for it. "Nice?"
He looks at me like I've just said the sky might be blue.
"She's the best," he confirms firmly.
And then he starts talking. Little things. School. How she makes grilled cheese just right. How she pretends not to notice when he sneaks snacks before dinner. How she sings badly on purpose to make him laugh when he's sad. His voice slows. His eyelids droop. He finishes the last bite, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and leans into the seat with a small, contented sigh. I stand before I can think better of it. Carefully, I unbuckle and lift him. He doesn't resist. Doesn't flinch. Just tucks in against me like it's the most natural thing in the world.
I carry him to the couch and lay him down, pulling a blanket over him, tucking it in around his shoulders the way I've seen women do. He murmurs something unintelligible and curls onto his side. He's asleep. Just like that.
I stand there longer than necessary—resisting the urge to kiss his forehead because, God help me, he looks so much like me—watching him breathe. The rage I carried onto this plane—the tight, coiled thing that's lived in my chest since she said my son—doesn't vanish. It doesn't dissolve into something soft or noble. But it dims. Like a fire banked down, not extinguished.
I expected the anger to erupt when I saw him. Thought the weight of what she kept from me would crush everything else. Ten years stolen. Ten years of losing teeth, believing in Santa Claus, hell, watching mindless cartoons about dogs and cats. I'll never get that back. Words I never heard him say. Nights, I never stood guard outside his door. That loss is still there, heavy and dull. But beneath it, I feel it: pride.
Unwelcome. Unreasonable. Real.
She did this.
Jenna brought this boy into the world. She carried him. Protected him. Raised him into this. Quietly brave, instinctively kind, worrying about a man who barely looks at him, even while he himself is breaking. He reminds him to eat. He makes sure the adults drink water. He believes—without question—that his mother will come for him. That doesn't happen by accident.
I don't know a damn thing about children. I don't know what they're supposed to sound like, or how much of their parents they're meant to carry. But this boy—my boy—sounds… good. Solid. Whole, despite everything. Instinctively, I know this is her work.
The fury I aimed at her for so long suddenly has nowhere clean to land. It changes shape. I'm still angry. I won't pretend otherwise. She lied. She decided my place in his life without giving me the chance to choose differently. That reckoning hasn't vanished. But it's no longer blind. It's edged now with something dangerous: respect.
She survived. She didn't break. She didn't raise him weak or bitter or afraid of the world. She raised him aware. Observant. Compassionate. Which means that when I face her again, I won't be able to dismiss her as reckless or selfish or cruel. I hate the part of me that understands it.
I look down at Amauri again, memorizing the curve of his lashes, the way his mouth relaxes in sleep. So much like me, it almost hurts. So much like her in ways I can't see yet. Jenna will still answer for what she did. But not the way I thought. Not with rage alone. Because the woman who raised this? She's no longer just someone who took something from me. She's someone who made something extraordinary.
And that changes everything.
Noise from the rear cabin interrupts the moment.
"Where is my wheelchair?" Whitford's voice cracks through the hum of the engines. "I need a phone. I need to call?—"
My men bring him forward. They're being careful with him. I haven't told them yet how to handle him. Hell, I don't know how to handle him yet. They're moving him like he's something fragile and unpleasant at the same time. Which I suppose he is.
I watch them approach, I watch Whitford with the same loathing I've always felt for him. He's not really broken, but he's been—reduced.
He's lost weight. His hands shake. His face has that hollow, pinched look of a man who has never had to be brave and who has finally run out of shields. This isn't survival etched into bone like Amauri carries it. This is decay. I feel nothing like pity. I never have. He was never a man. Men don't sell their girlfriends. Men don't offer women up like currency so they can climb a ladder that was never meant to hold their weight.
Playtime, he'd called it. Coach would get his with Jenna, and Whitford would get his on the field, under the lights, with scouts watching and a future bought in bruises and silence.
I remember when I learned what he'd done. The night Jenna and I buried Coach in the desert. That was the moment I decided he would die. I gave her time. Time to leave him. Time to realize she deserved better. Time to walk away from the boy who thought women were stepping stones.
She did. The very next day. Or so she told me.
