"You shouldn't act like you're doing me a favor, Aiden!" Ms. Victoria's voice blasted through the phone, making the speaker crackle with the sharpness of her anger. I winced, feeling the irritation settle into my half-asleep haze. Rolling over, I placed the phone on speaker and set it down on the bedside table, groaning internally.
"Okay," I muttered, barely awake, my voice sluggish with the remnants of sleep.
Rubbing my eyes, I caught a glimpse of the clock. 7:50 a.m. Too early for this. I leaned back, resting my head against the headboard, and fought to shake off the drowsiness clouding my mind. But her voice clawed through the quiet of my room, the words sharp and cutting.
"I really hoped you'd turn out better than your father."
A familiar, bitter feeling twisted in my stomach. I exhaled, feeling the sting behind my eyes—not from fatigue anymore but from a buried frustration I hadn't wanted to touch this morning. "You didn't exactly work toward that goal," I replied, knowing what would come next but somehow unable to hold back.
Her yell hit the room like a grenade, shattering the calm I'd been clinging to. I clenched my jaw, wondering how long I'd have to endure this routine. "Is this going to be every morning now? Because I don't think I signed up for a daily lecture on my failings, Ms. Victoria."
"Until you send your accountant over. Your mother is about to be screwed, you idiot!"
I pinched the bridge of my nose, exasperated. "You hired an accountant earlier this year. You remember that, right?"
"Yes, and he's taking advantage of my ignorance," she snapped, her voice indignant, as if that justified calling me before the day had even started.
"Your ignorance of your own finances?" I asked, unable to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.
"Stop questioning me and send a trusted accountant!" Her demand echoed around my room, filling every inch with its bite.
I sighed. "I can't. Everyone I know is busy. This isn't something I can just fix for you." My voice was quieter now, my patience thinning by the second. "You're capable of sorting this out yourself."
"What? Because I asked you to visit my alumni? That was for your glory too!"
"Please, can you spare me the dramatics? Not this morning, Ms. Victoria."
Her sharp inhale was followed by a livid, "Mom, you idiot! It's Mom to you!"
That word hit me in a place I'd long thought numb. Mom? Since when did she ever feel like that to me? Since when had "Mom" meant late-night phone calls full of resentment, words laced with guilt and accusation? Serial abandonment over the course of 30 years, I couldn't remember a time when it had.
I stood up, my patience finally gone, and walked toward the bathroom. I didn't bother to take the phone with me. Let her scream into the silence. As I shut the door, her muffled voice turned into little more than a dull noise, and I let out a dry, humorless chuckle.
Mom. That was a word for other people, for lives where you weren't born into competition, into a space where you had to fend for yourself the moment you could walk.
I'd cut her loose from the obligation of her yearly visits—the grand "motherly" gestures that only ever lasted a week. Looking back, I can hardly believe I used to cry just to have her show up at my father's house, playing the role of the perfect mother for seven days before vanishing again. Rumor had it she only came around to squeeze money out of him, not because she wanted to see me. Yet somehow, she always kept her hooks in me.
I turned on the shower, letting the hot water stream over me, easing the dull throb in my head that had started the moment Ms. Victoria's voice ripped me from sleep. A constant ache, just like her. I turned the shower off and reached for a towel, feeling slightly revived, but my senses sharpened when I heard another voice coming from my room. This wasn't Rose, my longtime housekeeper. This voice was softer, unfamiliar.
Tying the towel around my waist, I opened the bathroom door slowly. A young woman was kneeling in front of my bedside table, one hand clutching a vacuum cleaner. Her shoulders were tense, and her face was turned toward my phone as Ms. Victoria's voice screamed from it.
"He's really not inside. I can report back to him if you will tell me what you want," she was saying, her voice shaky but polite.
"Is he ignoring me? Where on earth would he be? It's seven in the morning! I am his mother!" My mother's harsh voice barked from the phone, and the poor girl flinched, tilting her head as though baffled by the hostility. A chuckle slipped from my lips before I could stop it.
"I—I'm sorry to hear that, but he really isn't here," the girl replied, her tone growing steadier. "I promise he's not the type to ignore calls, let alone one from his mother."
"Then call him out!"
She hesitated, cheeks pink. "I don't know where he is, but if you give me a few minutes, I can—"
"Did he sleep with you? You're awfully defensive of him."
The girl jolted back, her face coloring to a deep red. "No! I—I'm just his employee. I only—"
"An employee? And you're in his bedroom right now?" My mother's accusations grew sharper. "Disgraceful! Where is Rose!"
The girl's back stiffened. "I'm not dating him, ma'am! I am Nelly, the new housekeeper here" she shot back, her face now a mixture of embarrassment and defiance.
"How dare you!" Ms. Victoria snapped. "How dare you even touch his phone!"
"I didn't touch it!" She pointed toward the phone as if my mother could see her proving her innocence, her eyes wide with frustration.
I sighed, watching them from the doorway. This poor girl was fighting a losing battle with Ms. Victoria, and from her increasingly rattled look, she had no idea what she'd wandered into. Time to put her out of her misery.
Walking forward, I cleared my throat, and the girl—Nelly, I remembered her name now—nearly jumped out of her skin as she noticed me.
"We'll talk later," I said, grabbing my phone and cutting off my mother's rant mid-sentence. The silence was almost luxurious. I looked over at Nelly, who took a couple of cautious steps back, her gaze flitting from me to the vacuum cleaner as if reminding herself why she was in here in the first place.
"You see, sir, I was just vacuuming, and I started hearing these voices," she explained hurriedly, twisting her hands nervously. "Apparently, your mother was on the phone, and since you'd ignored her call, she just kept yelling, so I thought—well, I thought I'd try to calm her down."
I raised an eyebrow, watching her. Nelly's attempt at calm was unraveling by the second, though she was trying hard to hide it.
"And what exactly did Rose tell you?" I asked, trying to look serious as if i wasn't amused and impressed at toggling with my mother just now.
Nelly looked taken aback, but she quickly recovered. "What do you mean?" she replied, almost curtly. Then, she sighed, her shoulders slumping. "Oh, you mean the rule?"
"Yes. The rule. What was it?"
"Act invisible?" she replied, her voice so small and so resigned that I almost laughed.
"Exactly," I said, leaning against the wall, "Which means don't be caught in here again."
For a moment, she just stood there, nodding slowly, a sheepish but determined look in her eyes, as if trying to commit the rule to memory. But I caught a flicker of something else, too—a spark in her expression that made it clear she wasn't used to shrinking into the background.
She looked up and stared at me hard, enough to communicate her disapproval of my words but also soft enough to seem not to piss me off. She then turned away slowly and left the room, shutting my door a little harder than i expect.
Just then, my phone rang again. Typical. My phone never knew how to stay quiet. Liam Kensington's name flashed across the screen, bold and obnoxious as ever. I groaned, already dreading the conversation, before reluctantly picking it up.
"What's up, brother?" Liam's voice came through, crackling with bad reception. Of course, it did. Even the network seemed to conspire with him to irritate me. That voice—smug and self-assured—was capable of causing chaos in any situation. Even static couldn't drown out its menace.
"Hello," I replied flatly, making no effort to sound interested. He needed to know he wasn't exactly welcome today—or any day, really. But somehow, luck seemed to favor him this time.
"First off," Liam began, his tone already grating, "you've rebelled enough. Five years, man. It's time to move back to civilization. You can't keep hiding out in that godforsaken desert where no one can even reach you. Seriously, there's no damn signal out there."
Classic Liam—lecturing me like he was anyone's authority. His words were peppered with his usual cussing, his favorite language, and zero tact. It's no wonder no one ever takes him seriously. Of course, his sheer incompetence is the real deal-breaker.