Ch: 7 The Message From Talia.

Nerissa's POV

The phone buzzed against the duvet, face-down where I'd left it, and I almost ignored it. But the buzz wasn't a call. It was a single text, short and sharp, so I turned the phone over despite myself.

Talia Blackwood: "I finally got good news today. Five years of leaching off my family, and now you are finally gone. Now you finally got the hint and moved out. Stay out, bitch."

I read it twice. Then a third time, slower, like I was waiting for the words to rearrange themselves into something less ugly. They didn't.

A short laugh escaped me, dry and humorless, the kind of sound that came out when something hurt too much to cry about and too little to mean anything at all. Five years of biting my tongue at that dinner table, five years of swallowing Talia's insults and keeping the peace, and this was the message waiting for me on the other side of the world. Not concern. Not even curiosity about why I'd left. Just relief, gleeful and petty, dressed up in a text she probably typed with one thumb while she did her makeup.

I sat up against the pillows and stared at the ceiling of my old suite, letting the anger settle into something colder and more useful. Talia had never once seen me as a person. To her, I had always been a symptom of the family's misfortune, a reminder that the Blackwoods had once needed saving. It was easier to hate the woman who'd handed them the rope than to admit they'd been the ones drowning.

My thumb hovered over the screen. Every instinct told me to set the phone down, to let the silence answer for me the way it always had. But something in me wanted her to know exactly who she'd been insulting.

I typed four words, deleted them, and typed four different ones instead.

Me: "You'll want to sit down for the next part."

I didn't wait for a reply. I turned the phone face-down again and closed my eyes, but sleep wouldn't come. My mind kept circling back to the mansion, to the study, to the moment Lysander would have found the envelope. I pictured his hands closing around the ultrasound photo, his face draining of color the way mine must have when the doctor first told me the results. I wondered if he'd felt anything at all.

I told myself it didn't matter. 

I told myself that a lot, that night.

A soft knock came at the door sometime later, and Henri's voice followed it, low and apologetic. "Miss Nerissa. Forgive the intrusion. There's a call on the estate line. A Mrs. Malia Blackwood. She's asked three times in the last hour."

I sat up slowly, pressing the heels of my palms against my eyes. Of course it was Malia. Malia, who had never once made me feel like a stranger in that house, who had held my hand in the hospital and cried harder than I had. If there was one person in that family whose voice I could bear to hear right now, it would be hers. But bearing it and wanting it were two very different things.

"Tell her I'll call her back tomorrow," I said. "Tell her I'm safe. Tell her" I stopped, searching for the right words, the ones that wouldn't unravel me. "Tell her I need a few days."

"Of course, Miss." Henri didn't move right away. I heard the small hesitation in the pause before his footsteps retreated down the hall, the kind of hesitation that meant he wanted to say something and had decided against it. I was grateful for that. I didn't think I could survive kindness from anyone else tonight.

The phone buzzed again on the duvet. Talia, predictably, hadn't been able to let four words sit without chasing them.

Talia Blackwood: "Sit down for what? Are you seriously trying to threaten me from wherever you crawled off to? My brother is FINALLY free of you. Nothing you say changes that."

Talia's message sat there glowing on the screen, and I felt the old reflex rise in me — the urge to shrink, to apologize for existing, to let her have the last word. I closed my eyes and made myself breathe through it.

I wasn't going to hand her my name. Not yet. Whatever I said next couldn't undo five years of silence, and it didn't need to. It just needed to be true.

Me: "You don't have to believe anything I say, Talia. You'll understand soon enough. Take care of yourself."

I hit send and turned the phone face-down, resisting the urge to watch for the three dots that would tell me she was typing again. Whatever she said back, I already knew it wouldn't change anything. Talia had built her whole understanding of me out of scraps, she basically sees me as a gold-digger, opportunist, placeholder  and no text message was going to dismantle five years of that in one exchange. Better to let her sit with the uncertainty. Better to let the silence do what my explanations never could.

Sleep didn't come easily, but eventually exhaustion won out over the noise in my head, and I woke to pale gold light slanting through the curtains and the quiet, ordered sounds of the estate coming to life below — footsteps on stone, the distant clink of china, a door closing somewhere down the hall. For a moment, lying there with my eyes still closed, I let myself forget where I was. Then memory returned all at once, heavy and complete, and I sat up.

My phone had collected a small pile of notifications overnight. The missed calls from Lysander had climbed from eleven to nineteen. There were no new messages from Talia, which felt like its own kind of answer. And there was one unfamiliar number, a text sitting at the top of the list.

Unknown Number: "Nerissa. It's Lysander.