Golden Cage Mommy Mutiny (Elyse) novel Chapter 49

Even after I moved to that remote little town, I couldn’t truly cut myself off from my old life.

Kira filled her social media with curated affection–Ethan taking her on an African safari, the two of them making DIY rings, matching childish couple icons, and charity visits to her hometown.

Online, Ethan’s heroic undercover case dominated every platform, and even a quick trip to the corner store meant overhearing strangers dissect his achievements.

When a person reaches absolute despair, they start hating everything–Ethan’s cruelty, my father’s foolishness, the world’s malice, and my own weakness.

I shut myself inside for months.

Most days I just ate whatever scraps I had at home, drinking from the faucet when I was too tired to move. I’d lie on the couch for hours, watching the ceiling blur as night slipped into morning, my body shrinking to a weight that scared even me.

Ethan contacted me once, and of course it was for Kira. He said she mentioned how she’d always admired a bracelet I wore in college and wanted to know the brand.

Then his tone sharpened.

“Your father being brought to justice was the law doing its job,” he said. “He was the one in the wrong, not me. And after ten years together, we should at least still be friends, shouldn’t we?”

Friends–what a joke.

His words sent me spiraling, and I slit my wrist.

A maintenance guy happened to stop by and found me in time, got me to the ER before things got worse. After that, he told the landlord, and they made it clear I couldn’t stay there anymore.

With nowhere to go, I was taken in by an elderly woman who picked recyclables for a living.

She often comforted me, “Sweetheart, life goes wrong more often than it goes right. But there’s nothing you can’t outlast if you just keep going.”

I later learned she had lost her parents young, lost her husband in her second year of marriage, and raised her son alone until he died in a construction accident just after her grandson was born. Now, in her old age, she relied on scraps to raise the boy.

She was Dylan West’s grandmother.

She passed away when Dylan was sixteen, and he handled the funeral arrangements with the calmness of someone who had known loss far too long.

It made me wonder what I had been doing at sixteen crying to my father over scraped knees and

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believing the world owed me gentleness.

At sixteen, I made the biggest mistake of my life and let Ethan into it; at Dylan’s sixteen, he lost the last person he had and I took him in without hesitation.

I donated all the questionable money my father left behind and scraped by to pay Dylan’s tuition. With drawing no longer possible, I taught myself photography and became a freelance photographer, and keeping busy meant I didn’t drown in memories every waking second.

Another two years passed.

Dylan turned eighteen and was preparing to leave for college. He told me that if I didn’t want to go back, he would take the bus home every weekend just to see me.

I shook my head and said it was time.

My photography career was finally gaining momentum, and I needed broader opportunities.

Dylan hesitated, then spoke carefully.

“I always thought you stayed in the town because… there was someone you didn’t want to run into.”

A person I didn’t want to see?

It took me a moment to realize he was right.

And only then did it hit me—I didn’t think about Ethan anymore. Not even once.