The Capo’s Daughter Needs No Permission Chapter 26
My nineteenth birthday arrived soon after.
That morning, the dorm’s front desk called to tell me there were eighteen packages waiting for me.
They were all from my mother.
Each package was labeled with an age.
One through eighteen.
Standing at the desk, I thought about how my parents had once made up for all the birthday gifts Ava had missed.
So my mother had always known how to compensate a child for a missed birthday.
She just had never thought I might be waiting, too.
There was a cake box on top of the pile.
The label had my name on it.
Marco sent me an email:
*Mom was afraid the writing on the cake would get smudged, so she called the bakery a dozen times.*
*She remembers that when you were seven, this was what you wanted most.*
*Romy, please. At least accept the cake.*
I didn’t open a single package.
I contacted the delivery service and had all eighteen gifts, and the cake, returned to sender.
That afternoon, my mother sent me a voice message from a new number.
“I’m not trying to use gifts to pressure you into coming back.”
“I just want to make up for what I owe you.”
After listening, I replied for the first time on my own initiative.
“The day you scraped my name off the cake, you already knew what I wanted.”
“What I wanted was never eighteen late gifts.”
The chat bubble showed she was typing for a long time.
In the end, she sent only three words:
“I am sorry.”