The CEO's Rejected Wife And Secret Heir novel Chapter 185

Chapter 185: Chapter 185 – Catherine

Aria’s POV

We found the grave a few days later.

Eleanor, in exchange for her cooperation and a reduced charge that Barnes had negotiated with that suggested he felt the arrangement was fair, provided the cemetery name and the plot number and the fact that she had been paying for the maintenance of it quietly for years, a fact she had not volunteered and Barnes had discovered in the financial records, and which I chose to think about carefully before deciding what it meant.

It was a small cemetery on the eastern edge of the city, older than the parts of Ravenwood that Charles had moved in — oak trees and weathered stone, the kind of place that had been full for decades and simply maintained itself quietly. The plot was near the eastern wall, in a section shaded by a tree that must have been young when Catherine was buried there and was now enormous.

The headstone was simple.

Catherine Louise Whitmore

Beloved sister and mother

She chose love

I stood in front of it for a long time without speaking. Damien was beside me, he had read me correctly this morning, when I’d told him I needed to come here, and had understood that what I needed him to do was simply be present.

Noah was with Mrs. Dora at the penthouse, had been told Mama and Daddy were visiting someone important, had accepted this and immediately returned to his LEGO.

The cemetery was quiet, midmorning, a weekday. Birds in the oak tree. The smell of cut grass from somewhere nearby.

She chose love.

I thought about Eleanor’s face as she’d said it: She said she was not going to let what had been done to her determine whether the child deserved to live.

I thought about what that must have cost — twenty-one years old, alone in the worst possible way, and still making that decision.

I crouched down and set the flowers I’d brought — white roses, against the base of the stone.

"Hello," I said quietly. "I’m sorry it took me this long."

The oak tree moved in the wind above me. A leaf came down slowly, turning once, and landed on the grass beside the stone.

"I don’t know what I’m supposed to say," I continued. "I’ve been thinking about it for days and I still don’t know the protocol for — this. For meeting someone you should have known your whole life. I have a son. He’s four, and he’s extraordinary, and I think you would have loved him completely because he has this — this quality of just deciding to trust people and being absolutely right almost every time, and I think that might have come from you, though I’ll probably never know for certain."

My throat had gone tight. I let it.

"I’m pregnant again. A girl, we think, though it’s early." I pressed my hand against my stomach, the gentle swell of it, still small but present. "I don’t know what I’ll tell her about you. I’ll tell her something — I’ll tell her all of it, when she’s old enough. I’ll tell her that her grandmother was twenty-one years old and brave in a way that most people will never have to be, and that she chose life when she could have chosen otherwise, and that it cost her everything and she did it anyway." My voice steadied on it. "I’ll tell her that’s where we come from. That’s the beginning of us."

I stood slowly, one hand bracing on my knee, the other still on my stomach as Damien’s hand came to my shoulder, warm and certain.

I reached up and covered it with mine.

"I’d like to come back," I told the headstone. "If that’s — I’d like to make it something I do. Bring Noah sometimes. Let him leave drawings, because he will want to leave drawings, he leaves drawings everywhere." A sound caught in my throat that was partly laughter and partly something else entirely. "He’d like you, I know he would."

The wind moved through the oak tree again, and I stood in it and let the feeling be what it was — grief for something I’d never had, gratitude for something I hadn’t known I’d been given, the strange and particular grace of learning you were loved before you knew what love was.

I stayed another ten minutes, not speaking, Then I took Damien’s hand and we walked back through the quiet cemetery toward the gate.

"Thank you," I said to Damien, when we reached the gate.

He looked at me. "For what?"

"For coming." I glanced back once at the oak tree,"For not saying anything."

He squeezed my hand. "Always."

We got in the car, and I looked out the window as the cemetery passed behind us, and I thought about Catherine Whitmore— twenty-one years old, stubborn and funny, off-key singing in a family home that didn’t deserve her — and I thought: I will make sure you are not forgotten. I will make sure you are not just a footnote in Charles’s crimes or Eleanor’s guilt.

You are my beginning. I’m going to make it mean something.

*********

Olivia called me on a Tuesday afternoon and said "I need your opinion on something" in the tone that meant she had already made a decision and needed someone to confirm it was reasonable.

"The beach venue," she said. "Lucas found one two hours out. Private stretch with a late afternoon slot, the light is supposed to be good."

"How many people?"

"Forty."

"Olivia."

"It’s intimate."

"You told me thirty maximum."

"Thirty is very close to forty," she said. "Mathematically."

"He’ll be devastated if he isn’t." 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

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