Chapter 207

Elara’s POV

The floor tilted beneath me.

Forest eyes.

The words hit like a fist to the sternum. I heard them, processed them, and still my brain refused to accept what they meant.

The bakery.

The little girl in the bakery.

The one with mismatched shoes and dark braids who had tugged at my sleeve and called me Mommy. The one I had gently corrected. The one I had smiled at and walked away from because she wasn’t—she couldn’t have been—

She was.

The room narrowed to a single point. Lyra’s face. Those wide, bright eyes—green as deep forest, exactly the shade Kaelen’s voice had described. Her messy braids. Her mismatched shoes. The same child.

My daughter had found me in a bakery, called me Mommy, and I had told her she was mistaken.

I had looked into my own child’s face and said no.

My knees gave out.

I didn’t catch myself this time. I went down hard, both knees hitting the floor with a crack that I barely registered. The impact jolted up through my spine, but the pain was nothing—nothing compared to the thing splitting open inside my chest.

“No,” I whispered. Then louder. “No, no, no—”

My hands were shaking. My whole body was shaking. I pressed my palms flat against the floor to keep myself from collapsing entirely, and a sound came out of me that I didn’t recognize. Something between a gasp and a moan. Something animal.

I had rejected my own daughter.

She had called me Mommy, and I had walked away.

“Lyra.” Her name came out broken. Wet. I lifted my head and looked at her through a blur of tears. “Lyra, baby—”

She was still holding Kaelen’s hand. Still bouncing slightly. But the excitement on her face was beginning to falter. Her gaze moved between me on the floor and her father standing rigid above her, and something careful crept into her expression. Something no child that young should know how to wear.

Wariness.

“Lyra.” I stretched my arms toward her. My fingers trembled violently. “Come here, sweetheart. Please. Please come here. Mommy is so sorry—”

The word Mommy landed like a stone dropped into still water.

Lyra stopped bouncing.

Her small face went very still. Very serious. She tilted her head—a gesture so like Kaelen’s that fresh pain lanced through me—and stared at my outstretched hands.

“You said you weren’t my mommy,” she said.

The words. Delivered in a high, clear voice. Completely matter-of-fact.

They destroyed me.

“I didn’t know.” The tears were falling now, fast and hot, streaking down my cheeks and dripping off my jaw. I didn’t wipe them. I couldn’t let go of the air in front of me, as if holding my hands out long enough could erase what I’d done. “Baby, I didn’t know it was you. I didn’t recognize—Mommy didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know.”

Lyra’s lower lip pushed out. Not in a pout. In something harder. A defense being built in real time, brick by tiny brick.

“You said your babies were far, far away.”

I choked.

Because I had. I remembered it now with sickening clarity—kneeling in that bakery, smiling at this beautiful, insistent little stranger, and telling her gently that my children were somewhere else. Far away. That I wasn’t her mother.

Every word a lie. Every word a knife I hadn’t known I was holding.

“I was wrong,” I said. My voice cracked down the middle. “I was so wrong, Lyra. You are my baby. You’ve always been my baby. I just—I couldn’t see—”

“Then why did you go away?”

The question was quiet now. Small. She had stopped bouncing entirely. Her grip on Kaelen’s trouser leg tightened, and she shuffled backward until she was half-hidden behind him. Peering at me with those forest-green eyes from behind the wall of her father’s body.

Kaelen didn’t move. Didn’t speak. His jaw was locked tight, a muscle jumping beneath the skin. His dark gold eyes were unreadable—flat as hammered metal. He stood like a tower between us. A barrier. A shield.

And he was right to be one. Because I was the threat here. I was the one who had left.

“Was I bad?” Lyra’s voice wobbled. “Did I do something bad?”

“No.” The word ripped out of me. “No, baby, you were never bad. You were never, ever bad. Mommy was the one who made a mistake. A terrible, terrible mistake.”

I crawled forward on my knees. Just a little. Just enough to be closer. My hands were still reaching. Still empty.

“Lyra, please. Please let me hold you. Just for a moment. Please—”

She pressed her face into the back of Kaelen’s leg.

“Are you gonna leave again?”

The question was muffled against fabric. Barely audible. But it filled the entire room.

“No.” I shook my head so hard my vision swam. “Never. I will never leave again. I promise. I promise you, Lyra.”

She didn’t move. Didn’t come forward. Her small fingers stayed curled into the material of Kaelen’s trousers, holding on like it was the only solid thing in her world.

Because it was.

Because for years, he had been everything. Father and mother and safety and home. And I had been nothing. A ghost.

The silence stretched and stretched. I knelt on the floor of the living room I had abandoned, arms still outstretched, tears still falling, and my daughter hid from me.

My daughter hid from me.

The sob that broke out of my chest was ugly. Raw. I doubled over, forehead nearly touching the floor, and I cried the way I hadn’t allowed myself to cry in years. Not quiet tears. Not dignified grief. This was the wailing of something being torn apart at the root.

I had left my children.

I had looked my daughter in the eye and told her I wasn’t her mother.

No amount of context or explanation or righteous anger at the lies that had driven me away could change those facts. They were carved into the foundation of my children’s lives like cracks in stone.

“Ela.”

Kaelen’s voice. Low. Stripped of everything.

I couldn’t look up. Couldn’t stop the horrible sounds coming from my throat. My fingers curled against the hardwood floor.

A small shuffling sound. Lyra, adjusting her position behind her father’s legs.

Then—nothing. Kaelen said nothing else. Offered no comfort. No condemnation. He simply stood there, immovable, holding his daughter’s trust in one hand and whatever remained of his own feelings in the other. His expression—when I finally raised my head enough to glimpse it—was a locked door.

I forced myself upright on my knees. Wiped my face with the back of my hand. Drew a breath that rattled like a broken instrument.

“I’ll earn it,” I said. To Lyra. To Kaelen. “However long it takes. I’ll earn it.”

Lyra peeked out from behind Kaelen’s leg. Her eyes were red. Her chin was trembling.

She said nothing.

The front door opened.

Heavy footsteps approached. Quicker than a child’s, slower than an adult’s.

I turned toward the sound.

He was taller. So much taller. His dark curls were cropped shorter than I remembered, and wire-framed glasses sat on his nose—glasses he hadn’t needed years ago. His school uniform was wrinkled, one shoelace undone.

His dark gold eyes—his father’s eyes—locked onto me with a desperate, heartbroken look.

Valerius froze in the doorway, his school bag hitting the floor with a loud thud. Tears spilled down his cheeks as he asked, “Why did you leave? Why didn’t you want me anymore?”