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“Are you serious, Ash?” Suzette whispers in disbelief. Her body flops back into her chair as if she’s boneless.

Tera reaches out and grips my hand again. An anchor to keep me from drifting far away from this harsh reality.

I can’t let this stand—not even a little bit. That means I have to hurt my family to make it clear, and I don’t want to do that.

Everything inside me is twisted up. My skin is itching with nerves. A prickling across the scars like a bad omen of pain to come that I thought I had shed when I became a man.

“You’re not here for Addie, that’s clear now. So, why did you come, Maman?” I ask her in a firm tone and meet her eyes across the table.

Now that everything has been laid out in front of me, I can see how isolated Addie is. She thinks we all want nothing to do with her. Based on everyone’s reactions, it isn’t just Maman who’s been treating her like an enemy.

Maman has been separating her from us, and my sisters have been following her lead. All covered up with polite smiles at the dinner table, and comments I’m starting to see weren’t jokes.

Just like how the sperm donor singled me out. For whatever insane trigger that made me his focus. I’ll never know what it was. I don’t give a shit what it was.

But Addie has it all figured out. She had it figured out when we were kids.

That’s why she never really fought back. Yeah, she yelled and made her own point, but she always backed down and apologized. That’s why her hair was suddenly blonde at the age of thirteen. She’s the only brunette. I know she wore contacts for a long time. I was happy when she stopped.

I never thought about the fact that it stopped after she moved here. That her roots would show, and it wasn’t a big deal anymore. As long as I never mentioned it, that is.

It’s because she didn’t have Maman breathing down her neck that she isn’t a Broussard. She dropped an act that I never knew was happening. Addie got comfortable here while still hearing all of this hate on the phone.

Maman’s mouth works for a second before she mutters, “I’m moving here. To be closer to you and the baby.”

I swallow hard, my face starting to burn with heat. My only tell that I’m more furious than I’d like to be. I take a shaky breath, count to five, and let it out. I’m not used to people understanding and paying attention to all the subtle signs. My family knows them all.

Silence reigns around me, and Tera’s hand clenches hard over mine.

My eyes move to her, taking in her trembling lips and the silent tears tracing her cheeks. Then to Trevor. The asshole that stayed up all night helping Tera while she investigated what I couldn’t. Max. The sounding board that made me go outside and spar with him until I was calmer after all the revelations that came. Every single time I called Addie and got nothing, Max would drag me back outside.

She wants to take them away from me just like she did to Addie. The frosting and sprinkles subtly holding in the cake and filling.

Max and Trevor stare back at me with stony expressions. They know what it will be like if Maman stays in town. We’ve heard Suzette’s stories. Now, we’ve witnessed it in real-time without mercy. There’s no hiding Maman’s manipulations with everything that was said tonight. Especially when she says she’s moving for me and the baby. No concern for Tera or how Trevor and Max will deal with a new baby and Maman in their faces.

The sad thing is, she will never see it. She’s convinced that she’s doing the best she can for her kids. Removing any threats to our happiness and comfort through any dirty means necessary.

Even her own daughter.

Somewhere along the way, Maman lost a few of the screws keeping her mind together, and no one noticed.

It got swept under a rug, just like the sperm donor’s crazy did. And this time, it wasn’t me who suffered in silence.

It breaks a little piece of my soul to know that this happened right in front of me. I was too involved with my own issues to even see the signs. To even think of looking for them. I was so relieved to finally be free from that terror, I held on to it with both hands and never wanted to let go.

I changed, just like Addie. I forced myself to speak without an accent becausehisaccent was so heavy. I didn’t want to be anything like him. I did it for myself, never expecting it to become a trend.

While I struggled to avoid the image of his ghost, Addie was doing the same thing in her own way. Not with her voice, but with her looks.

I have never looked at Adelaide and seen the sperm donor. Not once. All I’ve ever seen is my big sis. My reigning champ.

I didn’t think about what hits she might be taking to keep me safe. How fucking selfish is that?

They may not have been physical hits, but pain is pain. Damage is damage. It takes months for bad injuries to heal. It takes a lifetime for emotional injuries to do the same. You can’t cover up a memory with a tattoo. You’re stuck looking in the mirror and never seeing your own face the right way again.

“What do you think?” Maman asks me the question, but makes it sound like the answer is irrelevant.

“Your house is paid off,” Brad ventures in, glancing at Sophia in confusion. “Moving here would be like starting over. Especially with Joseph’s retirement coming soon.”