Chapter 373: Right Evidence, Wrong Conclusion
Maurice sighs loudly.
Leila sets her drawing stylus down on the table with a slight bang.
"Okay." She exhales. "Out with it, Reese. You have been sighing since you sat down there two hours ago."
Maurice gives her an apologetic look. "I am sorry, honey."
"Do not just apologize. Tell me why you’re restless, so I can decide whether to cancel my plan to throw something at you for disturbing my work." Leila gives him a pointed glare.
A small smile crosses his face. "How do you know disturbing your work was not the plan."
His eyes light up, fully in teasing mode.
How can I tell her that I’m restless because I’m thinking about our daughter that is no longer our daughter?
A flicker of how troubled he actually is passes behind his eyes for half a second. Leila misses it entirely. She is too busy being annoyed at him.
"If that was your intention, you can leave my office right now." She says it firmly, eyes already back on the drawing pad, one last warning glare thrown his way before she returns to her work.
"My dear wife, you have been working too hard lately. You should rest. Your health matters." Maurice says gently.
Leila slams her stylus down again, harder this time.
"When we got the news about Arthur, you were so worried about the company. How it would manage without him as CEO. So you came up with a stack of gadget designs and pushed Sam, bless him, into selling them."
"You told me to design as fast as I possibly could. And now, the first time in days I finally get to sit down and properly work, since we brought him home, you are telling me to rest?"
Her voice climbs steadily as her emotion does.
"Whoa, hey. Leil." Maurice’s apology this time is genuine and immediate. He recognizes the signs his wife gives off when she is at her limit.
"Are you alright? You are not usually this easy to set off." He keeps his voice gentle, but does not move closer, still wary of the heat behind her eyes.
Leila closes her eyes, breathes, opens them again.
"I have this fear I cannot explain. That Arthur will never wake up. It has been weeks. There is no sign of him coming back to us."
Her eyes well up.
"I know Thea was in a coma far longer than this. And I was not nearly this panicked back then. So why do I feel worse now?" The words tumble out faster than she seems able to control. "Does that mean I love my daughter less?"
"Sweetheart..."
"I do not even worry that much about Thea, alone in Solarys, Reese. What does that say about me as a mother?" Tears fall freely down her cheeks now.
Maurice is up and across the room before she finishes the sentence, pulling her into his arms.
"Leila. Please do not think like that. You are not a bad mother. Hold onto that. I am not going to tell you that you are perfect, no one is, but you have done your best, and your best has never made you a bad mother."
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Maurice closes Leila’s office door quietly behind him. He had spent the last twenty minutes calming her, and now that he is finally alone, the exhaustion catches up with him all at once.
He has felt this particular exhaustion ever since the first time he suspected Thea was no longer Thea.
He remembers exactly when it started. It was back when Julian went missing, when Arthur, Liam, and Aldriana had gone into a dungeon to search for him.
He had never met Aldriana in person. He only caught her silhouette from a distance, once, in passing. And in that single glimpse, he had been completely certain it was Thea.
He was surprised, later, to be told it was not.
How does someone carry the exact same silhouette? The exact same body language?
Maurice is, at heart, a technician. He is the one who takes Julian’s ideas, half-formed and brilliant, and turns them into something that actually works. Julian may be the genius behind the heartstone gadgets, but it has always been Maurice who builds the bridge between concept and reality.
His mind runs on logic. He keeps his feelings close, shown only to the people nearest to him, his own family above all. To everyone else, he reads as quiet, a little awkward, someone who is more comfortable with schematics than small talk.
So when he learned the silhouette he saw was not Thea but Aldriana, his mind did what it always does when faced with a contradiction. It tried to resolve it. It built a quiet, private theory that Aldriana might be Thea after all, somehow, in a way no one had explained to him yet.
Then the theory ran into a wall.
Aldriana was more powerful than Arthur and Liam, both Sentinels, both trained for years. And if Aldriana truly was Thea, that would mean Thea was somehow more powerful than either of them.
Which made no sense at all.
So he told himself to let the theory go. But Maurice can never really let things go. Once a part of his brain has fixed on something, it does not release it cleanly. After that, without ever consciously deciding to, his mind began quietly gathering evidence to support a theory he could not bring himself to discard. He could not accept being wrong about something he had felt so certain of.
From that moment on, a part of him never stopped watching. The smallest things accumulated without him asking them to. The shape of her smile. The way her lips moved when she spoke. The cadence of her walk. The particular way she looked at people, holding their gaze a beat longer than she used to. Small things. Things that on their own meant nothing.
At first, Maurice told himself he had simply gone a little unwell, searching for patterns in his own daughter, a girl who had just woken up from a coma and was naturally going to seem different for a while.
But the evidence kept arriving. Unprompted. Unwanted. And the more of it he gathered, the less he could convince himself his theory was absurd, or that it was still only a theory at all.
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"Honestly, Thea. If you do not want to be here, you can leave. This is not for everyone." Claudia’s giggle pulls Theo back from wherever his mind had gone.
Theo blinks and looks around, momentarily disoriented. He has completely lost track of the fact that he came out with Claudia for a day of sightseeing in Solarys.
Claudia had been worried he would become sad and withdrawn now that he was on his own without his parents or his brothers. So she had essentially collected him and brought him along.
They are currently settled in a café inside one of Solarys’s most well-known apparel stores, the kind that has its own café built in for shoppers who want somewhere comfortable to sit between browsing and buying.
Theo smiles sheepishly. "Sorry, Claude. I did not mean to be so absent. And thank you for bringing me out."
Claudia’s giggle tips into a laugh. "You do not need to pretend with me, Thea. I know you do not enjoy clothes shopping. If anything, I should be the one apologizing for dragging you here without asking first."
Theo grins and says nothing. Which is answer enough.
Claudia laughs again. "You know, this is exactly why I like you. You do not tiptoe around me just because I am a Monfort."
She sighs, her eyes drifting to somewhere over Theo’s shoulder. "Unlike some people."
Theo follows her gaze. A group of girls roughly Claudia’s age have spotted her from across the store and are already making their way over, voices rising in excitement.
"You know what, Thea." Claudia is on her feet before she finishes the sentence. "You do not like it here anyway. Let us just go."
She grabs Theo’s hand and runs.
"Come on!" The group gives chase.
Theo has no choice but to follow, pulled along, smiling despite himself.
And even as he runs, his mind is spinning.
What does Maurice know? Since when? How much?
He can only blame himself for not being more careful.
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There were two moments that pushed Maurice’s theory from quiet suspicion into something he could no longer dismiss entirely.
The first was right after the Mt. Helen dungeon was cleared. Everyone who came out had ended up in the hospital, sleeping like the dead. And when Maurice came home, he found Thea in exactly the same state, unconscious and completely unreachable.
That alone might have meant nothing. But alongside it, he found a set of clothes he did not recognize. All black, practical, clearly worn. He had never seen Thea wear anything like them. And they were exactly the kind of clothes Aldriana had been wearing the day he glimpsed her silhouette.
The second moment came when Rhaenas was formed and both Arthur and Julian agreed, without apparent hesitation, to make their youngest sibling an active member and take her into dungeons with them.
Maurice trusts Arthur’s judgment completely. He trusts Julian’s. Neither of them would have agreed to something like that if they did not genuinely believe Thea could hold her own. They would never have put her at risk.
Which meant they had seen something in her that Maurice had not.
And that was when his mind began quietly weaving a theory even more absurd than the first one.
Not that Thea had changed. Not that she was somehow different from the girl he had raised.
But that the person currently living as Thea was not Thea at all. That she was Aldriana, in some form he did not yet have the language to explain, wearing his daughter’s face.
And the thought makes his blood run cold.
Where is the real Thea?