Chapter 17 - The Shadow of VictoriaThe meeting was set for a quiet teahouse nestled on the outskirts of Long Island—far away from the cameras and tabloids that still hunted for any scrap of Sterling family drama.
When Victoria Royce walked through the door, I barely recognized her.
Gone was the ice-cold, perfectly manicured heiress who had sneered at me when I was just a housemaid in the West Wing. She wore an oversized beige trench coat, no makeup, and her eyes were hollow, surrounded by dark shadows of sleeplessness and grief. She looked like a ghost of high society.
She stopped three feet from my table, clutching her leather handbag like a shield.
"Emma," Victoria said, her voice thin and raspy.
"Victoria. Please, sit," I said, gesturing to the chair across from me.
She sat down rigidly, refusing the tea the waiter brought over. For two long minutes, neither of us spoke. The silence between us was heavy, filled with five years of shared tragedy, deceit, and stolen moments.
"I didn't know," Victoria blurted out suddenly, her eyes brimming with raw, desperate tears. "Emma, I swear to God... I didn't know what Eleanor did to you. I thought... they told me my baby lived. They brought him to my hospital room wrapped in a blue blanket... I was so out of it from the anesthesia..."
"I know," I said quietly, reaching across the table.
Victoria flinched, staring at my hand as if she didn't deserve the gesture, before slowly covering her face with both hands and breaking down into silent, heavy sobs.
"My real baby died that night, didn't he?" she wept, her shoulders shaking violently. "The doctors... Eleanor... they let me hold your baby while mine was being carried away to a morgue. They made me live a lie for five years!"
"Eleanor used both of us, Victoria," I said, my heart aching for the woman sitting across from me. "She robbed me of my son's baby years, but she robbed you of your right to grieve your own child. She built a dynasty out of our pain."
Victoria wiped her cheeks with a trembling tissue, looking up into my eyes. "How is he? How is Noah?"
"He's happy," I smiled softly, a warm memory of his laughter surfacing in my mind. "He loves the ocean. He has a puppy. He asks about the stars a lot."
Victoria nodded, a bittersweet smile breaking through her tears. She reached into her bag and pulled out a small, worn leather-bound photo album, pushing it across the wooden table toward me.
"These are his photos from when he was three and four," Victoria whispered, her voice cracking. "His first steps... his first haircut... the time he tried to feed his toy bear porridge. I can't keep them anymore, Emma. They belong to his real mother."
I touched the smooth leather of the album, feeling an overwhelming wave of gratitude for this broken woman who was giving me the pieces of my son's past that had been denied to me.
"Thank you, Victoria," I whispered.
May you like
She stood up, pulling her coat around herself. "I'm leaving New York next week. Moving to Europe to start over. I just... I needed to know he was okay. And I needed to ask if... if one day, when he's older... I could write him a letter?"
I looked at the album, then at Victoria. "When he's ready. I'll make sure he knows you loved him, too."
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