The room had gone still yet again, not tense, not shocked, just... quiet. It was the kind of quiet that ca when truth finally arrived, not with drama or rage, but with gentleness and finality.
"Roman never ant to leave you hanging..." Ian said quietly, adding,
"He passed." The words landed softly, but their weight was imasurable.
Geneva, proud, composed, the kind who kept her back straight even through storms, closed her eyes. It was just for a mont.
Then opened them again, glistening, though no tears fell. She nodded once, as if to say I hear you. I accept it. I already suspected it. No, I knew, but I needed soone to say it. Soone to confirm it. Given that Roman was a Fae and a royal at that, Geneva knew she might never have lived to find out about this piece of news.
"Thank you," she whispered, and her voice cracked like worn silk. "That was all I ever needed to know."
Alex, silent until now, drew her gently into his arms. There was no jealousy in his eyes. Only compassion. Only understanding of a woman who had lived many lives before him. This was a mutual understanding they had arrived at long before they got married.
Deep down, Alex was sohow glad because he knew he would never have been able to keep his promise to let Geneva go back to Roman after all that had happened and after all the ti they had spent together as a couple. It would have literally broken him. A huge weight and a knot in his heart had been lifted.
Geneva rested her head on his shoulder, her body softening for the first ti in a long while. In that ti, she was no more Geneva Thornston, she was the maiden Geneva... the one who had her heart broken by one and pieced together by another.
Given another chance, Geneva knew that she would have made the sa decision and married Alex. She loved her boys equally, though they were from different n whom she had loved differently, but no less.
Geneva would never have known the outco of her life if Roman had stayed alive. But she did not want to dwell on that. It was decades ago, and the past should be left there. It wasn’t as easy, though. Roman’s place in her heart had never been occupied. Alex just occupied a different part, and this gave Geneva the room she needed to grieve properly.
In those decades, though Geneva had long since stopped speaking Roman’s na, the grief rose anyway — not a wail, not a sob, but a tremble in her fingers, a tightening in her throat.
"He never said goodbye," she murmured. "I thought... I always thought I wasn’t enough... it turned out that he really had no choice. What a cruel world!?"
Geneva’s eyes took on a faraway look, as if she was indulging in those mories. Alex did not react because they had that agreent between them. This made Geneva open up enough about her feelings in front of Alex. It was sowhat surprising for Alex that Geneva would show her vulnerable form in front of their kids and grandchildren.
No one interrupted her, nor did they offer platitudes.
By so silent agreent, they simply let her grieve—not as a widow, not as a wife, but as a woman once left without closure, now finally given a thread to tie back into her heart. This ti, even Gabriel did not make a sound. It was around that ti that Alex’s phone buzzed.
***
The dia scrambled for the story like no other, and for the Thornston sisters, they were unfortunate to be on the receiving end.
The news outlets and all chatrooms had enough to prey on, from Ian and Shelby’s reappearance to Aliya’s sudden disappearance. Aliya had spent almost every day giving one interview or another, and this day was the only one that they had yet to see her.
Obviously, there were many speculations, and most stemd from the fact that she was hiding now that Ian was openly supporting Shelby. However, out of all this, the most dominant news was about the Thornston sisters. It didn’t take long before reporters surrounded their ho.
The sisters had not stepped outside since the broadcast. Not a single foot past the marble threshold. They remained so, for a while, and in that ti, they did not have the heart to move past the humiliation they felt. Imdiately after they got ho, Sally called Alex, and the phone rang several tis with no answer, but Sally never gave up until the line was blocked by him.
In truth, the sisters had spent days in a stunned daze, replaying every mont of the live unravelling over and over again in their minds. Days passed without them making any contact with the outside world, and the reporters never left.
The reporters were like hyenas, searching for the perfect evidence to support their stories. The sisters’ fall from grace had not just been public — it had been seismic.
But the most jarring thing for the sisters in their ho wasn’t the headlines. It was the quiet.
At first, they hadn’t noticed it — too busy nursing their wounds and screaming at each other behind closed doors. But slowly, the silence in the house had begun to feel strange and cold. Their morning tea ca late. Their clothing was pressed but not perfud, sotis not even pressed or brought to their closet, as was the norm in their household.
Their lunch trays arrived lukewarm and not as organized as was done usually. Their evening baths had to be drawn twice, not because they were picky, but because the first ones had been filled with too much water and were ice-cold. They had to call for what felt like forever before any attendant ca to them.
Though Dumb, Dumber and Dumbest had complained of this attitude or more like whined, Sally and Molly were stuck in their own dilemma and didn’t have the ti to deal with their sons’ non-existent issues.
None of their usual contacts in the company gave them any ear. They were all very hesitant to interact with them. Also, using the excuse that they were not Thornstons, their shares had been taken away, with no room for them to fight for them. There was a clause in their share allocation that said certain conditions nullified their stake, and this situation they found themselves in was a classic example.
The clause did not stipulate that their blood invalidated their claim; in the sisters’ case, it was because of the press conference and its implications on the company’s growth that had beco their undoing.
With all this going on, Sally and Molly did not notice that their house was on fire and trouble was brewing.
It dawned on them one uncomfortable evening, when Sally snapped at a maid, and the girl barely concealed a look of disdain. She curtsied, but the mockery in her eyes was unmistakable.
"Did you see that?" Sally hissed, both furious and surprised.
"She didn’t even bow properly."
Molly was quiet for a beat. Then:
"They know."
"Of course they know! How could we have overlooked this important fact?"
The realization hit them like a slap. Of course, the servants knew. The whole world knew. And these weren’t ordinary house staff. They were legacy employees—raised in loyalty to the family, trained under a code they themselves had pushed for.
Molly had been the best advocate of how the workers were treated and how they were trained. Their training was to make sure that their absolute loyalty was to the family and that was how they had controlled Katie and every other person. Molly was the one to see what the issue was.
It took Sally a while to catch up. For now, that they were no longer family... that very code they had preached had turned against them.
It was poetic and a little pathetic because being on the receiving end of sa was very disconcerting.
Painfully so.
They tried to regain so of their forr footing. Summoning the head butler only to find he no longer answered their calls directly. Making a scene over dinner quality, only to be t with cool professionalism that cut deeper than insults.
The man treated them with extre politeness but blatant hostility, and even he was being civil. The rest, not so much. It was as if he and the rest of the workers were waiting for an event or a ti to do whatever he wanted to do. Molly was unsure of what to do, though she was the one with ideas. Every tray, every folded towel, every drawn curtain now bore the invisible imprint of quiet rejection.
They were not welco in their own ho! They had been in their circles long enough to understand the language that was being spoken.
"Do you think they’ll actually kick us out?" Sally asked one evening, her voice tight.
"We built this ho... well, not the brick and mortar, but every décor and vase in here were carefully selected by us and placed as they should be! What should we do now, sister? WHAT SHOULD WE DO?!!!"
"Nothing!" Molly said grimly. "We just lived in it."
The silence returned, this ti heavier — like a house that had already made its choice. And when they thought they had experienced it all, another tough pill to swallow manifested.
*********
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