THE CEO's REGRET

CHAPTER 21- AGENCY

My sixteen-year-old daughter read the letter from the father she’d never met, looked up at me, and said, “He was looking for us.” I had nothing to say back. We stayed right there on the kitchen floor. Neither of us made a move to get up.

The tiles were cold and hard under us, but it didn’t seem to matter. Isla set the letter down carefully, like it was something fragile, then pulled her knees up to her chest and just… waited.

That was so typical of her. She had this quiet patience that could loosen even the tightest knots in me. She’d learned a long time ago that pushing me for answers only made me shut down. So instead, she gave me space, and somehow that open, gentle silence was harder to hide from than any question she could have asked.

So I told her everything. Not the clean, careful version I’d been feeding her for years, the one where her father and I simply made different choices and moved on with our lives. No. I gave her the real story, the one I’d never said out loud to a single soul. Not to Jade, not to Marcus, not to anyone.

I told her about that first brutal year. How the loneliness had felt like a physical weight sitting on my chest every early morning once she was finally asleep. How I’d only cried twice once in the hospital bathroom the night she was born, and once on her first birthday when her little laugh filled the room and there was no one there to share it with. After that, I didn't let myself cry again. There just wasn’t time for it.

I told her about the anger that hit me around the six-month mark, sharp and clarifying. How I’d looked at that rage and decided to use it instead of trying to stuff it down, because for the first time since my life had been completely rearranged without my permission, I finally felt like I had some kind of control again. Some agency.

Isla sat perfectly still and listened, one hand resting loosely on her knee, her eyes focused somewhere in the middle distance. She took it all in quietly, the way she always did… completely, without any drama or performance.

When I finally stopped talking, the kitchen felt almost too quiet. She asked softly, “How old were you when you had me?”

“Twenty. Almost twenty-one.”

She was quiet for a moment. “That’s only four years older than I am right now.”

“I know.”

“Were you scared?”

I thought about it honestly. “Not of you,” I said. “You were the only thing I was sure about.” My throat tightened. “Everything else scared the hell out of me.”

She nodded slowly, like something had just clicked into place for her.

Then she said, simply, “I’m not angry at you for anything mom, not for keeping things from me, or for the years, none of it.”

She looked me straight in the eyes. “But… I think I want to meet him.”