Chapter 101: When It Switches

Chapter 101: When It Switches
Amelia's POV

Elena didn't speak for a full thirty seconds after I said it.

That was a long time for Elena, who had opinions about everything and usually delivered them before you'd finished the sentence, so the silence landed heavily and I sat across from her and waited and watched her face work through things she wasn't saying yet.

"A brother," she said finally.

"Yes," I said.

"Twenty-two."

"Yes."

"And he doesn't know about us," she said, and her voice was careful in a way that meant she was feeling something large and hadn't decided what to do with it yet.

"No," I said. "Dad only told me last night. He said it's our decision what we do with it."

Grayson had gone quietly to make more coffee because he was good at reading when something needed to be just the two of us, and I heard him moving around in the kitchen behind me and felt grateful for it.

Elena picked up her mug and held it with both hands and looked at the table. "His mother is gone," she said slowly.

"Two years ago," I said. "He's been alone since."

Something moved across Elena's face at that and I recognized it because I felt it too, that particular pull of knowing someone out there was carrying something you understood, the particular weight of losing a mother and having to rearrange your entire life around the space she left.

"He has our mother's eyes," Elena said, repeating what I'd told her like she was testing how the sentence felt.

"According to Dad," I said.

"Dad who we just found out is not as dead as we thought and also not as honest as we hoped," Elena said, but without real heat in it, more like a statement of fact she was making room for.

"Yes," I said.

She was quiet again for a moment and then she said, "Show me."

I opened my phone and pulled up what I'd found the night before after Thomas's call, just a quick search on the name and city Thomas had given me, and Daniel Raine wasn't hard to find because he'd never had reason to hide, and I turned the phone toward Elena.

She looked at the screen and her breath went out of her slowly and she didn't say anything for a moment.

The photo was just a regular one, the kind anyone had on a public profile, a young man at a table somewhere smiling at whoever was taking the picture, and the smile was Thomas's but the eyes, the particular shape of them and the way they crinkled at the corners, were our mother's, unmistakably and completely.

"Oh," Elena said quietly.

"I know," I said.

She handed the phone back and I put it face down on the table and we sat there together, two women deciding something that would change the shape of their family again, and I didn't rush it because it deserved the time.

"I want to meet him," Elena said.

"Me too," I said.

"But not yet," she said. "Not while we're still in the middle of all of this. When it's quieter. When we can actually sit down with him properly and not be distracted by everything else."

"Agreed," I said.

Grayson came back in with three mugs and set them down and sat beside me and looked at us both and said "well?" and Elena looked at him and said "we're going to meet him. Just not today," and Grayson nodded like that was the right answer and said nothing else, which was exactly what the moment needed.

\---

The days after Victoria's surrender moved fast and then slow in alternating waves.

Fast because there was a lot to process legally, Richard's case moving into its final phase, Victoria's plea being entered, Céline's custody arrangements being sorted, Noah's cooperation with Morrison being documented and his consequences determined, all of it requiring Grayson's attention and our lawyer's attention and Morrison's attention and seemingly everyone else's attention simultaneously.

Slow because between all of that there were ordinary hours, mornings in the kitchen, evenings where nothing urgent was happening, and those ordinary hours felt almost strange after months of everything being a crisis, like putting down something heavy you'd been carrying so long you'd forgotten you were carrying it.

Thomas was discharged from hospital and moved into a temporary place his lawyer had arranged and I visited him twice, short visits, careful, both of us feeling our way toward something that wasn't quite a relationship yet but wasn't nothing either, and on the second visit he asked about the babies and I told him twins and he looked at the table for a moment and then looked up and said "your mother always said you'd do everything twice as hard as anyone else," and it was the closest thing to a joke I'd ever heard him make and it was a terrible joke and I laughed anyway.

Elena applied for graduate school and didn't tell anyone until after she'd submitted, which was so completely her that I couldn't even pretend to be surprised.

Grayson held his press conference and I stood at the side of the room and watched him handle the media with that particular calm efficiency he had and felt the thing I always felt watching him work, which was a mix of admiration and the specific affection of knowing what he was like at three in the morning when the composure was down.

A journalist asked about the pregnancy and Grayson answered without hesitating, warmly and simply, said twins, said we were thrilled, said his wife was extraordinary and he'd leave it at that, and the room did the thing rooms do when something unexpectedly human breaks through, it just went slightly softer, and I stood at the side and felt it and felt safe in a way I hadn't felt in so long I'd forgotten what it was supposed to feel like.

Safe.

Just that.

That evening we went home, properly home, the mansion, and walked through the front door and it was quiet inside and clean and ours and Grayson stood in the hallway and looked around like he was seeing it properly for the first time in weeks, and then he looked at me and said, "We should think about where we want to live. Actually live. The two of us and two babies and whatever chaos comes with that."

"We could stay here," I said.

"We could," he said. "Or we could find somewhere that doesn't have a decade of someone else's history in the walls."

I thought about that. "Somewhere we pick together," I said.

"Yes," he said. "Exactly that."

I looked at the ring on my finger and then at him and said "okay" and he smiled, properly smiled, the one that only happened when no one else was watching, and I thought about how far we'd come from a wrong hotel room and a name he didn't know and a baby we hadn't planned and a marriage neither of us had wanted, and how none of it had gone the way either of us expected and how that was somehow the best possible version of what it could have been.

Then my phone buzzed and it was a text from an unknown number that made me stop.

Hi. This is Daniel Raine. My father gave me your number. I don't really know how to start this so I'll just say, I know I have sisters. I've known for a while. I just didn't know if you'd want to know about me. I hope this is okay.

I read it twice and then handed the phone to Grayson and watched him read it and look up at me.

"Elena's going to lose her mind," he said.

"Completely," I agreed, and went to find her.