Godmother To His Son Then I Took His Kingdom Chapter 28
The first time Leo called me, it was an ordinary Friday night.
I was at a gallery, checking the placement of exhibit labels. When his name flashed on my screen, I froze for a second before answering.
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah.”
He paused.
“You said I could call even when nothing’s wrong.”
I set down the label in my hand.
“Of course. How was your day?”
He started telling me about his new school.
He got a B on a math quiz. The pasta at lunch was terrible. His roommate ground his teeth. He spoke slowly, as if testing whether such small, ordinary things were worth my time.
I leaned against the wall and listened to every word.
“Mara, everyone says my mom is a murderer.”
“She was convicted of a crime. That’s a fact.”
“So… will I turn out like her?”
“No one is destined to become someone else just because of blood.”
I looked across the gallery at Eli, who was adjusting a light in the center of the room.
“We are all shaped by the choices we make.”
There was a long silence on the other end.
“Then was Graham my dad?”
I didn’t sanitize the answer for the sake of the dead.
“He took care of you for a long time. He also used you to avoid his own responsibilities. The good he did for you was real, and the harm he caused was also real. You’re allowed to miss him. You don’t have to defend him.”
Leo asked softly, “Like how you were grateful to my mom, but you still let her go to prison?”
“I didn’t send her to prison, Leo. Her actions and the law did that.”
“I understand.”
A few months later, he came to Santa Fe for the summer.
When we met at the foundation, he took a photocopy of the guardianship file out of his backpack.
“The child advocate said the original has to stay with the court.”
“What do you want to do with this copy?”
“Can I tear it up?”
I pushed the office shredder toward him.
But Leo didn’t move right away.
He turned to the birth certificate page and stared at it for a long time before looking up at me.
“If the father on here was fake, was the godmother fake, too?”
“At the birthday party that day, yes. It was.”
His eyes dimmed.
I went on. “But relationships don’t have to be decided by a piece of paper.”
“Then can I still call you Godmother?”
I looked at the child in front of me—a boy every adult in his life had once used as a pawn, then thrown away.
“You can.”
“But on two conditions.”
He tensed. “What are they?”
“First, it’s not because Evelyn wrote it down. Second, you don’t owe me anything for it.”
His eyes slowly brightened.
“So you don’t owe me anything either?”
“I don’t.”
“Okay.”
Very solemnly, he fed the photocopy into the shredder.
The paper vanished between the blades. The line bearing Graham’s name split apart, followed by the rest of the fictional family Evelyn had forged from lies.
Leo watched the scraps fall into the bin and let out a long breath.
“Godmother, can we go see Eli’s exhibition tomorrow?”
It was the first time he had ever called me that.
There were no applauding guests. No clinking champagne glasses.
And yet, I smiled and said, “Of course.”