This Time, I'll Be the Villain's Favorite Daughter novel Chapter 208

Chapter 208 Catch Something

And for the first time in his life, something stirred within him–a desire to hold on to something.

Maya was too eager to wait. She pulled Lawrence into her room, shut the door behind them, and stretc up on her toes to reach the small box sitting on her nightstand.

“Here.” She held it out. “Happy birthday!”

Her voice carried a bright thread of anticipation. “I had it ready in advance. I just couldn’t figure out ho to give it to you.”

Lawrence stood still for a moment, genuinely caught off guard. He hadn’t expected a gift. And he defini hadn’t expected one from Maya.

He took it without hesitating and unwrapped it with the kind of deliberate care you’d give something fragile.

Inside the box was a thin cord, the weave intricate and clearly handmade. A small emerald charm in the shape of a fish hung from it.

Maya pushed up her sleeve to reveal her own wrist, where a matching red cord held a teardrop–shaped emerald charm against her fine wrist bone.

“Yours is the little fish,” Maya said, pressing the two charms together.

They fit together into one complete circle,

“See?” She held them up so he could look. “Do you like it? I braided the cord myself.”

“I love it,” he said, studying it with full attention.

He felt the sting of tears behind his eyes and blinked hard.

This was embarrassing.

But this was the first time in this life that the two of them had celebrated a birthday together and exchanged gifts with joy in their hearts.

They were like ordinary children from an ordinary home.

It wasn’t about the gifts themselves. It was the simple fact of it that made him want to cry.

Alfred was nothing like Edric in terms of inscrutability. He was a straightforward kind of person, and his feelings showed up in equally straightforward ways.

Right now, he was rummaging across every surface in the room as if something were wrong, until he finally unearthed a book.

Chapter 208 Catch Something

He sat down and flipped through it at a frantic pace, the pages snapping by in rapid succession, though whether anything was actually registering was anyone’s guess.

George had finished hanging the last of the string lights and collapsed onto the sofa with his usual boneless ease. He offered his commentary with idle satisfaction.

“I knew she had a little brother, but I didn’t expect them to look that much alike.”

Alfred didn’t acknowledge him. He continued flipping through the book, pages flying.

“Twins are usually very close,” George went on. “Someone’s going to feel left out. I won’t say who, though.”

He was definitely still provoking him.

Alfred stood up, walked over, and pressed the open book directly onto George’s face.

George’s entire face disappeared behind the pages with the resigned dignity of a man who had brought this on himself.

He didn’t even get annoyed. He let out a muffled laugh from behind the book and peeled it away. “Jealousy isn’t an attractive quality, you know,” George announced, settling back into his role as the world’s most unqualified relationship counselor. “An older brother is supposed to be magnanimous.”

Alfred heard this, looked at George with complete seriousness, walked over to the dining table, climbed onto a chair, and yanked down every strand of string lights George had spent all afternoon hanging.

The whole thing came crashing down with a sharp, resonant snap, a cascade of little bulbs swinging before settling on the floor.

“Hm?”

George’s smile was still on his face. It had simply frozen.

He stared at Alfred with a flat, hollow expression.

“Magnanimous,” Alfred said, cold as stone, repeating the word right back at him. “An older brother is supposed to be magnanimous.”

George nearly laughed out of pure, helpless outrage.

When dinner finally made it to the table, Wendy noticed that every decorative item had been arranged with bizarre, militant precision.

It wasn’t an aesthetically pleasing. It was a geometric formation, orderly in the way border checkpoints are orderly.

The irritation hit her immediately.

Where’s George? Where are the lights?”

George unfolded himself from the sofa and pointed at the pile on the floor. “Alfred took them down.”

Chapter 208 Catch Something

“Then put

them back up,” Wendy said, already waving her hand at the three useless men in the vicinity. “And redo everything on the table. Now.”

That same birthday, a delivery arrived from Jenny: an enormous stuffed bear.

It was a foreign brand, homely yet endearing, and impossibly soft to hold.

Maya nearly buckled under its weight as she signed for it.

She struggled across the living room with the bear swallowing her whole and deposited it onto the sofa with great effort.

Toby arrived to find the house looking like something disastrous had happened to it.

A massive, gloriously ugly stuffed bear was draped across the sofa.

The dining table was buried under an assortment of unopened gifts, and Wendy was directing Raymond on the precise repositioning of every decoration in reach.

Maya was standing in the middle of the living room. She blinked when she saw him come in.

Toby handed his gift to Maya, carrying a faint trace of winter cold on him, and let his gaze move briefly over Lawrence before looking away with an unbothered expression.

“A lot of people here today,” he observed.

He decided immediately that he didn’t care enough to make it a thing.

He reached out, tapped her forehead with one finger, and looked at her expectantly. “My gift. Are you actually going to open it?”

Maya’s head tilted to the side from the gentle nudge.

Every other gift was still sitting untouched on the table. Only Lawrence’s had been opened.

The memory of last year was still unfortunately vivid in her mind: the two of them at odds, and Toby giving her shoe inserts to make her taller. She genuinely couldn’t imagine what a norial, thoughtful gift from him would look like.

Curiosity won out. She tore into Toby’s gift first.

“Is this actually yours?”

She pulled back the wrapping paper, opened the box, and lifted out a small decorative crown.

It was exquisite.

She remembered flipping through a magazine once and pointing at something just like it, telling Toby she loved that style, only for him to mock her taste as hopelessly antiquated.

Chapter 211 Playing Games

Wendy sat on the edge of the bed and patted the space beside her.

She genuinely wanted to talk to her daughter.

But about what, exactly?

Ask her what she was thinking? Try to coax out the things she kept tucked away, the things she never s aloud?

Wendy didn’t know how to ask.

She wanted to take whatever was hurting her and make it disappear.

Old wounds didn’t fade on their own. Wendy still remembered, with perfect clarity, every person from past who had wronged her. She’d carried those grudges all the way into the present.

Forgive and forget was a lovely thing to say. In reality, she would’ve cheerfully throttled every one of th And whatever Maya had been through, it was almost certainly worse than anything Wendy had ever face

Maya looked at her mother hovering there, visibly struggling to begin, and couldn’t help the quiet

want you

ask.” to amusement that surfaced. “Mom. Just ask what

Wendy always treated her like she was made of something delicate.

She wasn’t.

People had a way of softening the memory of their own worst moments.

In her past life, Maya hadn’t been gentle with Kaia/Not even close. She’d said ugly, cutting things that made Kaia cry, and even now the memory of those words had a harsh edge to it.

She’d despised Kaia.

But she’d hated Thomas more.

In that life, no matter the setting, she’d always been the one who didn’t belong.

C

She was like a stone dropped into a room full of glass, jarring against everything, welcome nowhere. “Foil character” might as well have been printed on her forehead.

Maya had always skirted around her past, not wanting to get too close to it.

Partly because she was afraid her parents would ask questions she couldn’t answer, and partly because her own behavior back then made her uncomfortable to think about.

Wendy blinked.

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