Chapter 204 It Doesn’t Matter
Edric didn’t particularly care about any of it.
His parents held some concern for him, but not much.
His brothers shared his blood, but not his life.
That arrangement suited him just fine.
Family was always family. Blood was a bond that couldn’t be severed and didn’t need to be nurtured.
As for anything beyond blood? He could take it or leave it.
He didn’t need his parents’ affection.
He didn’t need his brothers’ closeness.
His life moved along a clear, stable track, and nothing ever strayed from it.
With no desire to keep fielding the barrage of messages from the older generation and his brothers, Edric had the two children packed up and send home first thing the next morning.
He didn’t show his face once during the whole thing.
He simply arranged the car and the people, and that was that. Efficient and impersonal, like closing out a completed task.
Life at home resumed exactly as it had been.
94
Wendy held Maya at arm’s length and turned her around, checking her over until she was fully satisfied that her daughter had returned from the Clarks with all her limbs still attached.
Raymond’s reaction was the mildest of all, as though the two of them had simply taken a regular trip out of town. He waited for his wife to finish her fussing, and then he asked, “How was your month at the Clarks? What did you make of the place?”
What did I make of it?
Maya thought back over the entire month. Outside of the gaming, the one real thing she’d come away with
was…
“I know how to shoot now.”
Raymond paused.
“Sorry?”
“Shoot,” Maya said, and mimed pulling a trigger.
In her past life, when she’d been quietly researching her options, she’d briefly considered a firearm. She’d known nothing about them at the time, not even the basics of how one worked.
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Chapter 204 11 Doesn’t Matter
So she’d asked someone online.
They’d sent her a video tutorial, walking her through it step by step, and that was how she’d discovered that guns had safety mechanisms you had to disengage before the trigger did anything.
“You should’ve stayed longer then,” Raymond said, with a note of genuine regret, then shifted into a more serious register. “Maya, in regular society, if you start firing a weapon, your neighbors will call the police and you will get arrested.”
Firearms were, for ordinary people, a genuinely sensitive subject.
If she wanted to live a normal, unbothered life, she’d need to know how to live like a normal person.
There wasn’t much he and Wendy could offer on the topic of marksmanship, but the Clarks could teach her a great deal. Staying there longer would’ve made sense.
George waited for both parents to finish talking, then propped his chin in his hand and sighed with a trace of disappointment.
“I actually thought Edric might take a bit more of an interest in you.”
Maya rested her chin on the table and looked at him sideways. “George, you seem really invested in Edric fixating on me.”
“Well, if he’s fixated on you, he stops fixating on me,” George said, completely unashamed. “I was honestly curious how he’d react. Turns out it was pretty underwhelming.”
He slumped forward onto the table with a deflated expression. “Boring.”
Maya grabbed the nearest mug off the table and knocked it against his skull three times in quick succession, each thud landing with a satisfying hollow resonance, the way a fist sounds against a solid wood door.
This insufferable, chaos-loving creature.
She had not gone easy on him.
“Maya, you can’t just do that to your brother!” he yelped.
The fallout from the school situation wasn’t going to settle for at least a year, maybe longer.
The school’s leadership was buried in lawsuits, crisis PR, and cleanup, and according to what Jenny had mentioned in passing, the parents were absolutely relentless. The compensation negotiations had collapsed. and several families had gone to the media. All the way through December, both Maya and Jenny had been sitting at home with nothing to do.
Her days were shaped by the training sessions her mother dragged her to. Her evenings were hers.
She usually spent them talking to Lawrence.
Maya gave him a rough account of everything that had happened with the school.
Lawrence listened from his end of the line.
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Chapter 204 11 Doesn’t Malter
When he heard what Raymond had done, his grip on the phone tightened briefly. He thought to himself that Raymond might not be a good man by every measure, but he was clearly going to be a very good father.
“Did you get scared?” Lawrence asked, biting the back of his hand. The small sting of pain helped him settle his nerves.
Maya paused.
“Not really,” she said. She was used to things like this by now, and added, “Stop worrying about me. I’m the older one here.”
I’m the older one here.
Those words landed somewhere soft inside him, dissolving slowly like a piece of candy on the tongue. Lawrence pressed his lips together quietly and made a small sound of acknowledgment.
He could tell her spirit had opened up. She sounded lighter, more like herself.
“Hey…” He pressed his cheek gently against the phone, reining in the longing that kept rising in his chest, his voice going quiet and a little muffled. “I want to see you.”
Four words, said carefully, like he was setting something fragile down.
They both knew perfectly well, though, that it wasn’t really possible right now.
Thomas watched him like a hawk.
He seemed to have understood, somewhere along the way, that he’d already lost one child and couldn’t afford to lose another.
Slipping completely out from under his father’s control before he was old enough to stand on his own was nothing but a fantasy.
Every time Lawrence ran up against that wall, he felt the same fierce, helpless wish to grow up faster.
Adults got to make their own decisions.
“I want to see you too,” Maya said.
She wanted to sit across from him and actually talk, wanted to see whether he’d gotten any taller, instead of reading him through a cold, flat screen.
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