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010

Author: Amaka
last update Petsa ng paglalathala: 2026-04-02 20:31:39

đŸ–€ Alexandra đŸ–€

“At least end the day by filling your stomach with food first before ending anything or anyone.”

Papa’s voice came from the door, calm as always, like the world wasn’t currently upside down and my life wasn’t sitting on my bed in the form of twenty pregnancy tests and one very annoying medical report.

I didn’t even turn immediately. I just sat there, staring at nothing in particular, trying to decide if I had the energy to deal with another human being today.

“Does anyone in thi
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  • Chaos Is My Crown   125

    đŸ–€ Jacob đŸ–€When I walked through that door, five sets of eyes turned toward me at once, and for one full second nobody in that room moved at all.Lex’s face I could read instantly careful, watching, waiting to see what I’d do before she decided what she would. But it was the four small faces that undid me, because they all wore the exact same expression for the exact same heartbeat: confusion. The polite, searching confusion of children trying to place a face they almost recognized but couldn’t yet.And then one of them the little girl closest to the foot of the bed, the one with my eyes, my exact eyes, set in a face that was unmistakably half her mother’s broke first.“Daddy?”The word came out small and unsure, more question than statement, like she was testing whether the word even belonged in this room. And God help me, I lost my breath completely. Five years. Five years and I still recognized myself looking back at me out of a five-year-old’s face, and she knew me. She knew me.

  • Chaos Is My Crown   124

    đŸ–€ Jacob đŸ–€I knew this was going to come back and bite me.I sat on the edge of the bed in the Airbnb Jack had rented for me furnished, generic, smelling faintly of someone else’s air freshener and stared at my phone like it might rearrange the words on the screen if I looked at it long enough. It didn’t. Why is your name on the referral that got Amara into my house four years ago? Twelve words. Twelve words that had just reached backward and dug their fingers into a decision I made when I still had the right to make decisions about my own family.I called Jack before I let myself think about what I was going to say to her.“Jack. I need you to dig into Amara for me. The girl I asked you to place in my ex-wife’s house, four years back.”“Okay, boss.” No hesitation. No follow-up questions. Jack had worked for me long enough to know exactly which Amara, exactly which house, exactly what “dig into her” meant when it came out of my mouth at five in the morning with my voice this tight. T

  • Chaos Is My Crown   123

    đŸ–€ Alexandra đŸ–€ Jen arrived two hours and fifty-eight minutes after I called her, which I noted only because Jen was always early, never on time, and the fact that she walked through that door at the absolute edge of the window I’d given her told me she’d hit traffic, or hadn’t slept at all, or both. She had a tablet in one hand and a coffee in the other, and she stopped just inside the doorway to look at the kids first, the way every decent person did before they looked at me, before they got to business. “They’re breathing on their own,” I said before she could ask. “Thank God.” She exhaled, set the coffee down, and pulled a chair close. “Okay. Where do you want to start?” “Everything,” I said. “From five years ago to right now. I want names, dates, contracts, anyone brought in, anyone removed, every shift in personnel around this family that I wasn’t paying attention to because I was busy pretending I’d retired from all of it.” Jen didn’t blink at the tone. She just opened the

  • Chaos Is My Crown   122

    đŸ–€ Alexandra đŸ–€I walked back into Room 14 and pulled the chair back into the small gap between both beds, the same chair Jacob had been sitting in earlier, still slightly warm from where he’d been, and I sat down and took one small hand in each of mine the way I had hours ago, like nothing had moved at all, even though everything had.Loveth’s fingers curled slightly around mine in her sleep.Dean’s chest rose and fell with the steady mechanical rhythm of the ventilator, that quiet hiss and click that I had stopped hearing as a sound and started hearing as a countdown, though I couldn’t have told you toward what.I watched them both for a long time and let my mind, against my own permission, drift toward the version of tonight where things had gone differently. Where the call had come too late. Where there had been nothing left for anyone to do.I let myself feel the full weight of that for exactly one breath.Then I closed the door on it, the way I closed the door on everything I co

  • Chaos Is My Crown   121

    đŸ–€ Jacob đŸ–€That banter or maybe I should just call it what it actually was, a simple yet sweet conversation was something I genuinely had not been expecting tonight.Not after the slap.Not after Chairman Fisher told me to leave the room like I was a delivery boy who had overstayed his welcome.Not after everything else that had happened in the last several hours, which, when I actually stopped to count it all up, was an amount of chaos that most people don’t experience in a full year, let alone one night.But there we were. Me with my terrible vending machine coffee. Her sitting across from me with that look on her face that said she was choosing, deliberately, to let the moment be light instead of heavy. And somehow it worked. Somehow for one entire minute the weight of everything else the children on ventilators, Stella’s missing legs, the mystery caller, Amara typing at three thirty in the morning somehow all of that stepped back just far enough to let two people who used to know

  • Chaos Is My Crown   120

    đŸ–€ Alexandra đŸ–€I found Jacob exactly where I expected to find him. Not by Stella’s room, not by the elevator pretending he was about to leave the hospital like a reasonable person who had just been dismissed by a wheelchair-bound mafia chairman, but in the small visitor’s lounge near the children’s ward, sitting in one of those terrible plastic chairs with a vending machine coffee in his hand that he was very clearly not drinking.He looked up when I walked in.“So,” he said, “your dad threatened me with his eyes for a full three minutes before he even started talking.”“That’s restraint, actually,” I said, sitting down across from him. “Normally people get the eyes for thirty seconds before he moves on to actual words.”“I feel so honored.”“You should.”He looked down at the coffee in his hand like it had personally wronged him.“This is the worst coffee I have ever had in my life,” he said. “And I once drank something a flight attendant handed me during turbulence that I’m fairly

  • Chaos Is My Crown   111

    đŸ–€ Alexandra đŸ–€None of this made sense. That was the thought repeating inside my head over and over again while I stood in the middle of the hotel suite staring at Jacob.Five years.Five entire years had passed without seeing him. Five years of therapy. Five years of rebuilding my life. Five year

  • Chaos Is My Crown   110

    đŸ–€ Alexandra đŸ–€â€œHOW THE HELL DID SHE GET ACCESS TO A PHONE?” My voice echoed through the entire suite as I paced across the living room with my phone pressed against my ear.I honestly didn’t care that it was nearly midnight. I didn’t care that I was standing in a luxury hotel in Los Angeles.And

  • Chaos Is My Crown   109

    đŸ–€ Jacob đŸ–€The second Stella ended the call, I grabbed my jacket and headed for the door. I wasn’t thinking anymore. That was the problem.Every logical thought had completely abandoned me the moment she mentioned another child.A child.My child.Five years.Five fucking years.If Stella was tell

  • Chaos Is My Crown   108

    đŸ–€ Jacob đŸ–€Was she messing with me? Because honestly, it felt like she was.I stared down at my phone for what had to be the hundredth time in the last hour. The message remained exactly the same no matter how many times I read it.Something came up. I won’t be able to make it.That was it. One se

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