♟️On My Own by Darci
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"Should we... should we tell his daughter?" Pietro Volkov, the vice-captain of our team and my third and last closest childhood friend asked, haunted, probably because he love his parents more than anything in the world, which make sense given how amazing his parents bloody are, even I love them, we all do. In fact, he probably has the most friendly parents of the entire team.
"No!" I said firmly and they all looked at me, anxious. "You heard what he said about the little hostile girl. If she knows he is sick, she will lose it, and will probably be unable to enjoy her last year with him. She already lost her mother somehow, let her have him with no reservations for as long as possible. This has nothing to do with us, we'll probably never see them again in our lives."
After a long tense silence, they nodded, even if I could tell Killian, Yohan, and Pietro were reluctant. I looked one last time to where she was, but by then she was gone and so were her siblings and her father, as if they had never been here at all. An eerie bad feeling spread down my spine and I clenched my jaw, forcing myself to grin at my teammates, trying to show how nonchalant I am as their captain.
"Come on, let's go to the restaurant!"
Nodding, they all followed me, but even then, the bad feeling stayed in me.
§
No matter how much I tried, for the next 12 months, I couldn't help but to think about the defiant angry girl and her terminally ill father. Wondering if he had passed already, my three closest friends even mentioned that to me when we were at my home, but soon we stopped thinking about it. It wouldn't do us no good.
That is, until December 24th of 2022, when my parents had united with the Villin, the Hawthorne, and the Volkov for Christmas in my family's historical Victorian villa. We were in the middle of an amazing dinner, when my father received a call in his personal phone and froze like I had never seen him before. "I never thought you would call me of all people, kid," he said, swallowing hard and we all turned to him. "You are as hostile as when I first met you."
"Who is it?" Mother asked, frowning softly.
Father clenched his jaw, looking hesitant in answering the question, until he turned to mother and said, "It's... your daughter."
And that was enough for everyone to tense, because those words were enough to make mother pale. None of us ever met the kids she had in her first marriage that only last 7 years, her ex-husband had taken the guardianship of the three kids and the little we heard about it, the oldest kid was hostile to the fact that her mother had remarried. That was all we knew, all I knew, and the idea of the kid calling mother now, after years of silence, made me angry.
"Did something happen?" Mother asked, her voice shaky. "She wouldn't have called if something didn't happen. Ask her what happened, my love."
"What?" He frowned to something she said on the phone. "What do you mean moving to England?" He clenched his jaw, growing hostile and I felt the same, because, what the fuck? "Is it about money? You never wanted anything with us, why are you wanting to move here now? Where is your father? Put him in the line or," he froze.
Not just froze as he turned ashen pale, eyes widening, lips parting. "What happened, dad?" I asked, swallowing my anxiety, I hate feeling anxious.
He side-eyed mother, fear in his eyes, then the girl yelled in the phone and he clenched his jaw. "Put it on speaker," mother exclaimed, jaw clenched, and even if reluctantly, he did it.
"...I don't care if you don't want me there, I don't want to be with you either," the girl yelled, angrily and in heart-breaking tears, a voice so painfully familiar me and my friends instantly looked at each other. "At least have my siblings with you, I'm... I'm only 16, I can't... I can't raise them. I don't fucking need you, even less Juliette, but my siblings do, they are only 10 years old, she abandoned us when they were 1, and I've raised them the best I... the best I could even since then."
"I'll drop from school and get a job, I don't need you, but I can't put my siblings through that. It's time for her to take responsibilities for the kids she put in the world, instead of solely focusing on a fucking boy who's not her fucking son. Just take Atlas and Athena, take... take care of them. I just... I just need her to sign the papers to emancipate me. My dad... my dad refused to do it, and,"
Mother grabbed father's phone abruptly, shaking, "What happened to your father, Aella?" The second she called her daughter's name, my blood went cold and all the pieces of that day began to follow into place, and I couldn't help but to sink into my chair, my friend's eyes nearly popping out of their faces. "Where is Dean?"
A long silence came from the other line, all we could hear was a struggling heavy breath from the phone, until she spoke again, "My father passed away, 10 days ago," she dropped the bomb and mother gasped in horror. "He... he hid it from me, but he was terminally ill with stage 3 stomach cancer, and," her voice broke and she cursed. "I had to hold the funeral and wait for the lawyer to read the will, to know where we were going to now. I had no idea you still had some of our guardianship, but as you do, father left you as our guardian in case he... in case he died. He knew about it for more than a year and... said nothing."
"Cancer?" Mother cried.
"I can only get my inheritance from him when I turn 21, but he left enough for me to buy the plane tickets to take us to London, and from there take a cab to Thornhill Valley where you and your perfect rich family live. I'm calling now because I've only managed to put the twins to sleep now, they... they are struggling and will need therapy. They are... they are good kids, that might have been the only thing I did in my life, but I did my best to make sure they wouldn't turn out like me, and they are nothing like me."
"They are innocent, kind, gentle, caring, they are also intelligent, extroverted and easygoing, they have hope, and they... have always wanted to know you, Juliette. Don't worry, I kept my hateful thoughts and my bitterness to myself, you and your husband may dislike me, but I would never poison my baby siblings heart like it happened to me."