Chapter 93 Chapter Ninety Three

Chapter 93 Chapter Ninety Three
Two hours later, Ellie walked into the living room looking refreshed and well rested. She found her kids and their father camped on the couch, eyes on the TV.

"Hey, guys." Ellie greeted. "Space for me?"

"Yeah, babe." Cesar patted his lap.

Ellie smiled and settled onto him. He was too sweet for his own good, she thought — the kind of sweet that still caught her off guard some mornings, after everything they'd survived to get here.

"Arya was here a while ago." Cesar told her.

"Really? Why didn't anyone wake me?" She asked.

"You were sleeping peacefully, mama." Miesa said, with the gravity of a child repeating something she'd overheard and believed completely. "If we'd woken you up, the baby won't like it."

They all laughed.

"She brought the baby a present." Cesar said. "Tristan, go to my office and bring that box on my desk."

"Okay, Dad." Tristan stood and left, returning two minutes later with the present. He handed it to Cesar, who passed it along to Ellie.

She ripped off the ribbon and the wrapper, opened the lid, and smiled at what she found inside.

"What is it?" Cesar asked.

"A photo album." She lifted it out for them all to see.

"There's a card!" Miesa exclaimed, snatching it out and opening it to read aloud. "I'm sorry it's not much, but I hope you can put in pictures of your little one. I'm so glad my baby met someone like you. Arya."

"Who's her baby?" Tristan asked.

"Yes, momma, who's her baby?" Miesa echoed. "She wasn't pregnant when she visited us."

They all laughed. Cesar and Ellie exchanged a glance over their children's heads — the kind of look that carried a whole conversation in it. He didn't want the kids knowing Arya was their grandmother. 

They'd want to visit her every chance they got, and he wasn't ready to hand any part of her that much ground.

"I'm sure that was a typo." Cesar said. "I'm not sure who she's referring to."

"You're lying." Tristan said flatly.

"Just tell us, daddy." Miesa pleaded.

"Okay, fine." Cesar grunted in exasperation, then paused and sighed, the fight going out of him in one breath. "She's... my mother."

"What?!" Tristan and his sister exclaimed in shock.

"How come?" Miesa asked, already spinning through the implications. "She has two daughters, so that makes you their brother? Like Tristan is to me? Does that mean Uncle Patricio is your dad?"

Cesar chuckled softly despite himself. "Calm down, twenty million questions." He shook his head. "Patricio is not my father. It's a long story that I don't want to get into."

"You'll tell us someday?" Tristan asked. If his father couldn't talk about it, he reasoned, it had to be something hard.

"Yes. Someday." Cesar agreed.

Someday, he'd be free from his nightmares and his demons. Free enough, maybe, to forgive his mother — and to be more than just a friend to her. 

He hoped he'd get there someday. He wasn't there yet, but for the first time, the word someday didn't feel like a lie he was telling his kids to buy himself time. It felt like something he might actually mean.


Two weeks later
Cesar and Ellie took Miesa for her monthly checkup, and they were overjoyed when the doctor told them her cancer was in remission — though she'd need to continue maintenance therapy for a couple more years, just to be sure it wouldn't come back. 

It was wonderful news, especially for Miesa, who'd spent too many nights quietly afraid she'd never get to grow up alongside her family.

"I'm so happy, mommy, daddy." Miesa beamed at them as they walked out of the hospital. "I'm free!"

"Yes, baby." Ellie smiled back, blinking against the sting in her own eyes. "I'm happy too."

Cesar's phone rang as they neared the waiting car. He pulled it from his pocket, frowned at Tristan's name on the screen, and answered. Ellie and Miesa peeled off toward the ice cream stand across the road while he talked.

"Hey, kid, what's up?" He asked.

"Dad... please, please tell me you're not in the car right now?" Tristan's voice was shaking.

"Uh... no. Why?" Cesar frowned, something cold already prickling at the back of his neck.

"There's a bomb. Don't get—"

As if summoned by the word itself, the explosion tore through the air. It threw Cesar off his feet, and he landed hard several feet from where he'd been standing. 

Around him, people who hadn't been caught in the blast screamed and scattered, and the world dissolved into chaos — hospital staff rushing out to check on the injured, sirens beginning to wind up somewhere in the distance.

Cesar's head spun where it had struck the concrete, and for a moment he couldn't make his body obey him enough to sit up. He didn't know exactly where he was or how much time had passed. 

He didn't know anything, really, except two names — Ellie. Miesa. — looping through him with a panic sharper than the pain in his skull.

"Mr. Sandoval, are you okay?" A voice cut through the ringing in his ears, a face swimming into view above him.

"What?" He rasped, disoriented.

"Are you okay? It's me, Dr. Rothschild." Savannah said, as two more people crowded into his narrowing field of vision.

Cesar propped himself up on his elbows and forced his eyes to focus.

"Ellie? Miesa?" He rasped again, the only words that mattered.

"I haven't seen them." Savannah said, reaching for his arm. "Come on, you need to get your head checked. You're bleeding."

"No. I have to look for them." He shrugged her hands off and pushed himself upright, swaying on his feet before he found something like balance. "Ellie! Miesa!" His voice cracked on the second name — he barely noticed.

"Cesar!" Ellie's voice found him first.

He turned toward it and saw her — Miesa's hand locked in hers, both of them running toward him — and his knees gave out from under him right there on the sidewalk. They were fine. Whole. Unmarked. He could breathe again, because they were fine.

"Daddy!" Miesa crashed into him, crying, and he wrapped both arms around her like he could weld her to him and never let the world take another shot at her.

Ellie folded herself into the embrace too, holding them both, flooded with her own relief that he was standing, that he was alive, that whatever had happened hadn't taken him from her. 

She and Miesa had crossed the road for ice cream only minutes before the blast — a small, thoughtless decision that had turned out to save them.

Cesar kissed Ellie hard on the mouth, grateful in a way that had no proper words — grateful she hadn't climbed into that car a minute earlier, grateful the universe had given him this one more time when it so easily could have taken everything.

"Vincent." Ellie breathed, the name hitting her like a second blow as she suddenly remembered their chauffeur.

"He was standing by the car." Miesa said, fresh tears cutting new tracks down her cheeks. 

They'd lost him. It didn't seem possible that a man who'd driven her to school every morning could just be gone like that, in a single breath of fire.

"Sir, are you okay? Ma'am?" Vincent's voice reached them before his figure did, jogging toward them across the chaos.

"Vincent?!" They all chorused at once, staring at him like he was something conjured from nothing.

"What... how... you were..." Cesar stuttered, pointing back toward the smoldering wreck of the car, then at Vincent, then back again, his mind refusing to reconcile the two.

"Oh, I missed a call from my daughter, sir, and my phone battery died, so I went to use the payphone over there." He gestured toward a payphone a few blocks down from the hospital, entirely unbothered, as if he hadn't just risen from the dead in front of them.

"So... who was there?" Cesar questioned, still trying to catch up.

"Nobody."

"What? But we saw a man." Ellie said.

"No, ma'am." Vincent chuckled. "That was a hologram. I decided to try out my son's new project, and it worked."

"Oh, thank God." Ellie breathed, relief crashing through her all over again as she squeezed Vincent's hand affectionately. "God bless your son."

Vincent laughed. "Indeed." He said, and there was real warmth in it — pride, too, though he tried not to let it show too much.

Cesar exhaled, feeling something in his chest finally loosen. Whatever this day had tried to take from him, it had failed. Everyone who mattered was still standing on this sidewalk with him.

"Will you let me see your head injury now, Mr. Sandoval?" Savannah asked, arms crossed, clearly done waiting.

Cesar looked up at her and nodded. "Yes. My family's safe." He said — and that was really all the permission he'd needed to finally stop fighting her.

Vincent helped him to his feet, and together they led him back into the hospital, the four of them moving as one unit through the wreckage of a morning that had nearly ended everything.