Chapter 65: A man’s word

"And remember, just as our daughter is your baby, that is the same way those kids are Selen’s babies," Julian said, his voice flat with exhaustion. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, refusing to let the argument stretch on any longer.

"And if you want to know if there is a trust fund with such an amount for our daughter as well, then why don’t you ask my parents yourself? I’m going to sleep." he said and without waiting for her reply, Julian turned his back, pulled the blanket up over his shoulders, and settled into the mattress.

Mary stood in place by the side of the bed. Her arms were tightly folded across her chest as she watched him close his eyes.

"Hmph!" Mary huffed loudly, deliberately making sure he heard her annoyance.

She crawled into her side of the bed, pulling her own section of the duvet over her.

She did not hate Clancy’s children. In fact, she had never wished them any ill will. But she was fiercely protective of her own, and she wanted absolute certainty that her daughter was not going to receive second-class treatment from Julian’s family.

From the very moment she had married Julian, Mary had felt a massive, Clancy-shaped cloud hanging over the entire family. It felt like every holiday, every dinner, and every family milestone was threaded carefully because of Clancy’s shadow.

Now that she finally had a child of her own, she refused to let her innocent daughter carry that same emotional baggage.

As the room grew darker and her eyes grew heavier, Julian’s blunt words began to loop in her mind. Deep down, she knew he was right. How nearly impossible would it be that his parents would see her daughter as anything other than their own flesh and blood grandchild?

They had never been cruel to her since the beginning, but anxiety has a way of making the mind play tricks. As she finally started drifting to sleep, a cold knot of regret formed in her stomach.

She genuinely hoped that Julian’s mother had not somehow picked up on what she thought about them. Her questions had not just been a dig at Clancy, she had essentially questioned their capacity to love their own son and granddaughter equally. It was a messy line to cross, and she knew it.

****

The next afternoon, Clancy arrived at Selen’s home much earlier than his usual time. His corporate meetings had wrapped up ahead of schedule, and rather than killing time in his hotel room or his eerily silent office he wanted to see the kids.

But more than that, he desperately wanted a chance to actually talk to Selen. He needed to discuss the envelope his family had sent, but there was a deeper urgency inside him- he wanted to talk about them.

Before their agonizing months spent sitting in hospital waiting rooms, Selen had completely rejected every single attempt he made to speak to her. She had built an impenetrable wall around herself.

Even now, during this fragile truce where he spent significantly more time sitting in her living room than he did at his hotel, they still barely spoke a word to each other that was not strictly about the children. That certainly was not how he wanted them to grow.

Up until this point, Clancy had been forcing himself to focus on one single fire at a time. He did not want to overwhelm her. And for the most part, things were finally looking up.

His relationship with the kids seemed to be going genuinely well. Diana was recovering speedily from her surgery and treatments, and Selen had even managed to return to her regular work schedule. With the baseline chaos finally settling down, Clancy figured it might finally be time to try once again to rebuild the foundation of their relationship.

As he pulled his car into the driveway, he could not help but marvel at the sheer absurdity of his own life. If anyone had told him a few years ago that the family he had entered into an underground deal with would end up forcing a wife on him, and that she would somehow end up being the only woman to ever truly hold his heart and bear his children, he would have called total bullshit. ℯℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

He genuinely had not expected that greed had swallowed the Williams family, Selen’s family so completely. Even after Clancy had compensated them handsomely for the deal, their greed was bottomless. They were terrified of losing the connection, so they forced their daughter down his throat.

At the beginning, even he had not realised that it was Tola, Selen’s step-sister, whom her parents were originally supposed to arrange for him. Tola was the one mapped out for the contract. But when the Williams family caught wind of Clancy’s ruthless, cold reputation and heard rumors that he was a hardened misogynist, they panicked.

By then, it was far too late to cancel the binding contract without facing Clancy’s roth. So, in a desperate bid to protect their favorite daughter, they twisted the arrangement behind closed doors. They threw Selen into the fire instead.

Clancy had not realized the depth of this until much later, long after Selen had already packed her things and left him.

Sitting in his parked car, staring at Selen’s front door, he could only imagine how vastly different, how completely ruined things would have been if he had indeed ended up with Tola. Tola was a gambling drunk who could not keep her life straight if her life depended on it.

He allowed his mind to wander through the alternate possibilities. Maybe, just maybe, he still would have crossed paths with Selen on that fateful night. Maybe she still would have gotten pregnant with his kids anyway, and he still would have spent years looking for her, eventually flying across the entire world just to be with her.

But if that had happened, he would currently be trapped in a messy, public, and expensive divorce from Tola.