Chapter 107

The restaurant occupied the entire top floor of a Midtown hotel, overlooking Central Park. Camille arrived fifteen minutes early, a tactic Victoria had taught her: secure the position of power, choose your seat, control the encounter from the first moment. She selected a corner table with her back to the wall, facing both elevators. The host seated her with a professional smile, leaving her alone with her thoughts and a sparkling water she wouldn’t drink.

Camille smoothed her navy dress, a simple design that concealed the tension in her body. The silver rose pendant Alexander had returned to her hung at her throat, a reminder of who she had been before Rose’s betrayal, before Victoria’s transformation. Her phone buzzed with a text from Alexander: Everything okay?

She typed: They haven’t arrived yet.

I’m in the lobby if you need me.

A small smile touched her lips. Alexander hadn’t questioned her decision to face her parents alone, but he’d insisted on accompanying her to the hotel. Her shield, waiting in the background.

The elevator doors opened, and Camille’s smile vanished. Her stomach tightened into a knot. Margaret and Richard Lewis stepped into the restaurant, looking smaller than she remembered. Her mother scanned the space, hands clutched around her purse. Her father stood slightly behind, his shoulders rounded in a way Camille had never seen before.

They spotted her, hesitated, then walked toward her table with careful steps. Camille did not stand, did not smile, did not offer her cheek for the kiss her mother leaned in to give before thinking better of it.

“Camille,” Margaret said, the name catching in her throat. “Thank you for, for agreeing to meet us.”

“Please,” Richard gestured to the chairs. “May we sit?”

Camille nodded, her face revealing nothing. Victoria would have been proud. They settled awkwardly, all the social graces they’d drilled into her now useless in the face of their broken relationship.

“You look well,” her mother tried. “Healthy.”

“I am,” Camille kept her voice neutral. “Victoria takes good care of her investments.”

Her mother flinched at the word “investments.” Her father cleared his throat.

“Camille, we…” Richard began.

“Why did you want to meet?” Camille cut him off. Direct. No small talk.

Her parents exchanged glances. Margaret nodded slightly, and Richard reached down for a leather satchel he’d placed beside his chair. He removed a flat package wrapped in blue cloth and placed it on the table.

“We wanted to give you these,” he said. “They’re yours. They’ve always been yours.”

Camille didn’t touch the package. “What is it?”

Margaret’s eyes filled with tears. “Your journals. From when you were a girl. Before… Before Rose came.”

The words hit Camille like a physical blow. Her journals. The ones Rose had found and read aloud mockingly. The ones that had disappeared after her “accident.”

“You kept them?” Camille couldn’t hide her surprise.

“We found them when we were cleaning out your old room,” Richard explained. “After your… after the news about your car in the river. We couldn’t bear to throw them away.”

Camille looked at the package, still not touching it. “And now you want to return them because you know I’m alive.”

“No,” Margaret shook her head, a tear spilling down her cheek. “We want to return them because we’ve read them. All of them. And we…” Her voice broke completely.

Richard covered his wife’s hand with his own. “We failed you, Camille. In ways we’re only beginning to understand. Your journals, they show a pattern we were too blind to see.”

A server approached, sensing the tension. Camille requested water for the table and said they weren’t ready to order. When the server left, she reached for the package, unwrapping it with careful fingers. Inside lay five notebooks of different colors and sizes. Her childhood handwriting filled their pages.

“What pattern?” Camille asked, though she already knew.

Margaret wiped her tears. “How Rose manipulated all of us. How we always took her side. How we… punished you for things that weren’t your fault.”

“Read the green one,” Richard said softly. “Page twenty-three.”

Camille hesitated, then opened the small green notebook. Her thirteen-year-old self had written:

Mom yelled at me again for making Rose feel unwelcome. But I DIDN’T. I asked her to come to the movies with me and Jenna, and she said yes, and then she didn’t show up. And when I got home, she told Mom I left without her on purpose. Why doesn’t Mom ever believe me? Rose smiled when Mom sent me to my room. She SMILED. Like she PLANNED it.

The memory flooded back: waiting in the lobby for Rose, who never came; the sick feeling knowing what would happen when she got home; the helplessness of not being believed.

“There are dozens of entries like that,” Margaret said, her voice hollow with regret. “So many times we took Rose’s word over yours.”

Camille closed the journal. “Why are you showing me this now?”

“Because we owe you the truth,” Richard said. “That we see it now. What Rose did. What we allowed her to do.”

“And we want to apologize,” Margaret added. “Not because we expect forgiveness. We don’t deserve that. But because you deserve to hear it.”

Camille stared at them, these strangers who shared her blood. She had imagined this moment, confronting them, making them suffer for their betrayal, walking away triumphant. Victoria had trained her for that scenario. But Victoria hadn’t prepared her for genuine remorse, for her proud father with reddened eyes, for her perfectly composed mother reduced to tears.

“You chose her,” Camille said, harder than she intended. “When I told you about her affair with Stefan. When I needed you most. You chose her.”

“Yes,” Richard admitted. “And it will haunt us for the rest of our lives.”

“We believed what we wanted to believe,” Margaret added. “That our perfect family couldn’t possibly hide such ugly truths. That our adopted daughter couldn’t be capable of such calculation.”

“And then she tried to kill me,” Camille said flatly.

Her parents flinched.

“Yes,” Margaret whispered. “And we didn’t know. Not until it was too late.”

“We’re not asking for forgiveness,” Richard said. “Or for you to come back to us. We know that’s not possible.”

“What do you want, then?” Camille asked, steadier than she felt.

Margaret reached across the table, stopping just short of touching Camille’s hand. “Just… to know you. In whatever way you’ll allow. On your terms.”

“To be whatever you’ll permit us to be in your life,” Richard added. “Even if it’s just distant acquaintances who meet for coffee once a year.”

Camille looked down at the journals, the tangible evidence of her childhood suffering, preserved by the very people who had failed to protect her from it.

“I don’t know if I can do that,” she said honestly.

“We understand,” Margaret nodded, drawing back her hand. “The journals are yours regardless. No strings attached.”

A strange feeling washed over Camille, not quite forgiveness, but something adjacent to it. Recognition, perhaps, that her parents were as human and flawed as she was. That Rose had manipulated them too, in her way.

“I need time,” Camille said finally. “This isn’t something I can decide today.”

Hope flickered in her mother’s eyes, fragile, cautious hope. “Of course. Take all the time you need.”

“But,” Camille continued, “I could perhaps… meet occasionally. Not at the house. Not with Rose.” Her voice hardened on her sister’s name. “Neutral ground, like this. Just to talk.”

The relief on her parents’ faces was painful to witness. It spoke of months of grief, of regret, of the terrible belief that their daughter was dead, and then the equally terrible knowledge that she had survived only to rightfully despise them.

“Thank you,” Richard said, his voice rough with emotion. “That’s more than we dared hope for.”

They ordered food mechanically, none of them particularly interested in eating. As her parents engaged with the server, Camille studied them with new eyes. They had aged years in the months since she’d left. Gray dominated her father’s hair now. Lines had deepened around her mother’s mouth.

When the server left, a silence fell over the table, the uncomfortable silence of people who once knew everything about each other and now were nearly strangers.

“We saw the news about the Phoenix Grid,” her father said finally, grasping for neutral territory. “It’s an extraordinary project.”

“Yes, it is.” Camille allowed herself a small bit of pride. “It will transform the city’s power infrastructure completely.”

“Are you… happy, Camille?” her mother asked suddenly, the question so direct that it caught Camille off guard. “With Victoria? With this new life?”

Camille considered the question, not allowing herself the easy lie. “I’m… becoming who I need to be. Happiness wasn’t the goal at first. Survival was. Then justice.”

“And now?” Richard asked quietly.

An image of Alexander flashed in Camille’s mind, his smile, his steady presence, the way he looked at her as if seeing all of her. “Now, there might be room for more than that.”

Margaret nodded, understanding something in Camille’s tone. “I’m glad. You deserve that. You always did.”

They ate in awkward silence. When the meal ended, they stood together, the moment of parting equally awkward.

“May I…” Margaret began hesitantly, “may I hug you? Just once?”

Camille hesitated, then gave a small nod. Her mother’s arms went around her, familiar yet strange, the scent of her perfume unleashing a flood of memories both good and painful. The embrace was brief, slightly stiff, but genuine.

Richard didn’t ask for a hug, respecting the boundaries Camille had established. “Take care of yourself,” he said simply. “We’re here if… when you’re ready.”

Camille watched them walk to the elevator, looking smaller and more fragile than the parents who had once loomed so large in her life. As the doors closed behind them, she sat back down, her hands trembling slightly as she reached for the journals.

She opened the green one again, flipping through pages of her younger self’s handwriting. Pain and joy and ordinary days captured in a child’s words.

Her phone buzzed. Alexander: How did it go?

Camille stared at the text, unsure how to answer. Not well. Not badly. Something in between.

They brought my childhood journals, she typed.

Three dots appeared immediately, then: Are you okay?

The question lingered on her screen. Was she? The meeting had opened old wounds, but something else too, a tiny crack in the wall she’d built around her heart. Not forgiveness. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But acknowledgment, at least, that healing might someday be possible.

I think I will be, she replied finally. Coming down now.

Camille gathered the journals, each one a piece of her past she’d thought lost forever. As she rode the elevator down, she felt strangely lighter, as if she’d set down a burden she hadn’t realized she was carrying.

She’d expected to feel triumph in facing her parents, in showing them the powerful woman she’d become without them. Instead, she felt something more complicated: grief for what had been lost, relief at the truth finally being acknowledged, and a tiny, cautious seed of possibility for a different future than the one Victoria had planned.

Alexander waited in the lobby, his face lighting up when he saw her. He didn’t ask questions, simply offered his hand. Camille took it, feeling its strength and steadiness.

“Let’s go home,” she said.

But as they walked out into the bright afternoon sun, Camille wondered, with Victoria’s mansion on one side and her parents’ house on the other, where home really was. And if, someday, she might build one that was truly her own.