Chapter 558

Olivia

I felt as though the ground had opened up beneath my feet, swallowing me into a chasm of nothingness. Maybe I was having a nightmare—yes, that had to be it.

But when I reached out and gripped the edge of the table, only to find that it was as infallible and grounding as ever, I knew that it had to be real.

“I… I can’t…” The words caught in my throat as my gaze flickered between Freya and Clarissa—this woman who I had had some sort of strange connection with, only to discover that she was somehow my late mother. “How is this possible?”

Clarissa—no, Giselle, my mother—seemed to share in my bewilderment. “I understand your confusion, Olivia,” she said softly. “Everything that Freya—my sister—just told you is purely thanks to some scrying work that she was able to accomplish. My amnesia is still intact.”

“So you can’t remember the truth,” I said.

She paused, drawing in a fortifying breath before continuing. “All I know is that I was taken,” she murmured. “Brought into that... that ‘program’, as they called it, and subjected to treatments and medications, always under the pretense that I was being helped. That they were trying to cure some unnamed disease ravaging my body.”

“They never told you what it really was?” I asked. “Cancer?”

Clarissa shook her head. “Never. And I’m not sure why they wanted me so badly, or why they went to such efforts to treat the cancer. But they did.”

A tremor passed through me at her words, the revulsion curdling in my gut. On one hand, assuming all of this was even true, they had cured my mother’s cancer.

But on the other hand, she had gone through so many horrors just to get here. I would have gotten up and hugged her, had I not been completely frozen to my chair.

Freya laid a steadying hand on my forearm, pulling me back to the present. “I’m sure you’re wondering how you didn’t recognize your own mother.”

I nodded stiffly, part of myself hating the fact that I was so utterly speechless. Of course we had felt our bond, and I knew that we looked similar, but I hadn’t put two and two together. Clarissa didn’t really look like my mother.

“There are some… differences in your face,” I said softly, looking over at Clarissa. “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but…”

“Of course not.” Clarissa looked over at Freya, silently urging her to continue. It seemed, judging from the tears in her eyes, that maybe she lacked the ability to speak or move right now in the same way I did.

Freya sighed. “Part of the reason neither of you could recognize the other was because of how much time had passed,” she explained. “But they also... altered Giselle’s appearance. Subtle changes through plastic surgery; a rhinoplasty here, a brow lift there. All designed to hide her identity, to keep her from being recognized should she ever encounter her family again.”

“It’s true,” Clarissa choked out. “All of the girls in the ‘program’ were forced to undergo plastic surgery in order to keep us from being recognized.”

As I looked at her, I could finally see it.

The elegant slope of her nose, so familiar and yet… not quite. The arch of her brows, the line of her jaw... all bearing the vague features of the woman I had once known, and yet so different.

They had changed her, molded her. Twisted and remodeled her very image just to suit their whims.

A ragged sound tumbled from my lips, somewhere between a wounded cry and a breathless keen of anguish. My hands shook uncontrollably as they rose to cover my mouth, as if that would somehow keep another sob from coming out.

It was true. Clarissa—Giselle—was my mother.

She was alive.

The realization crashed onto me like a thousand pound weight, and suddenly, I felt utterly breathless—as if the wind had been knocked out of me. Beside me, Nathan continued to sit silently, but his arm around my shoulders no longer felt like it was tethering me to reality.

It was all I could do to steady myself and croak out the tiniest word.

“Mom?”

That single word seemed to shatter what was left of her composure. Without a word, my mother suddenly stood and ran around the table to meet me. I stood as well, crashing into her arms. Now, finally, it all made sense—all of the moments where I had felt so comforted by her embrace, so at home in her arms.

Because she was my mother.

When we finally pulled apart, my eyes were so misted over with tears that I could barely see her face. I managed to blink them away, and looked up into my mother’s eyes for the first time in nearly two decades; and for the first time in all that time, I felt so small, like a child whose knee had been scraped.

But even then, as I looked at her, I knew that it wouldn’t be the same. I remembered everything about her, every moment, but she remembered nothing before that first night she met me at Dan’s dinner party.

“The amnesia,” I choked out, taking a step back and turning to look at Freya. “There has to be a way to cure it.”

Freya said nothing, but the downward, sympathetic slope of her eyebrows said it all.

“No,” I murmured, shaking my head. “There has to be a way. We’ll find a way, mom. We can restore your memories. I’ll do whatever I can—”

Before I could finish, my mother cupped my face in her hands and turned me to look at her.

“I may never fully remember our lives together,” she said softly, “but from the moment we met, I knew there was a bond between us. One that defied explanation, but was undeniable all the same. Nothing can take away the bond of a mother and her child. Nothing.”

She brushed away the tears streaking my cheeks. “That’s why I was so drawn to you, Nathan, the twins…” A soft hitch broke her words as her gaze drifted towards the stairs leading up to the nursery. “My true family.”

The realization struck me then; those moments when I had watched how lovingly Clarissa had interacted with the twins was no mere coincidence. She had felt the same bond with her grandchildren that she felt with me.

“Would you…” I gestured toward the stairs. “Would you like to see them?”

She could only nod as the tears that had been welling up in her eyes began to pour over.

Quietly so as not to wake the twins, the four of us made our way up the stairs and down the hall to the nursery, where the door still lay cracked open. I carefully pushed the door open, peeking my head in to see that the twins were still fast asleep in their cribs.

“Little angels…” Clarissa whispered, stepping forward as if in a trance. I stood there in the doorway, not wanting to get in the way of the moment as she quietly walked up to them and kneeled by their cribs, reaching her hands in to stroke their small faces.

As I stood there, watching, I couldn’t help but feel my chest tighten around the knot that had formed there. It was unbelievable, even now, even after I had felt my mother’s arms wrapping around me for the first time in nearly twenty years.

But it was true. As I looked at her, and at Freya, and at Nathan, I knew it was true. Another miracle to add to the growing pile; and now, after everything we had been through, our family had grown by one more.

Slowly, Nathan stepped up beside me and wrapped his arm around my shoulders again. When I looked up at him, there was still a look of disbelief in his eyes—but it was overshadowed by the pure joy that we both felt in this moment.

He looked over at me, and a grin spread across his face.

“I told you that you two looked alike.”