The CEO's Regret: His Lost Wife's Secret Twins novel Chapter 24

Chapter 24

ARIA

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I sat there for hours. The room darkened as evening came, and still I couldn’t move. My hand stayed

wrapped around Dad’s, holding onto the only solid thing left in my world.

The tears had stopped. Now there was just emptiness. A hollow space where my heart used to be.

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I remembered the first time he took me to dance class. I was five. Christine had refused to come, said it was

a waste of money. But Dad drove me anyway, sat through the entire hour watching me stumble through

basic positions.

“You were beautiful,” he’d said afterward, even though I’d fallen twice.

“I messed up.”

“You tried. That’s what matters.” He’d lifted me onto his shoulders, carried me to the car. “My brave girl.”

Christine never called me brave. She saved those words for Emma.

I pressed my forehead against his hand. The machines hummed their endless song around us.

At seven, I’d won my first competition. A small local thing, nothing impressive. But Dad had been there,

front row, his face bright with pride. He’d brought flowers. Daisies, because he knew they were my favorite.

Christine hadn’t come. She was at Emma’s piano recital instead. Emma, who lived in the big house. Emma,

who got the smiles and the soft words and the gentle touches I never received.

‘Emma is so talented,” Christine would say at dinner. Not to me. Never to me. Just to Dad, as if I wasn’t

sitting right there. “Mrs. Grant says she has real potential.”

What about me? I’d wanted to scream. What about my dancing?

But I’d learned early that asking for attention only made things worse.

My chest burned with old pain. Pain I’d buried for years.

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Chapter 24

“I don’t understand,” I whispered to Dad. “I tried so hard to make her love me. But nothing was ever

enough.”

Then came the accident. I was thirteen.

One phone call changed everything. Dad’s car. Fire. Critical condition.

I’d run to the hospital, still in my school uniform. Christine was already there, stone-faced and dry-eyed. “He’s not going to wake up,” she’d said flatly. “The doctors say he might never wake up.”

“But he’s alive?”

“Barely.”

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No comfort. No hug. Nothing.

And just two weeks later, she’d tried to have him moved to a long-term care facility. “We can’t afford to keep

him here,” she’d said.

I was thirteen years old, and the only person who’d ever loved me was dying. And my mother wanted to put

him somewhere I couldn’t visit easily.

Mrs. Grant had intervened. Paid for Dad’s care. Kept him at the better hospital. I’d heard her arguing with

Christine about it one night.

“That child needs her father. Even if he can’t respond.”

“That child needs to face reality.”

Reality. Christine’s favorite word.

My reality became visiting Dad every week. Talking to him. Holding his hand. Begging him to wake up.

And Christine? She stopped coming after the first month. “It’s too painful,” she’d said. But she had plenty of time for Emma’s college visits. For Emma’s graduation parties. For Emma’s engagement celebration.

I got nothing. No mother. No father. Just a half-life of being tolerated in the Grant house while Christine

doted on Emma.

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Chapter 24

Wild child, they called me at school. The girl with no supervision. No curfew. No one who cared where she

was or what she did.

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I’d started staying out late. Coming home at dawn. Testing boundaries that didn’t exist. If Christine noticed,

she never said anything. Too busy being the devoted servant to the Grants. Too busy being the mother

figure Emma had never needed because she had parents who loved her.

The bitterness rose in my throat, sharp and acidic.

“Why?” I asked Dad. “What did I do wrong? Why does she love Emma more than me?”

Emma, who had everything. Money. Status. A mother and father who adored her. And somehow she also got

my mother’s affection.

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The CEO’s Regret: His Lost Wife’s Secret Twins