Chapter 13
I held his struggling hands until he stopped fighting, his chest heaving with angry sobs.
“Listen to me very carefully, Leo,” I said, my voice low and steady.
It was not the voice of the pushover he remembered.
“Auntie Rosalie is gone. She left because she did not want to take care of you. Dad is staying here because he cannot take care of you. I am your mother. You do not have to like me right now, but you will respect me, and you will absolutely never raise your hand to me again. Do you understand?”
He stared at me with wide eyes.
He had never seen this version of me. The unbreakable one.
He sniffled, his lip quivering.
“Dad said—”
“Dad is wrong,” I said simply.
I released his wrists.
“Shoes. Now.”
He put them on.
The transition to Ardencraft was brutal.
For the first month, Leo was a nightmare. He threw tantrums. He refused to eat my food. He broke a glass display case in the shop.
He was testing the boundaries, looking for the crack in my armor, expecting me to break and apologize just as I used to.
I never did.
When he threw his dinner onto the floor, I calmly handed him a broom and stood over him until he swept it up. Then he went to bed hungry.
When he broke the glass, I took away all electronics for a month and made him sit on a stool in the kitchen peeling potatoes until his thumbs ached.
Sadi watched me one night after a grueling standoff over bath time.
“Are you sure you aren’t being too hard on him?”
“I am undoing five years of poison,” I said, scrubbing baking sheets at the sink. “If I am soft now, he will grow up to be exactly like David. I love him too much to let him become a monster.”
The breakthrough came on a quiet Sunday three months after he moved in.
I was alone in the bakery kitchen, working on a complicated batch of macarons, when I felt a presence and turned.
Leo stood in the doorway clutching a stuffed bear. Not the cheap toy he had brought home that day with David, but the old worn bear he had loved since toddlerhood.
He watched me pipe batter onto the tray.
“It smells like vanilla,” he mumbled.
“It is vanilla.”
I did not look up.
“Want to help?”
He hesitated, then slowly walked over.
I pulled up a stool and handed him a small piping bag.
“Squeeze from the top. Keep it steady. If you mess up, we scrape it off and start over.”
His hands shook, but he managed to pipe one perfect little round.
He looked up at me, searching my face.
“Good,” I said.
A tear slid down his cheek.