TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 242

CHAPTER 175: HIS MOTHER’S LETTER–2

Every word lands like a stone dropped into still water and the ripples spread through my chest and I am going very still in the way I go still when the memories start pressing in.

There are reasons Zurich has always been my least favorite place, and Mathilde is dead–set on re–hatching those reasons.

“Thank you, Mathilde. Really. But we need to get going.” I take a step back. “Another time. We’ll come back and do the tea and the honey cakes and catch up properly, I promise.”

“Knox, wait.” Her hand catches my arm and the grip is stronger than it should be from a woman her age, firm with an urgency that makes me stop. “Don’t leave yet. I have something for you.” Her eyes are bright and serious in a way that rearranges her entire face. “Something from Katherine. From your mother.”

The ground shifts under my feet, a dizzy spell that for a second drains all oxygen in my lungs.

“She gave me an envelope the week before she… Well, died. She told me to keep it safe and give it to you when you were old enough to read it without it destroying you.” Mathilde’s eyes are steady on mine. “I have been trying to determine when that might be for twenty–three years. I’m not sure the moment has arrived, but I’m running out of time to wait, and so is the house, and honestly, so am I.” She turns toward the

house. “Wait here.”

I watch her walk up the path and disappear through the front door, and the minutes she’s gone are some

of the longest of my life.

I don’t know what to think, or remember correctly how to breathe.

My mother never left a suicide note when she took her life.

It was like she was there the night before, and come morning she was gone without any warning or explanation or the decency of not smiling to her own son the night before like she didn’t plan on taking her

own life in the next few hours.

There is nothing more confusing for a little boy than losing the one person who made the world survivable, and nothing more damaging than losing her by choice.

She chose to leave.

She looked at me and at this house and at the life we shared inside it and she decided that death was preferable to another morning of being my mother, and that knowledge has lived in my chest for

twenty–three years.

The first woman who ever broke my heart, and she did it so thoroughly that every woman after her has just been walking through the wreckage she left behind.

And the rage hasn’t dulled.

I thought it would – thought time would sand the edges down into something manageable, something!

eould file away behind the walls I spent years building – but it burns as hot now as it did when I was a boy left alone with a father who was more feral beast than husband or parent.

It burns with a desperation for answers she never gave me. It bleeds with the realisation that I was never enough reason for her to stay.

And it aches in places my walls were never built to protect deep in the crevices where the boy still lives, still waiting outside her bedroom door, still believing that if he’s quiet enough and good enough and small enough, she might come back.

She never did.

Mathilde returns carrying an envelope. It’s evidently old, yellowed, and sealed.

My mother’s handwriting is on the front with just my name, KNOX in the careful script I remember from birthday cards and grocery lists and the notes she’d leave in my school bag when the bad weeks were

happening.

‘Be brave today. I love you. Mama.‘

—

“She tried to get you out,” Mathilde says, and her voice changes – rougher now, weighted with a deep

sadness. “A week before she ended things. Katherine came to me with money and a plan. I was supposed

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