Chapter 305 We could all be one family again, a real one

Chapter 305 We could all be one family again, a real one
The mention of Sienna never coming back didn't land the way Frederick had expected it to.
Instead of lighting something up in Rose's face, it pulled a shadow across it, a small, uncertain cloud moving behind her eyes as she turned the idea over in the way that children do when something doesn't add up for them.
Rose had memories of her mother in the back of her mind, but they were bad, as compared to that of Sienna.
With Sienna, her father would light up and was always bubbly. Rose loved to see her father that way, though she hated her mother’s sadness.
"Does that mean I won't get to see you as much?" she asked, and her eyes had gone glassy at the edges, not quite crying yet but close enough that Frederick's arms tightened around her instinctively where she sat on his lap.
"Of course not. Why would you think that?"
Rose turned to look at him fully, wiping at the corner of one eye with the back of her hand with the matter-of-fact efficiency of a child who doesn't see tears as particularly dramatic.
"Because you are always with Aunt Sienna. If I want to be with you, she has to be there too." She said it plainly, without accusation, which somehow made it worse. "When Mommy lived with us, we never saw you at home. We missed you every single day."
She paused, as if thinking of her words. “You never made time alone for me.”
The scales didn't fall slowly. They came down all at once, and Frederick sat very still underneath the weight of them.
"Wait, Rose," he stopped her from speaking to allow himself to digest all that she had just said, needing to make sure he was hearing this right.
"You actually believed that Sienna was the only reason I could spend time with you?" He never meant it that way but if that was how Rose saw it, then he must have been doing more wrong than he ever cared to admit.
Rose nodded, and the simplicity of it broke something open in his chest that he wasn't sure how to close.
He opened his mouth to explain himself, to offer her some version of events that would make him look like less of what he had actually been, and then stopped.
Because the explanation would have been a lie, and some part of him that had only recently woken up knew it.
When Sienna was in a coma, he had spent his hours at her bedside whenever he was away from the office, while Rose was always with Cassie, always waiting for a father who kept finding reasons to be somewhere else.
And when Sienna woke up, when he'd thrown himself into the project of building the family he thought he wanted, he'd taken Rose along for the ride and sweetened it with nice things and quiet requests not to tell her mother.
He had made Rose into an accessory to his choices rather than the priority she should have been all along.
It was exactly as she said it was. He couldn't argue with a child's memory of her own childhood.
"I put the wrong things first," he said, and his voice had come down from wherever it had been and landed somewhere much more honest.
"I am so sorry, my princess. That changes right now. Aunt Sienna is not coming back, and that means it's just you and me, and I am going to show you what that actually looks like."
Rose considered this with the gravity of someone weighing a promise against a long record of broken ones. "That's why you haven't even been here very long," she pointed out, landing another quiet observation directly on his conscience.
Whenever Sienna was around, she would mostly tag along but Sienna wasn’t there, and his father had disappeared for weeks.
"I know." Frederick didn't try to deflect it. "I was dealing with things that needed to be dealt with. But I am done with all of it, and you are what I'm coming home to now. If your mother comes back into our lives at some point, I'll make sure the time we spend together always includes you. So what do you say?"
But Rose's reluctance didn't ease, and Frederick felt it the way her small body stayed measured and careful in his arms instead of relaxing into him the way it used to.
Without her on his side, fully and genuinely, he had nothing. No angle, no leverage, no real reason to keep reaching for Cassie at all.
Rose was the only door that remained, and he needed her to choose to walk through it with him.
"Rose." He tipped his head down to meet her eyes, his voice dropping into something raw and unguarded. "Look at me. Do you want your mommy back? We could all be one family again, a real one."