The Princess Stopped Begging for Love, But They Became Desperate to Give Her Everything Chapter 10

The Princess Stopped Begging for Love, But They Became Desperate to Give Her Everything Chapter 10

Mom cried.

The light seemed to fade from Dad’s eyes.

Isabella watched me with a complicated expression but said nothing.

On the day I left, Mom and Isabella came to see me off.

Mom held on to my hand, her eyes swollen from crying.

“Elena, from now on… could you come back sometimes? Please?”

I looked at her.

Then I asked the question I had carried with me for years.

“Mom, if I hadn’t accomplished any of this, if I were just an ordinary person, would you still want me to come

back this badly?”

She froze.

Her lips parted.

No words came.

Her face went white.

That was answer enough.

I smiled faintly, pulled my hand away, and walked toward security.

I never looked back.

Later, I heard that Isabella and Nico Russo’s marriage was unhappy.

Nico began seeing other women.

He treated Isabella badly.

She returned to the Caruso estate in tears.

My parents felt awful for her, but Caruso Holdings had been slipping for years.

The company’s port and shipping projects still depended heavily on the Russos, so they could do little more

than urge Isabella to stay and endure it.

Later still, Dad’s health continued to deteriorate.

Caruso Holdings slid into a serious crisis after years of poor management and bad decisions.

Many of the ties Lorenzo had once held together through sheer personal influence, with port operators, construction firms, and unions, began to unravel.

They tried contacting me.

They wanted me to use my professional connections in energy and geology to help.

I refused.

Everything I had accomplished, I had built one step at a time.

The Caruso family had nothing to do with it.

I wasn’t going to let their mess pull me back in.

I put down roots in Montana and eventually became well known in my field.

I supervised graduate students and still went into the field from time to time.

My life was simple.

Full.

Peaceful.

Eventually, I met someone who wanted the same kind of life I did.

He was a colleague.

Gentle, thoughtful, and deeply respectful of me.

We got married.

There was no extravagant wedding.

Just dinner with a few close friends.

We decided not to have children.

We were happy with each other and with the lives we’d built around work that mattered to us.

That distant, magnificent house in New York, along with all the tangled love and resentment of the Caruso family, became little more than a memory from another lifetime.

Many years later, I received word that Mom was dying.

I went back.

She looked impossibly old.

She lay in bed, painfully thin..

Dad sat beside her in his wheelchair, just as frail and aged.

Once, a single sentence from Don Lorenzo Caruso could silence an entire room.

Now he struggled to form a complete sentence.

When Mom saw me, tears spilled from her clouded eyes.

She clutched my hand and repeated the same words over and over.

“Elena… I’m sorry… I’m so sorry…”

Dad was crying too.

His speech was thick and broken.

“We were wrong… we were both wrong…”

I looked at them and felt no anger.

No satisfaction.

No grief for what might have been.

The little girl who had once desperately wanted her parents to love her had died a lifetime ago.

I handled Mom’s funeral arrangements and left soon afterward.

The funeral followed Caruso tradition and drew old acquaintances, business associates, and members of

the extended family.

Isabella came to see me before I left.

She looked tired and much older than I remembered.

The effortless polish she’d once worn like armor was gone.

“Elena,” she said.

Her eyes held a mixture of regret and envy.

“Maybe you were right from the beginning. Leaving this family… maybe that was the right thing to do.”

I looked at her without answering.

I knew regret wouldn’t change anything for Isabella.

She and I were different.

She could never let go of the Caruso name, Caruso Holdings, or everything that family had given her.

“I used to be jealous of you,” she said suddenly.

“I was jealous because even after you disappeared, they never stopped thinking about you. So when you

came back, I wanted to be better than you at everything. More accomplished. More obedient. I wanted all of their attention for myself.”

She lowered her eyes.

“I was wrong.”

I listened quietly.

In my previous life, hearing the truth would have devastated me.

Now it felt like hearing a story from someone else’s life.

“It’s over.”

As I turned to leave, I remembered the words my son had spoken to me at the end of my previous life.

“Mom, can you stop competing with Aunt Isabella all the time?”

This time, I never had to compete with anyone.

I finally had a life that truly belonged to me.