This Time, I'll Be the Villain's Favorite Daughter novel Chapter 206

Chapter 206 Birthday

Fish

Two children who looked so much alike, sharing the same birthday, holding each other close in the cold

winter air.

Maya let

go

and tilted her head back, looking the boy over from head to toe. He’d grown again since she

last saw him.

“How are you here?” she asked, her eyes bright and wide. “I thought you couldn’t get

out.”

“I couldn’t normally,” Lawrence said, leaning close to her ear. “Which is why I’m a little curious, Maya. Wh in your family arranged for Thomas to get hit by a car?”

His reasoning was simple. The people who could pinpoint Thomas exact schedule with that kind of precision were an extremely short list. Ordinary people would never have access to that information, and even business rivals rarely resorted to something as dramatic as hired vehicular assault.

The only family he could think of that would do something this reckless and extreme without a second thought was the Clarks.

Thomas‘ injuries had been serious. He’d need the better part of a year to recover.

Lawrence had used a hospital visit to his father as cover, looked up the new address Maya had sent him, and made it across town before dark with the gift tucked under his arm.

Maya went completely still.

She blinked once. Then again.

“Sorry, what?”

She genuinely hadn’t expected Thomas to end up in the hospital over this.

That man truly could not catch a break.

Maya ran through every member of her household in her head and concluded that, honestly any one of them was capable of it.

Lawrence had only asked out of passing curiosity. He wasn’t particularly invested in the answer.

He tugged her sleeve lightly and held the gift out toward her, his eyes catching the winter light. “Happy birthday.”

Maya refocused and looked down at the box.

She didn’t take it inside. She started unwrapping it right there on the spot.

She wanted a few more minutes alone with Lawrence before heading in.

She peeled back the layers of wrapping paper with careful, deliberate patience until the box underneath appeared.

Chapter 206 Birthday

She opened it. Inside sat a snow globe.

A clear glass dome, and side it, a tiny, intricate scene. There was a switch on the base.

Lawrence reached over and pressed it for her.

The light came on.

Inside the globe, light shifted and moved, slow and luminous.

Then a figure began to emerge, faint at first, then more defined, rising through the soft glow like something surfacing from deep water.

The evening sky had dimmed, and the snow had turned the world a soft, muted grey. Maya lowered her head and brought both hands up to cradle the globe, curving her palms around it, holding the light close.

The light sharpened. The figure sharpened with it.

It was a woman.

A woman Maya had never seen before, and yet something deep and wordless inside her knew. The figure rising through that warm, glowing light was her mother.

Maya didn’t move.

She could hear her own heartbeat, steady, insistent and loud.

She had no memories of her mother. Not a single one

Every photograph Thomas had ever owned, he’d taken and locked away. Not one had been left for her.

What she knew of her mother had been assembled from scattered fragments overheard across the years: a woman who smiled easily, bright and warm like sunlight on water.

But she’d never actually seen her.

Until now.

ľ

It was only light and shadow, but it printed itself clearly and completely behind her eyes.

The warmth behind her own eyes began to build.

Then a voice came through the globe.

Light and gentle, carrying a smile in it, soft as a held breath.

“Happy birthday, sweetheart.”

“Is that…” Maya swallowed past the tightness rising in her throat, once carefully. “Is that Mom’s voice?” Lawrence made a quiet sound of confirmation.

His own memories of their mother were thin and scattered. He’d gone through every old photograph be

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Chapter 206 Birthday

ished

could find, cross–referencing them against what he could pull from memory, and reconstructed her voice as faithfully as he was able, wanting to give Maya something real to hold onto.

Her mother’s voice was lovelier than Maya had ever let herself imagine.

She’d thought she’d made her peace with it all: With the past, with everything she’d never had. But hearing that voice, she felt the tears rise anyway, pressing close and insistent behind her eyes.

It was like…

She was still a little heartbroken about it.

It wasn’t the kind of grief she’d ever known how to share. She’d understood from very early on that a child without a mother had to learn to swallow her feelings whole, with no one to offer them to.

coming But she’d wanted to bury her face in her mother’s shoulder. She’d wanted to cry without restraint and ask her why, why, when she wasn’t a terrible person or a wicked child, life had never seemed to stop for her.

She’d wanted to pour every painful thing she’d ever felt into those arms. She’d just wanted to be held. Maya’s sense of belonging came from Wendy’s love.

But the longing for family, the ache of it that had never fully quieted, came from a mother she’d never

once met.

She’d always believed, with a certainty that lived somewhere beneath thought, that her mother had loved her.

She’d never doubted it. Not once.

“Mom…” Maya held the snow globe against her chest and looked at Lawrence, a faint tremor in her voice. “She loved me too, didn’t she?”

Maya had never brought her mother up with him before.

She’d never once asked what she was like.

Lawrence had mistaken that for reluctance.

Only now, watching her in this moment, did he understand. It wasn’t reluctance. It was something closer to fear, a quiet terror of touching something she didn’t know if she could survive touching.

Even if the whole world had withheld its love from her, she’d held onto her hope for her mother with both hands and never let it go.

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