We Will Love Again – Episode 26
The archive room seemed to shrink around the three of them. Noah faced his mother while Alaina stood between the shelves, clutching the financial statement that had exposed years of private grief.
“What promise?” Noah repeated. His voice was controlled, but the restraint made the question more dangerous.
Nora lifted her chin. “Alaina is exaggerating a conversation that happened years ago.”
“Then explain it.” Noah blocked the doorway when she tried to leave. “Tell me why she believed she could not contact me when her mother died.”
Alaina stepped forward. “Noah, you know enough. Let her go.” She could not bear watching the two people she once loved as family turn into enemies.
He looked at her in disbelief. “You’re defending her again?”
“I’m trying to stop this from becoming another decision none of us can undo.” Alaina’s answer carried the exhaustion of five years spent managing everyone else’s pain.
Nora seized the opening. “I told her that if she truly wanted you to succeed, she had to make the separation permanent. That is all.”
“Permanent how?” Noah demanded.
Nora’s silence finally cracked Alaina’s resolve. “She said I could never call, write, or ask Peter to explain. If I came back, you might abandon Oxford and everything would have been for nothing.”
Noah remembered checking his phone for months despite his hatred. Every unknown number had carried a possibility he refused to name. Alaina had not stayed silent because she forgot him; she had believed silence was the price of his future.
“And you agreed?” he asked her.
“My mother was dying.” Alaina’s eyes filled. “You had already given up Harvard. I was terrified that if I heard your voice, I would beg you to come home.”
Noah turned to Nora. “You used her worst moment to control both of us.”
“I saved you,” Nora insisted. “Without Oxford, there would be no Triple AI.”
“Maybe.” He looked around the archive room, suddenly sickened by the fortune he once treated as proof of Alaina’s betrayal. “But success doesn’t give you the right to call the damage worthwhile.”
Nora’s confidence faltered. “One day you’ll understand what a mother is willing to do for her child.”
“I understand perfectly.” Noah opened the door. “You were willing to break him.”
Nora walked out beneath the stare of the office staff. Alaina remained behind, shaking with the aftermath of a truth she had fought so long to contain.
Noah turned back to her, anger replaced by something more difficult to face. “I came here to punish you for a lie my mother helped create,” he said. “Now you’re going to hear the truth about what I did.”
