All Chapters of Love, Lies, and a Billionaire's Regret : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

PENELOPE "I...I...Umm," I stuttered."Well, since she doesn't know how to say it, let me..." Seraphina interrupted."...Enough!!" Jonathan cuts in abruptly."I will answer you, I will answer everything but not in this park with people watching and phones raised and her standing there enjoying every second of it." I glanced at Seraphina. "That is what she wants and I'm not ready to give her what she wants."Phew!! That was a close one.Jonathan took one step back which was not him agreeing to it but him giving me the space I requested.Seraphina had been watching us with her arms loosely crossed, that posture indicates that she has already seen and knows the ending of it."How irresponsible she is to have a child who doesn't have a father," she said. "Stop," Jonathan ordered."I'm just making an observation." She rolled her eyes at me. "You've always been good at buying time, Penelope. stalling and making people wait until the moment passes and everyone forgets what the question was.

PENELOPE Seraphina moved first...She walked toward the officers with the confidence that she had been waiting for this exact moment and had already planned what she would say. She smoothed the front of her coat. Touched her cheek once, where the red mark still sat. "Thank you for coming," she said, her voice pitched perfectly with concern. Her voice is that of a reasonable woman in a distressing situation. "I wasn't sure someone would actually call." The first officer, a broad-shouldered man with a notepad already out, looked at her cheek. "Are you injured, ma'am?" "I'm okay." She touched it again. "It was just a tense moment. I don't want to make this bigger than it needs to be. I just want everyone to be safe." She glanced toward me. "Especially the child." As invisible as the words were, I felt their weight on me The second officer, a younger female had already moved her eyes to Nora in my arms. "Ma'am." She stepped toward me. "Are you the child's mother?" "Yes," I said.

PENELOPE I simply walked to his car after much thought on it. After all, this was just it and nothing more. As I closed the car door, the noise dropped immediately and the crowd outside became muffled, then distant, then just movement seen through tinted glass. The sirens were still audible but reduced like something happening in another version of the afternoon. The driver pulled out when he suspected that I was properly seated then he zoomed off. I sat behind the passenger seat. Jonathan sat beside me and nora was in my arms, still wrapped in his jacket, her eyes half-open now with the drowsy alertness of a baby who had worn herself out and was now hovering at the edge of sleep. I looked at the window and the park disappeared completely from my vision. it was now being replaced by streets. Nobody spoke for three full minutes. The driver kept his eyes forward. Invisible in the way good drivers are. Nora's breathing slowed. I felt it before I confirmed it, the weight

Penelope's pov"Start with the river," Jonathan insisted.Seraphina moved to the sofa and sat down, not nervously, of course. She sat the way she always sat, like the furniture had been arranged for her arrival. She crossed her legs and rested one hand on her knee and looked at us calmly, deciding how much to say."Sit down," she said. "Both of you. This isn't a courtroom.""It feels like one," I said. "Start talking." I didn't raise my voice.Jonathan moved to stand beside the chair from her. He placed one hand on the back of it and stood there and waited just like he had been waiting for this moment for far longer than he realised.Seraphina exhaled deeply."We were children," she said. "You were nine and I was seven. Penelope was nine too. We were at the Westfield property for the summer, the big one with the grounds and the river at the back.""I remember almost drowning," Jonathan said. "I remember being pulled out. I remember waking up on the grass." He looked at her. "I remem

"They knew." I said it into the air, because saying it was the only way to confirm it was real and not something I had misheard. "Yes," Seraphina said. "They sat you down. They heard the truth and they sat you down and told you to keep lying." "They told me the story was better as it was." she explained. I looked at my sister, the woman I had grown up beside, who I had eaten at the same table with, worn her birthday dresses while I stood to the side at every party. "I was nine years old," I said. "And my parents sat in a room and decided that a lie about who I was, about what I had done, about my courage and my worth, was less important than how our family looked to Jonathan's." Jonathan was very still on the other side of the room. My parents had known. I went back through every memory I had of our family after the river incident. Every dinner, every holiday photograph, every moment my mother had told me to be understanding, every time my father had used that voice, the one