Page 74 of The Billionaire’s Fake Fiancée
I don't know her, don't remember her face. She's nothing like the ghosts that sometimes whisper at the fringes of my consciousness. And yet, something in her desperation pulls at me.
When she holds out her hand, I grip it and sink down on the bed next to her.
The door shuts behind Neil, but all my attention is taken up by this woman who is my blood mother.
A woman's laughter.
My mother's laughter.
Tinkling of anklets.
My mother loved to dance. Now her once beautiful form is ravaged by disease.
My mother opens her mouth but no words emerge. Her eyes dart to the glass on the nightstand. I pick it up and, helping her sit up, hold it to her lips. She leans against the headboard and gulps down the water.
When she finishes, I place the glass back and turn to her. Her eyes shimmer with tears. This time, it's me who reaches out to grip her hand, clasping it in both of mine.
In her eyes—amber eyes so like mine—I see regret, love, and below it all a spark of anger.
A ripple of emotion races through me. Hurt, anger, affection and something else. A pull of trust. Of deep, unshakeable faith. A certainty that this woman is my mother.
I just know it.
I shake my head, still unable to speak but wanting to tell her it is okay, that I am here now. That we'll figure it out. That it didn't matter what had happened in the past, to get us to this stage.
That it didn't matter how I had come to be wandering around on my own, with no memory at the age of five.
It was enough that she had found me now.
We sit there not saying anything, yet saying so much to each other.
Then Anja begins to speak. She doesn’t stop. It's as if all the words, conversations she'd stored up to have with me—her long-lost daughter?all of it comes pouring out.
She tells me everything.
Anja passes away a week later. I stay with her till the end.
38
Sienna
* * *
Anja was cremated this morning, and I spread her ashes across the waves of the Arabian Sea.
Since she passed away, I've been numb. I'm not sure what I am supposed to feel. Regret at all the time I didn't have with her? Or perhaps I should be grateful that I had a week with her. Right now, I feel empty, as if all my emotions have drained away with her.
Neil and I are back at the bungalow.
So I sit in the study that had once been my father's, hands wrapped around a cup of hot tea, and wait for Neil to speak.
Books line an entire wall and on a mantelpiece sits pictures of a family. My family. One I am getting to know. Of my mother and father and me in happier times.
There are also pictures of me as a baby, as a little girl, till I'd been kidnapped at five.
Those gaps in my memory now have places and colors attached to them, but it still feels alien. As if I'm trying on a skin and finding it doesn't quite fit.
"She missed you a lot and so did your father," Neil says in that soft voice of his, drawing my attention away from the pictures.
