There was a brief pause before Ansel spoke again, still trying to reassure me.
"Alright, I'll come home right away to be with you."
He didn't question why I had canceled.
It wasn't that his love for me was so deep that he could overlook my whims. It was simply that he had successfully offered the blood-bound ring to Elara in that carefully orchestrated setting. I was merely his backup plan for when the proposal didn't go as expected.
As Ansel walked in, I was just coming out of the bathroom. Seeing Elara behind him, I couldn't help but frown.
"Why did you bring her here?" I asked warningly.
Was he really so eager to rub my face in it?
Ansel, looking a bit guilty, rubbed his nose. "Serafina, I ran into Elara downstairs and found out she lives on the next block over. She heard you were back in Clearmont Harbor and insisted on coming up to apologize…"
I watched him coldly, unimpressed by his performance. The compound was quiet around us, the kind of silence that settles in a house where the wrong word can change everything. One of Ansel's men stood just outside the door, close enough to hear, pretending not to.
"Serafina, my mother and I were in the wrong back then. I'm apologizing on her behalf. Can you find it in yourself to forgive us?"
Elara's head tilted slightly to the right, her smile softening into something that looked, to anyone who didn't know better, like genuine remorse.
I turned to Ansel, my voice shaking.
"So, you think I should forgive them, both mother and daughter?"
The pain of a ruptured eardrum. The numbness from bamboo whips. The torment of seeing my mother's belongings reduced to ashes, her correspondence burned, the backup cipher keys and personal letters gone forever because Vittoria Corsetti decided the first wife's memory had no place in her house.
I didn't ask why he fell for Elara. It would have made me seem too weak.
As I stubbornly waited for his response, Ansel's guilt seemed to dissolve into the air. His fingers drifted to the base of his left ring finger, brushing the bare skin there, and then he spoke.
"Serafina, Elara was just a kid back then. She didn't understand right from wrong. She's been remorseful for years and has already apologized to you. Why hold onto the past so tightly?"
The physical and emotional abuse that threw me into an endless abyss. That's what he called the past.