Chapter 5 - Camille Wanted Mateo to Choose
Mateo stared at her.
“What does that mean?”
Camille finally stopped denying the emotional truth.
“You were trying to make everyone happy.”
“That is somehow the problem?”
“You told Lila nothing would change.”
“She was scared.”
“And it wasn’t true.”
Mateo said nothing.
Camille continued.
Noah came home from the hospital three weeks earlier.
Newborn schedules reshaped the house immediately.
Mateo woke at night.
Worked from home more.
Lila heard crying at two in the morning.
Her bedtime routines shifted.
The nursery became the center of the upstairs floor.
Yet every time Lila asked:
“Will you still read to me?”
“Will Noah take my room?”
“Do you love him more?”
Mateo answered:
“Nothing changes.”
Camille hated it.
Not because she wanted Lila frightened.
Because she believed he was refusing to help his daughter face reality.
“So you created fake behavior?” he asked.
Camille shook her head.
“That wasn’t how it started.”
The first missing object had been real.
Noah’s sock.
Camille found it inside Lila’s toy basket.
Lila probably carried it there accidentally while helping with laundry.
No malicious intent.
But Camille noticed Mateo’s reaction.
He became attentive.
He sat with Lila.
Asked how she felt about Noah.
For the first time, father and daughter actually talked about jealousy.
Camille thought:
Finally.
Then nothing else happened.
Mateo returned to saying everything was fine.
So Camille created the next incident.
A pacifier clip.
Small.
Harmless.
Something that forced another conversation.
Mateo stared at her in disbelief.
“You manufactured a problem because you thought it improved communication?”
“At first.”
“At first.”
That distinction terrified him.
“What changed?”
Camille looked away.
The second incident produced no punishment.
Mateo again reassured Lila.
Then spent the evening with her.
Camille felt excluded.
Not from Mateo romantically.
From the emotional center of the family.
She had given birth to Noah only weeks earlier.
The entire household asked whether the baby slept.
Whether Mateo was adjusting.
Whether Lila was jealous.
Almost nobody asked how Camille was adjusting to becoming a mother while also parenting a four-year-old who already had a bond with Mateo she could never replicate.
Mateo felt anger rising.
He also heard pain.
The two could coexist.
“You could have told me.”
“I tried.”
“When?”
“When I said I felt like I was living inside a family that existed before me.”
Mateo remembered.
He answered:
“That’s not fair to Lila.”
Camille nodded bitterly.
“Exactly.”
He had heard every expression of loneliness as an accusation against his daughter.
So Camille stopped saying it directly.
Then started manipulating situations instead.
The explanation did not excuse anything.
It did reveal how the pattern grew.
But one question remained.
May you like
Why hide all the objects under Noah’s crib?
If the point was only to stage incidents, why keep evidence linking them together?
