Chapter 12 - Elise Refused to Let Me Hide Behind Her
I wanted to turn Lorraine into the only villain.
Elise would not let me.
That may have been the first sign we had any chance of rebuilding something honest.
We were in the kitchen late that night after Ivy had fallen asleep upstairs.
I had just finished saying that Lorraine stole three years from us when Elise stopped me.
“She stole them differently from each of us.”
I frowned.
“What does that mean?”
“She lied to me that you were dead. She blocked me at the hospital. She threatened me. Those things are hers.”
I waited.
“But after you recovered enough to travel?”
I looked away.
“That part is yours.”
I hated hearing it.
Which was exactly why I needed to.
“I hired someone.”
“I know.”
“I wrote.”
“I know.”
“I believed you wanted no contact.”
“You had a daughter.”
“I know.”
“You keep saying that.”
Her voice cracked.
“But you don’t get to turn respecting an alleged boundary into three years of disappearing. You could have filed for contact. Asked a court to locate me. Checked whether support actually reached Ivy. Shown up at the last address you had. Asked someone outside your mother’s orbit.”
Every sentence was accurate.
My injuries explained months.
My mother’s manipulation explained much.
But eventually I had become physically capable of searching harder.
I didn’t.
Why?
The answer was humiliating.
“Because I was afraid.”
Elise stared at me.
“Of what?”
“That you really had left.”
Silence.
“If I found you and you told me yourself that you didn’t want me near Ivy, then I couldn’t blame confusion anymore.”
There it was.
Not logic.
Fear.
Lorraine exploited a weakness already inside me.
The son who avoided confrontation.
The man who packed house keys into a box rather than putting them directly in his partner’s hand.
The father who sent birthday gifts through an intermediary rather than risking hearing no.
Elise sat across from me.
“So don’t tell Ivy someday that Grandma took three years and leave it there.”
I nodded slowly.
“What do I tell her?”
“That Lorraine lied.”
A pause.
“And that her father should have fought harder to find the truth.”
It hurt.
It was also the first answer that felt clean.
I looked toward the ceiling, imagining Ivy asleep in a room she had never known belonged to her family.
“What about you?”
Elise leaned back.
“What about me?”
“Did you stop looking because you were afraid too?”
Her expression changed.
“Yes.”
The honesty surprised me.
“Of what?”
“That I’d discover you were alive.”
I stared.
She laughed through sudden tears.
“You think that would’ve been good news after a year?”
I said nothing.
“If you were alive and hadn’t come for us, then I had to believe you chose that. Some days it was easier to keep the dead version of you than risk learning the living one didn’t want his daughter.”
For the first time, our failures faced each other without Lorraine between them.
She had built the lie.
We had both, in different ways, become afraid to test it.
That didn’t reduce her responsibility.
It explained why the machinery kept working long after the first deception.
And it gave the final confrontation a different purpose.
We didn’t need Lorraine to tell us whether we loved each other.
May you like
We needed her to answer why our independence frightened her enough to do this.
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