Chương 5
My mother had not simply opened an entrance.
She had been looking for something.
And now I had to find out what she was trying to give him.
The question followed me long after I left the security office.
What was she trying to give him?
I repeated it in my head until the words started losing meaning.
By the time I returned to my apartment, I had built five different explanations and hated every one of them.
Maybe my mother had been afraid.
Maybe Richard had pressured her.
Maybe she had convinced herself she was helping.
Maybe she had been collecting information because she wanted something from me.
The last possibility was the one I could not shake.
I parked outside my building and stayed in my car for almost ten minutes.
The steering wheel felt cold beneath my hands.
I watched people move through the parking lot carrying groceries, talking on phones, unlocking doors.
A man in a baseball cap struggled with a bag of dog food while his golden retriever pulled toward another dog.
The ordinary scene almost felt insulting.
Everyone else was living normal lives.
I was sitting in a parked car trying to understand why my own mother had requested my records.
Eventually, I forced myself upstairs.
The repaired door opened with a slight resistance.
The maintenance crew had fixed the damage, but the apartment still felt different.
Not unsafe.
Not exactly.
Just changed.
Like a room after someone leaves a party.
The furniture was the same.
The walls were the same.
But the feeling was gone.
I put my keys on the counter and noticed a small envelope near the door.
My name was written across the front.
Olivia.
No last name.
I stared at it.
I knew the handwriting immediately.
My mother’s.
For several seconds, I considered throwing it away.
That would have been easier.
A part of me wanted to punish her by refusing to know.
But I had spent too much of my life avoiding information that hurt.
I opened it.
Inside was a single sheet of paper.
I’m sorry.
That was all.
Two words.
I laughed quietly.
Not because it was funny.
Because after everything, two words felt impossibly small.
I sat at the table and read it again.
I’m sorry.
There was no explanation.
No defense.
No excuse.
Just an apology sitting on paper like it could carry the weight of twenty years.
My phone buzzed.
Another message.
Olivia, please let me explain.
I put the phone face down.
Then I turned it over again.
I hated that I wanted to answer.
That was the part nobody talked about.
When someone hurts you, people expect anger to make things simple.
They expect you to close the door and never look back.
But family does not disappear just because it disappoints you.
A stranger breaking your heart is painful.
A parent doing it creates a different kind of confusion.
I spent the next hour looking through the documents from my childhood box.
Not because I wanted memories.
Because I wanted facts.
That was what the Navy had taught me.
When emotions became overwhelming, find what you know.
Separate facts from assumptions.
The notebook was fact.
The dates were fact.
The broken furniture.
The hospital visits.
The excuses.
Those were facts too.
But there were gaps.
Large ones.
The kind that bothered me.
I went through old papers until I found something I had forgotten.
A court document.
Not a major one.
Just a custody agreement from when I was fifteen.
Richard had not always been my stepfather.
He had married my mother when I was eleven.
Before that, he had been the man who visited on weekends.
The man who brought gifts.
The man who acted differently around other people.
The document showed something else.
My biological father had tried to challenge the arrangement.
I barely remembered that.
I remembered him leaving.
I remembered my mother saying he was unreliable.
I remembered Richard telling me that some people were not strong enough to be parents.
But the paperwork showed my father had requested more involvement.
The request had been denied.
I sat there staring at the page.
Another piece of my childhood had shifted.
Not disappeared.
Shifted.
That was becoming the hardest part.
The truth was not arriving like a door opening.
It was arriving like a room slowly becoming visible.
My phone rang.
This time, I answered.
“Mom.”
The silence on the other end told me she had been waiting.
“Olivia.”
Her voice sounded older than I remembered.
Not weaker.
Older.
“I got your letter.”
“I didn’t know what else to say.”
“That’s usually when people say something important.”
She breathed out.
“You sound like your father.”
I froze.
It was such a strange thing to hear that I almost missed it.
“My father?”
“Yes.”
“Which one?”
The silence returned.
My grip tightened around the phone.
“Mom.”
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No.”
My voice sharpened.
“You shouldn’t have.”
She started crying quietly.
I hated hearing it.
That was the worst part.
Even after everything, hearing my mother cry still reached the part of me that remembered being a little girl waiting for her to come into the bathroom and say everything was okay.
But she never came.
“Why did you request my housing records?” I asked.
She stopped crying.
A long pause.
“Richard asked me to.”
The honesty surprised me.
It also hurt.
“Why?”
“He said he needed to know where you lived.”
“You knew where I lived.”
“Yes.”
“Then why?”
“I thought he wanted to talk.”
I closed my eyes.
“Mom.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
My voice cracked.
“You don’t know because if you knew, you would have understood that letting him near me was never going to end with a conversation.”
She whispered my name.
I looked at the ceiling.
A crack near the corner had appeared after the door damage.
A tiny imperfection.
Something I would have ignored before.
May you like
Now I noticed everything.
“Did he threaten you?” I asked.
