Chapter 11: What Torsten Kept

At one in the morning my mother knocked on my hotel door.

I looked through the peephole.

She stood in the corridor in her evening gown, with a coat thrown over it.

She was holding the green leather box with both hands.

I opened the door a hand's width.

"Kerensa," she said.

"Please."

"It's one in the morning."

"I couldn't wait."

I let her in and did not offer her a seat.

She stood in the middle of the room and held the box out to me.

"It's yours," she said.

"It was always going to be yours. Your grandmother wanted you to have it."

"My grandmother isn't my grandmother."

My mother flinched.

I hadn't meant to be cruel.

I had meant to be accurate.

"She loved you," my mother said.

"She held you at the christening. She sang to you."

"Did she?"

"We all did."

"Mother," I said.

I had not called her that in five years.

It came out before I could stop it.

Her whole face broke.

"Then you do remember."

"I remember that you stood on the staircase and told me to be out by noon."

"I was frightened."

"Of what?"

"Of the scandal," my mother said.

"Of the newspapers, and what your father would do. Lydia said she'd go to the papers about the test unless we chose."

"So you chose."

"We had to choose between you."

"No," I said.

"You had to choose between a daughter you raised and a daughter you found. You picked the one who threatened you."

My mother set the box on the dresser.

Her hands were trembling.

"I don't know how to ask you to forgive me," she said.

"Then don't."

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Name Was Banned, But My Success Was Unstoppable from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.