Page 62 of The Haunted Hotel

“He’s kinda not talking to me,” I admit with a sigh. “Ellis says that Grandad told him it’s because I look so much like my dad that it was a shock, even though he knows I’m an adult now. In his mind he still thought of me as a little kid.”

“Who’s Ellis?” she asks and I can hear the curiosity in her voice.

“He’s… he works here,” I say softly. “But he’s lived here since he was a kid. His mom used to be one of the housemaids. When she moved on, he loved the place so much he stayed.”

She gives a small chuckle. “That doesn’t surprise me. Both your grandparents were always taking in waifs and strays, just like they did with me when I landed up on the doorstep of Ashton House. In fact, that was how I met your father.”

“What?”

Mom sighs heavily. “That’s a story for another day. You’re right, I never should have kept the memory of your father from you.”

“Then why did you?”

She goes quiet again. “Give me a moment to move. I have a private cabana, and I need privacy for this conversation.”

I wait patiently before she finally comes back on the line. “He’s right, you know. Your grandfather. You are the image of your father. There are days when it hurts to look at you, but it’s a good hurt because…” She pauses and I can hear the tremor in her voice when she starts up again. “Because even after he was gone, it’s like I got to carry a little piece of him with me.”

“What happened, Mom?” I ask the one question that’s been burning inside me since I was fifteen years old and have always been too afraid to ask.

“Your father died from an aneurysm, that much you know. One moment he was there, and in the next breath he was gone. Instantaneous. There’s nothing anyone could have done to save him. They tell me he wouldn’t have felt a thing, he wouldn’t have even known anything was wrong.” She blows out a long breath as if trying to organise her thoughts. “I never settled well in Yorkshire. I was a city girl and never quite got used to the country. That life was so foreign to me, so far removed from everything I knew. I know there was a lot of talk, especially from the local village gossips. They thought I was a pretty Americangold digger, a nobody from New Jersey. That I married your dad for his money.”

She huffs. “Little did they know that every generation of Ashton-Drakes struggled with debt. None of the men in that family seemed to have any clue how to manage money, and a fair few of them had gambling problems. When I knew them, your grandfather Cedric was still trying to dig the family out of the abyss of gambling debts his older brother Clifford had gifted them with before his untimely death.”

I snort. “Seems about right from what I’ve heard about the rest of my ancestors.”

“The truth is, Morgan,” she says quietly, “I loved your father with every single fibre of my being. He was the love of my life.”

“He was?” I’d always hoped that she’d loved him, that they’d loved each other, and that I wasn’t just the product of a marriage that didn’t work out and would’ve ended early anyway if there hadn’t been a tragedy. It helps to hear her admit how she felt. It soothes something deep inside me that I didn’t know needed soothing.

“He was so handsome and charismatic.” She sighs happily like a teenage girl with her first crush. “But he was also sweet and kind, had a smile for everyone. He was always the first to offer to help, put the needs of others before his. He was the best man I’ve ever known. When he died…” She swallows tightly, the hurt obvious even after all this time. “After he died, I needed to get away. I needed to go somewhere where I wasn’t surrounded by memories of Elliott. I was drowning in my own grief, in so much pain I couldn’t see your grandfather’s. When I first took you back to New York, I hadn’t intended it to be permanent, no matter what people thought. I just needed to be with my own family, needed time to heal. So I brought you to my mom’s place in New Jersey.”

“I don’t remember that. The earliest memories I have are of living in the penthouse at The Hamilton Manhattan.”

“I’m not surprised,” she says. “For the first six months after your father’s death, you wouldn’t speak. Not one single word. I know it sounds cliché, but I took a job as a maid at The Hamilton—that’s how I met Royce—to pay for you to see a therapist. She said that you being nonverbal was a trauma response to your father’s death. I pushed my own grief aside to concentrate on helping you.”

“I remember that,” I say quietly. “I wanted to speak, but the words wouldn’t come.”

“When you did gradually begin to speak, it became clear you’d locked up all your memories of home, of your father and of Ashton House. I know there must be a small part of you that thinks I didn’t take you back to England because I met Royce, got married, and had Warren. That I replaced our family with a new one, but, Morgan, that couldn’t be further from the truth. I never took you back because I was so afraid it would push you back into that awful grief and that I would lose you. Gradually, you started moving forward, and in order to keep doing that, you had to leave what was behind you in the past. I made the choice not to take you back before I started seeing Royce and certainly before he asked me to marry him.”

“You married Royce barely a year after Dad died.”

“Yes, I did,” she replies contemplatively. “I hadn’t planned to. Meeting Royce was a surprise. He became my friend first. He ended up paying for all your therapy so you could have the best help. I wasn’t looking for another relationship at all, especially so soon after Elliott, but I was so sad and lonely, I didn’t know how to cope with my own grief and was trying to focus on helping my child through his struggle with something I didn’t understand.”

“That must have been hard,” I murmur. I always knew it couldn’t have been easy, but hearing it in her own words hurts me somewhere deep inside.

“I fell into a relationship with Royce because it was all about comfort. He wanted to take care of both of us. I never lied to him, and that was why our relationship worked. Royce went into it knowing I was in love with another man, one I was also grieving. But he loved me and he loved you too, and in the end we grew to love him too. He was a good man. Falling pregnant with Warren was a surprise and a gift. When he came along, you came out of that dark grief and began to really talk, and smile. I will never forget the first time you held him after he was born. You smiled, a real smile for the first time since Elliott died, and I knew then we’d turned a corner. Having your little brother to shower with your love was when you truly began to heal. Warren saved you in a way I couldn’t.”

“Mom,” I choke out, my eyes burning with tears.

“We became this unassailable little unit, you, me, Warren, and Royce, and we loved each other. Losing your father taught me one very important lesson that I have never forgotten, and that’s to treasure every single moment because you never know how many you have left.”

I scrub my free hand over my eyes, brushing away the moisture, and sniff loudly.

“I made my choices in life,” Mom continues. “And I stand by them. But the one regret I have is your grandfather. He’d lost his wife only the year before, and it had devastated him. Elliott played a large part in getting him through his grief even though he’d lost his mom too. Then Elliott died and Cedric fell apart. I tried in those early days. I tried to help him, but I couldn’t. It was too much. I couldn’t take on his grief as well as my own and my child’s. So I made a choice. I figured that we’d come back at some point, but the longer we were away and with you finally comingout of it, it was harder to overcome my fear of rocking the boat. But I should’ve checked on him.”

“I understand why you didn’t, Mom.” I swallow past the burning sensation at the back of my throat. “Nothing about any of this was easy. You made the best choice you could, and I’m grateful for the life I’ve had and for the family you gave me. I do love you.”

“I love you too,” she whispers.