Sarah Visits the Store
Chapter 13 - Sarah Visits the Store
Sarah made her first visit to the store six months after Richard's phone call, an occasion that required considerably more courage than she'd anticipated, given how thoroughly she'd once associated everything connected to the Mercer name with the specific pain of being told she wasn't good enough.
She walked through the showroom slowly, taking in the warm gold light and glass cases with the specific, complicated wonder of someone returning to a world she'd once been forcibly excluded from.
Mr. Whitfield greeted her with immediate, genuine warmth. "Mrs. Mercer. It's been a very long time."
"It's Ms. Cruz again, actually," Sarah said, smiling slightly. "Though I appreciate the thought."
Richard met her upstairs, in the same office where he'd first reconnected with Mark months earlier, considerably more nervous than a man running a watch empire typically allowed himself to appear.
"Thank you for coming," he said. "I know this wasn't easy."
"It wasn't," Sarah admitted. "I've spent ten years avoiding anything connected to your family's name. Walking through that showroom just now felt like deliberately stepping back into something I'd convinced myself I'd fully left behind."
"I understand that completely," Richard said. "I want you to know, whatever happens between us going forward, I intend to make sure you never have another reason to feel unwelcome in anything connected to this family. That's a promise I should have made ten years ago, to your face, instead of letting my mother's lies stand unchallenged while you were forced to build an entire new life on your own."
Sarah sat with that promise, weighing it carefully against ten years of evidence that promises from this particular family hadn't always been worth the breath they were spoken with.
"I appreciate you saying that," she said. "I want to be honest that I'm not ready to simply trust it yet. I think trust, once broken this completely, takes considerably longer to rebuild than a single apology, however genuine, can actually accomplish."
May you like
"I agree entirely," Richard said. "I'm not asking for trust today. I'm asking for the chance to earn it, slowly, over whatever timeline actually feels right to you."
Mark, having arranged this meeting with considerable, careful lobbying from both sides, watched his parents navigate their first conversation in ten years with a specific, quiet hope he didn't fully allow himself to express out loud yet.
