Pain upon pain

New York

Carson's mansion

"Your husband divorced you, and you are coming here?!" Celine's voice shot up in anger, the moment she heard what Ava had just recounted to her after she suddenly visited the mansion.

The next morning after the night that Ethan declared their divorce, Ava had packed the most important clothes and accessories to her in a box, and left the Walton's mansion so early with a swollen face which was a result of excessive crying.

She didn't even wait to see Ethan or his mother before leaving.

She also left the alimony cheque that he had dropped for her alongside the already signed divorce papers, on the dresser table that was in her room. Her only hope was to return to her father's house, tell her mother everything that had happened, and begin to think of what she would do thereafter.

However, the cold demeanor her mother flashed before her the moment she explained what happened, made her heart drop in fear that she might be blamed mercilessly for being useless. Once again.

"I do not have anywhere else to go, Mum. I have nowhere to stay now that Ethan has decided to break off our loveless marriage," Ava explained tiredly to the woman standing before her, who was not ready to listen to any excuses or silly jokes.

"You cannot stay here, Ava. No, you can't. It is either you go back to your husband's house, or find another place to stay at. You are not welcome here," Celine dropped the bombshell against Ava, which put her in great shock at what she was hearing her mother say.

"Mother. How can you say that? Why can I not live with you?" Ava's quaking voice asked in surprise with a disappointed and sad tone, when she realized that the relationship with her Mum was still so unfair to her. Not after everything she had done to grovel up to her.

"Do not call me your mother anymore! I am sick and tired of hearing you call me that!" Celine got angry at the mention of the word from Ava, like she had been waiting patiently to burst out in anger concerning that issue.

"Why would you say that, Mum?" Ava asked painfully, uncontrollably tears trickling her cheeks again to hear her mother say that, "What I have ever done to not deserve the same love that you give Leslie? Just what?" She finally voiced out the daring question that she had been dying to ask for so long.

"Now that your father is dead, I'm glad that I can now say it. Shouldn't you have taken a hint for a long time now?" Celine glared at her with an irritated expression, her fingers tapping systematically on the magazine she was reading before Ava came in.

"What? What do you mean…….?" Ava tried hard not to stutter at the words she was hearing, which were hard to fully decipher immediately.

"I know my own child very well, and there is a vivid difference. Leslie and I are not part of your life anymore. We cease to be families from now onward," Celine declared shockingly at Ava, whose heart was beating much faster than normal when she tried to understand Celine's words.

"Mu.. what are you?" She chuckled wryly, as she turned around the large living room for a minute, allowing her eyes to meander around every corner of the well-decorated house. The very one she spent half of her teenage years in.

"If you need a narration breakdown, then I'll do just that," Celine uttered, with her eyes raised in irritation again, when she realized that she was not getting the expected outburst from Ava. "You are not my daughter, and I married your father when you were still a young child. Now that your father is gone and you have finally proven yourself useless, we can be free from each other for good."

Ava didn't utter a word as she turned around again after the truth bomb that had just exploded hit her, and carefully wrapped her fingers around the huge traveling box she brought with her. As she carefully turned to drag the box alongside her on her way out.

The shock of what she was just hearing Celine reveal to her in her misery was too much to bear, and her body wasn't even reacting in the normal way she would have expected it to react.

'Probably because she had cried too much.'

"I am glad you now get it," Celine smirked spitefully when she realized that the situation of the truth revealed to Ava, wasn't as loud and dramatic as she had expected it to be, "And as for the company. Don't think you are getting anything from it. I'm sure you left with alimony from your damn husband!" She yelled.

Ava just continued to drag the box outside along with her, as some of the maids they still had working for them recognized her. They came around to help her with the two huge boxes that she was struggling with, and she just let them do whatever because she was not in her right senses anymore. Perhaps she should just die.

She was yet to recover from being ousted like an outcast after more than two years of marriage, and yet had to deal with the fact the woman she had always tried to curry her favor for motherly love wasn't actually hers.

And as for the alimony that might even have served as comfort, her pride wouldn't let her take it, thinking she had some fortune to look back to at home. Now, she had to hear again that Celine was planning to sell the company that her father spent his life trying to save, with nothing for her at the end of everything.

She lost both her inheritance money and alimony.

'She was finished. Totally finished.'

Ava didn't cry out loudly at the back of the cab that she sat in, and just bit her lips painfully as her teeth quaked. Everything that was going on was too much for her little heart to handle. It felt like her heart was hanging by a line of thread, and she just needed one more piece of bad news to slump.

It was still hard to contain within her that Ethan didn't remember that they had sex, the night of his mother's extravagant 60th birthday party.

'How could he not remember when she could remember every detail?'

The memories of the touch and feelings of his own body against hers were still so vivid, that her head still spun at the thoughts she wanted to bury so hard.

The manner in which he touched her body so tortuously that night still lingered with her, and the hickeys that were imprinted on her neck the next day sent the hair on her skin standing.

Memories of the clenching of her walls against his rock-hard shell stuck stubbornly with her, and her body still trembled at the thought of it every single time. He had awakened something she thought had died in her, and she tried to hide the fact that something like that ensued between them.

When she found out about what happened the next morning, she quickly ran out of the room at dawn before Ethan would wake up, and accuse her of seducing him.

It was a secret that Ava had tried to protect for her own peace by feigning ignorance, but her eggs didn't let her conceal the secret by getting unnecessarily fertilized.

'Now he didn't even believe her or remember what happened between them, and he decided to cast her out.'

And just when she thought that she might be able to settle at her father's house, think some things through, bear her child, and request legal DNA tests for her child, another sad shock had to hit her badly.

Nothing hurt more than the fact that Celine had been her stepmother, for all those years that she had yearned for her love. The ill-treatment from the woman she had always known as her mother hurt so deeply, than the actual scars that she had received from Celine at every blame.

She never for once doubted Celine's position in her life as a mother, even if she knew that she was loved less compared to Leslie.

'How could she? When there were so many memories that she couldn't remember from her childhood.'

The most vivid memories she still had of her life were from her teen years, when she knew Celine as Mum, and Leslie as her younger sister. Despite the coldness especially from Celine, she didn't give up and tried to love her fake mother whom she could never satisfy. Whose eyes never lit up whenever they saw her.

All those years she always thought that she was the problem, and couldn't do anything better in life because her mother made her feel so. All those years, she had been subjected to physical, emotional, physical, and psychological stress because she yearned earnestly for affection.

But right before her eyes in a few days, she lost both.

Both from the woman she had always loved as mother, and the man she had always loved as husband.

The two people that she had sacrificed everything for left her out in the cold at the most desperate time of her life.

'There was probably no reason for her to live again.'