He’d known from Fadi’s reports that she’d put the mansion up for sale around the time she must have given birth. He’d had Fadi acquire it for him, through a third party so she wouldn’t refuse to sell. Now, imagining her there, pregnant with his child in Patrick’s house, was another turn of the lance embedded in his gut.
“Leaving the mansion and leaving the States was the first thing I did after I discovered my pregnancy. I was too high profile there, and I didn’t want anyone finding out.”
“By anyone, you mean me.”
Her exhalation was laden with resignation. “Actually, you weren’t my main concern. Your mother was.”
His mother’s mention, when he least expected it, was another blow out of blue sky. “Why would you have worried about her?”
“Because she would have realized it’s your baby.”
“Why would she have?” Confusion screeched inside his head, picking up momentum, churning his thoughts to a sickening mess. “She had no more access to you after your mother left her service, probably never had any interest in you to start with. Why would she have followed your news? And if she had, you’d been married, and she couldn’t have found out the exact stage of your pregnancy.” He shook his head. “What am I saying? She wouldn’t have suspected a thing even had she known the baby wasn’t Patrick’s. There’d been no reason for her to suspect me being the father. She knew nothing about us.”
“She knew everything.”
The quiet assertion went off in his head. Time slowed, filled with the debris of the history he’d thought he’d lived as each fragment flew in his face, crashed into him with the force of realization.
His mother had known.
But how? Did he want to know? He’d found out enough crimes his family had perpetrated against hers. Could he bear knowing more?
Aih. He owed it to her, to them, to his son, to know everything, set straight as much of it as he could.
Yet… “I find it impossible to believe she’d known about us and hadn’t done something about it.”
Her body and expression tensed defensively. “You can believe what you like.”
“I am not disbelieving you, I’m…boggled that she knew and just…let us be. She was the main reason I kept us such a heavily guarded secret. She had a way of making anyone we ever came close to…disappear. Admittedly, it was worse with Haidar, qorrat enha—the apple of her eye, and she was downright vicious in what she’d done to Roxanne. But I am still her son, and I knew she’d do the same to anyone I came close to that she didn’t approve of. And she approved of no one. But when it came to you…”
Her lush lips twisted. “Yeah, her servant’s daughter.”
“You were never that to me. But I knew you were that to her, warranting a whole new level of disapproval if she knew, and consequently an even more…creative intervention.”
Her eyes cleared of the rawness of agitation, filled with the mist of contemplation. “You thought she’d harm my family?”
He let out his breath on a ragged exhalation. “I didn’t even want to think what she might do if she knew.”
Her shrug was dismissive, assertive. “She knew. She told me.”
He should be getting used to the constant turmoil being with Lujayn created. If he hadn’t till now, he never would.
“And she never did anything,” he said. “All right, there goes another corner pillar of my belief system.”
“She didn’t think she had to do a thing. She thought you were taking care of not sullying your image or family name with such an abominable liaison well enough. She commended you for knowing what my kind was good for, and keeping me where I belonged, in the dark, unacknowledged and reviled.”
His blood burned cell by cell as every vicious word that reeked of authenticity bludgeoned him.
He had no doubt those had been his mother’s words. What remained to know was… “When did she tell you that?”
She attempted a shrug of nonchalance, failed miserably. “Oh, a bit over six years ago.”
When she’d started being contentious and ill-tempered. Now he knew the reason, he thought it a miracle she hadn’t walked out on him on that same day. That it had taken her two more years of what must have looked like proof of his mother’s words.
So his mother had managed to spoil another vital thing to him. In an even more evil and damaging way than he’d feared.
“It wasn’t true, what she said,” he finally rasped. “I am now realizing my actions could have been interpreted in a way to validate everything she’d said, and I bet she was counting on that, too, but none of it was in any way true.”
Her arms went around her body, as if hugging herself against sudden cold. “She was so proud of what you’d done to me. She said you did what she’d promised me she’d do one day, put me in my place.”
“When did she say that?”
“Ten years before I met you.”
This time it was he who staggered around to find the nearest surface to collapse on.
Lujayn had been only eleven when his mother had threatened her.
After sitting down with the stiff care of someone who had trouble coordinating her movements, she said, “On one of her trips to the States, she called my mother. My mother was in turmoil over answering her ‘summons’ but she buckled under her conditioning and went. She took me with her. Without inviting us to sit, your mother demanded that she leave her family and come back to her service.
“God, I’ve never seen Mom like that, couldn’t imagine that my vivacious, outspoken mother could stand before anyone so shaken and unable to stand up for herself. She stood there, head bent, taking your mother’s cruelty as she hacked at her, saying she’d deserted her in a pathetic attempt for independence that only landed her with a slob of a husband who’d never be out of debt. That she’d gone from a highly paid lady-in-waiting to a queen to the servant of a bum and his children for free. I saw my mother shriveling under her barrage, and I couldn’t bear it.”
He couldn’t either. Was there no end to his mother’s transgressions? Had he ever had a chance with Lujayn? He must have always been inextricable in her mind from his mother, and her feelings toward him had no doubt been tainted by his mother’s degradation of hers. Then she went on, and he realized there was always worse than the worst he could think of.