by Jerilee Kaye
Her mother looked at her apologetically. “Oh, sweetheart. I am so sorry. I am sorry you suffered for this. This was my fault. And your father’s revenge. What your father did has no valid reason, no excuse. But you shouldn’t have been the one to pay. I am so sorry, child.” Her mother reached out and gave her a tight hug. They both cried in each other’s arms.
Then her mother pulled away from her. “It’s okay, baby. You’re home now. And I promise to make it all up to you. Your father is going to pay for the difficult life he put you through.”
Adrienne shook her head. “Mom…he’s still my father.”
“No father could stomach depriving his child of the life she deserved. Just because of what? Jealousy? Revenge? Anger? None of those are reasons enough for him to take you away from me.”
Adrienne knew it wasn’t time to argue about this. Right now, she couldn’t defend her Dad. She was also mad at him for doing what he did. Especially for…letting her stepmother and stepsister crush her and break her spirit.
Jin came back to the room and announced that dinner would begin shortly.
“Where is your father?” her mother asked Jin.
“He just got in,” Jin replied. “I ensured that Adrienne’s friends come dine with us, too. I figured all this hoopla will be much easier for Adrienne to handle if she had her best friends to keep her company.”
“Of course,” their mother responded. “They are more than welcome. And besides, I would be thankful to anybody who loved my daughter all the time that I wasn’t at her side.”
They went to the first floor of the house and Jin and her mother led her to the huge dining room. There was a long table in the middle of it with twenty seats.
Jill and Yuan already sat there and Adrienne introduced them to her mother. After a few minutes, a handsome man in his fifties entered the room. His hair was darker than Jin’s and his eyes were aquamarine.
“Oh, we have guests,” he said, smiling. His smile was warm and welcoming. Then he turned to her mother and kissed her lovingly on the lips.
“Pierre,” her mother began. “Jin just brought me the most wonderful surprise. I’d like you to meet her.” Ariana pulled her husband towards Adrienne.
Pierre Starck stood in front of her and took a good look at her. He blinked back twice and, immediately, recognition crossed his face. Without having to introduce them, he said, “Andrea.”
Adrienne smiled at him shyly.
“But her name now is Adrienne. All the while, we were looking for Andrea, when that’s not even her name.”
“How?” Pierre asked his wife.
“I will tell you all about it later.” Ariana whispered
Pierre looked at Adrienne again. “My God, you look like your mother.”
“Jin found her,” her mother announced. “Now, she’s finally here, Pierre.”
Pierre Starck smiled at his wife and hugged her. “Oh sweetheart. I’m so happy for you. You’ve waited decades for this.”
“I know.” Tears rolled down Ariana’s cheeks again. “And you have patiently waited with me.”
Pierre Starck leaned forward and kissed his wife once again and then he turned to Adrienne. He gave her a hug and then he said, “Welcome to the family, child.”
Tears welled up in Adrienne’s eyes and she felt happiness surge through her. She saw that Pierre Starck genuinely loved her mother and it was true what Jin said. He’s accepted her existence even before they got married. And had her own father allowed her to live with them, this man would have treated her like a real daughter.
“Th-thank you, sir,” Adrienne said.
“Oh, child. I have been hiring private investigators in the US to search for you for almost all your life. I think, now that I have finally met you, you should call me Papa.”
Adrienne smiled shyly and nodded. “Thank you, Papa.”
After dinner, Adrienne went with Jill and Yuan to the Starck’s huge garden at the back of the estate.
“Wow,” Yuan breathed. “Your family is really lovely.” He couldn’t help the tears in his eyes, too.
Jill was also crying. “Adrienne, we know how much you’ve wished to have a family that shows even just a little bit of affection for you. Now you do. This is some sort of a miracle!”
“I know,” Adrienne admitted happily. “I mean…it’s still too much to absorb at the moment, but I never ever dreamed that some people would love me enough to dedicate decades of their lives trying to find me…because they felt that I belonged with them. It’s just…so surreal considering I grew up feeling out of place with the family I had then. I never felt like they accepted me. And now…I met some people who turned out to be doing everything they could just to make me one of their own.”
“If this happened to me…I don’t think I would be able to forgive my father at all,” Yuan said.
Adrienne felt a sharp pain in her chest again. Tears welled up in her eyes and she stared down on the grass on her feet. She shook her head. “What he did…maybe he thought that was right. He didn’t want to lose me. But what he did was wrong. I felt like he cheated me. He was being selfish. My real mother loved me all these years, while I was growing up thinking that motherly love didn’t exist for me at all. Maybe I would be able to forgive him. But I need time to take all this in. I’m still angry at him. But yes, I think I would forgive him. In time.”
“Your mother is Amanda Seville, Adrienne,” Jill asserted, her voice said that she found that surreal.
“I know, right? Unbelievable.”
“Well, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree at all. That’s where you got your talent. You always wondered how no one in your family ever knew how to write.”
“Now, I don’t feel out of place at all. My mother loves me. And I have a brother who genuinely cares about me, too.”
“And he’s bloody hot!” Jill couldn’t help saying.
Adrienne narrowed her eyes on her friend. “He’s my brother, Jill! How could you even talk like that about him in front of me?”
Jill giggled. “And to think I thought at first that he was interested in you. Well, he was. But not in the way I thought, not romantically. Just like you said.”
“So what are you going to do now?” Yuan asked. “Will you live here in Paris?”
Adrienne sighed. “I don’t know. What I do know is that I want to get to know my family a little bit more.”
“Yes. You deserve that,” Jill said. “Your stepmother and your stepsister hated you. Now, it’s time you stay with the mother and brother…including the stepfather…who felt that your coming home today was a miracle.”
Her mother called them. It had gotten late and they came from a long flight. Jill and Yuan stayed in two of the guest rooms. Adrienne said goodnight to them. She wanted to talk to her mother more, though. She felt like talking to her for hours would still not suffice for getting to know her.
“This is your room, Adrienne,” her mother said, opening the door of the room opposite Jin’s.
When they stepped into the huge room, Adrienne almost gasped. The luxurious queen-sized bed in the center was covered in purple and pink bedspreads, duvet and pillows. The pillows in the center of the bed had the letter A embroidered in them. There was a desk and a shelf full of books. A huge couch and center table stood on a corner opposite the bed. Luxurious violet curtains cover the glass walls and doors that led to a huge balcony. The walls were adorned with beautiful, serene paintings on canvass.
“Wow,” Adrienne breathlessly stated. “This is so beautiful.”
Her mother smiled. “I’m glad you like it. We decorated this room as often as we could. The sheets and curtains get washed and replaced every week.”
“Is this a guest bedroom or does someone actually stay here?”
“This is not a guest room, Adrienne. We have been decorating and keeping this room ready for years...hoping this day would come…that you would finally come home to us.”
Adrienne found herself overwhelmed by emotio
ns once again. She never expected to hear what her mother just said. She remembered her bedroom in Boston, the room where she actually stayed in for years before she went to college. Her bed didn’t have sheets and all her stuff got put in boxes, as if her supposed mother expected her never to return at all. And now, here in this house, her real mother made a room for her, kept it ready for the day when she would finally return to her.
She turned to the paintings on the wall. Some of them were abstract, painted in pastel colors, beautiful and elegantly feminine to match the theme of the room. These included a painting of a rainforest with a lagoon in the center and exquisite wildflowers.
Adrienne thought that the paintings matched the room so well that someone painted them for it…a room meant for the princess in the family.
“Do you like the paintings?” Her mother asked, noticing how she was admiring the canvasses on the wall.
Adrienne nodded. “They’re lovely.”
“Jin painted all of them,” her mother said proudly.
Adrienne stared at her mother. She couldn’t hide the awe on her face.
“It’s his hobby,” her mother revealed. “He’s been painting for this room since he was fifteen, hoping that one day, his big sister would come home, see them… and admire them the way you are doing now.”
Adrienne’s heart swelled. Her brother painted for her, when he hasn’t even met her. Kimberly never even had nice thoughts of her when she lived with her all her life.
As she stared back into the room, she couldn’t help but wonder how it was possible that the Starcks have managed to make her feel like she belonged to them in a space of five hours, and the family she grew up with hadn’t made her feel accepted when she’d lived with them for over twenty years.
An hour later, after she’d taken a shower in the huge elegant en-suite bathroom, she lay down on the luxurious bed that was always meant for her. She turned on her phone. So much has happened, she forgot to turn her phone back on after she took them from the police station.
She had notifications of missed calls from her father and some from Justin.
She sighed. How she wished Justin was with her in this longest day of her life. She missed him. She missed how she confided in him all her pains, her thoughts, her dreams and her ordeals. She wondered what he would say when he found out how her life had turned a sudden three-sixty in the space of sixteen hours.
Her heart pounded inside her chest when she read his message to her: Where will you be in exactly forty days? Let me answer that for you. In Italy. Changing your last name to mine.
She smiled bitterly. All her life she was called Adrienne Miller. But now she found out that it was a fake name. Her legal name on her real birth documents was Andrea Blanc. If her mother had it her way, she would have been Adrienne Blanc. If Pierre could have it his way, she was almost certain he would change her name to Adrienne Starck.
Now that she knew who she really was, she’s confused about which name was right for her to use.
But in her heart, at that moment, she knew what name she would rather use out of all the options she had.
She would rather be Adrienne Adams.
30. Novo življenje
Slovenian for New Life.
Over the next days, Adrienne spent most of her time in the Starck mansion, getting to know her mother. It was like they both couldn’t get enough of talking to each other. As gently as she could, she told her how difficult it was, growing up with Marina Miller, the woman she thought was her Mom, who provided little comfort and constant negative comparisons to her stepsister.
Yuan and Jill enjoyed Paris just as much. Jin took them around anywhere they wanted whenever Adrienne desired some alone time with her mother.
“Do you have a boyfriend, Adrienne?” Her mother asked.
Adrienne sighed. She was reminded again of the broken pieces of her heart. She hadn’t heard from Justin since the last time he told her she’d be going to Italy in forty days. She reckons he was still working on convincing his parents to let him go. She had no idea how he’s going to do it, but deep inside her heart, she really, really hoped he would succeed, so he could come back to her.
Adrienne looked up at her mother. “I did, but it was…complicated,” she disclosed.
Her mother’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t miss the shadow of pain that she saw cross Adrienne’s eyes.
“You loved him?”
Adrienne blinked back the tears that are threatening to pour from her eyes. Then she replied, “With all my heart, Mama.”
“Then why aren’t you together?”
“Because…because we can’t,” she replied. “His family is rich and powerful. Apparently, he needed to marry an heiress.”
Her mother raised a brow. “Are you saying to me that his family couldn’t accept you because you were from a middle-class family? Well, now you’re not anymore! You’re an heiress now, too.”
Heiress.
She still has not gotten used to that word. She didn’t even know what it was supposed to mean and what obligations or duties were attached to it.
“Well, his family already arranged for him to marry some girl.”
“Oh. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised, considering it happened to me, too. What did your boyfriend do? Didn’t he fight for you?”
“He did,” Adrienne replied sadly. “His parents disowned him. He still fought for me. But I couldn’t make him leave them for me, Mama,” Adrienne said. “So, I gave him up.”
Tears slid down her cheeks and she wiped them as she smiled at her mother ruefully.
“You truly are a brave girl, Adrienne. I am so proud of you, sweetheart.” She reached out to Adrienne and pulled her into her arms. Adrienne cried silently in her mother’s arms, wishing she had this luxury when she was entering puberty and finally realizing how harsh the world really was.
Her mother pulled away from her and touched her face between her palms. She smiled at her. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. You are a beautiful woman,” she assured her. “Don’t worry. I will introduce you to someone who is worthy enough to claim your hand. Handsome, rich, smart and powerful. You will forget your boyfriend in no time.”
She was about to say that she wasn’t interested in other wealthy heirs, but her mother already pulled her away into the house.
“Come quick! Let’s go to the salon. Nothing beats a nice spa to heal a broken heart. And shopping of course.” Her mother laughed.
Adrienne couldn’t help but admire the spirit of the woman in front of her. She was contagious.
Wow! My mother rocks!
They went to a spa in one of the Starck’s hotels, with Jill and Yuan. Then they had lunch with Jin in one of their restaurants. While waiting for their car to drive them to the nearest shopping mall, Jin came up behind her.
“So, is she wearing you out yet?” Jin teased.
Adrienne smiled at her brother. “Oh my God, Jin! She is wonderful.”
Jin nodded. “Yes. And she’s waited for you for years. So if she gets to be a little clingy or overprotective, just bear with her. She will loosen up eventually.”
Adrienne shook her head. “I don’t care. I’ve waited all my life to feel like this. Like I have a mother.”
“I know. And I’m glad you’re smiling genuinely these days.”
“Thank you, Jin. If you didn’t find me, I would have been sulking behind my desk in Manhattan instead of being here in Paris, happily getting to know my mother.”
“You’re wrong,” Jin said and Adrienne raised a brow at him. “You wouldn’t be behind your desk in Manhattan. You would probably be in Boston…behind bars.” He teased and Adrienne couldn’t help hitting him on the shoulder.
Then she smiled at Jin warmly. “Thank you. I mean it. I will forever be thankful to you for bringing me back home.”
“And speaking of home,” Jin paused. “Have you thought ab
out what you’re going to do?”
“What do you mean, what I’m going to do?”
“Adrienne, you realize you don’t have to work another day of your life, right? You have a trust fund just waiting for you. We have a company of our own. You can work for one of our hotels if you really want to work. And you can pursue your love for writing.”
Adrienne took a deep breath. “I have a job at Blush.”
Jin raised a brow. “And you’d rather spend your days with your heartless editor than your family?”
Adrienne bit her lip, not really knowing what to decide. Jin did have a point.
“Come on, Yen,” Jin said. “Mom has waited for you for so long. She deserves to get to know her daughter.”
Adrienne nodded. Jin was right. She owed it to her mother. She needed to spend time with her to make up for what they had lost. She needed more time to bond with her new family…to feel like she belonged to a family.
And moreover…a new life, environment, new country would take her mind off Justin while she waited for him. He said he would find her after forty days. But what if he didn’t come back?
She could keep herself busy learning how to live her new life…to forget that her heart had sustained irreparable damage. She would never forget Justin. But she needed help going through one step at a time.
Adrienne and her mother spent the whole afternoon shopping. Adrienne’s mother insisted on getting her a new wardrobe and Yuan and Jill happily helped her pick out more than a dozen different tops, a dozen different jeans, skirts and other stylish items.
Adrienne didn’t really want expensive clothes, handbags and accessories, but Jill and Yuan talked some sense into her.
“It’s not for you, Yen!” Jill hissed.
“Do it for your mother!” Yuan insisted. For many reasons.”
“Like what? Squander her money?”
“No. Like you’re her daughter now,” Yuan explained. “She has a semi-celebrity status and her family is like the crème of the crop. And since you’re the latest addition to that family, people in their world will look at you, gossip about you, scrutinize you. So, why don’t you give them something beautiful and good to look at? Some girl with style and finesse, as well as the sense and the brains.”