Chapter 199: Moving Day
Edrick
Moana was terribly quiet for the next few days. I didn’t blame her, of course. She was going to be rightfully upset about having to leave, but it was the safest thing to be done. I only ever wanted to keep Moana and Ella safe, and despite our last incident at the mountain estate, I felt confident that our new security guards would protect us while we were there. During that time, though, I decided that I would have to figure out what to do about my father. I knew that he was going to come after us, but I had no real evidence. He hadn’t made any real threats yet, at least not anything that we could prove, so we couldn’t turn him in to the police. As of that moment, I was at a loss as to what to do about him. And my mother wasn’t picking up her phone when I called, either. I was beginning to get worried, to say the least.
The next few days went by too quickly. I hired a moving company to get everything that we would need; mostly clothes, kitchenware, and sentimental items since the mountain estate was already fully furnished. I wanted Moana to feel at home there, so without her knowledge I hired an interior designer to go to the estate and furnish one of the rooms to make it a nice art studio for her. I figured that this would cheer Moana up and maybe make her not hate being there and being away from her job so much.
By the middle of the week, however, I started to feel a bit sad too.
I liked the penthouse. I had never really cared too much about the place, but ever since Moana had begun to call the penthouse her home, it had become more special to me. What was once just an expensive and luxurious place to live now felt entirely different. As we went around and prepared to move, I began to notice little things that I hadn’t noticed before, too. Moana had placed flowers around the apartment. She had left various throw blankets and comfortable pillows on the furniture. Her sketchbook lay on the table by the armchair in the sun. Even in my bedroom, she had placed a little dish for her jewelry and a stack of books on the bedside table, and had a tray of lotions and serums for her skin and hair on the bathroom sink. I used to keep my bedroom curtains closed, as I needed complete darkness to try to sleep, but lately they had been open and my bedroom was filled with sunlight during the afternoons. I hadn’t noticed, but apparently at one point Moana had replaced the boring black comforter on my bed with a lighter colored one that brightened up the room.
Seeing all of this now, I felt more reluctant to leave. I knew that we had to go, but it was so hard to say goodbye to this place.
Ella was distraught, too. When I initially told her about my plans to take them to the mountain estate, she had thrown a massive fit. She didn’t remember anything about the event in the warehouse, so she really didn’t understand why I was making them move, and she was furious with me. She spent the next few days fuming at me and refusing to speak because she didn’t want to leave her new friends that she had made at school.
By the end of the week, however, it was time to leave. The movers were scheduled to come at noon, and once they had packed up all of our things they would be following us to the mountain estate along with our caravan of security vans. We would be leaving out the back, where the paparazzi weren’t waiting for us. Within a couple of weeks, news would probably start to spread that the Morgan penthouse was dark and empty, which would likely stir up a lot of news since Ethan was being held in jail. I didn’t care, though. I just wanted to get out.
Friday morning, I woke up and finished packing up a few things. Moana eventually came out and helped Ella get ready, but she hardly spoke to me.
Oh well, I thought to myself. She would come around soon. Soon, she would understand why I was doing this and she wouldn’t be so mad at me. And besides, the mountain estate was beautiful. For all I knew, she might even want to stay there; maybe eventually we would sell the penthouse, send Ella to a private school near the mountain estate, and I would manage WereCorp remotely. I wouldn’t mind that.
I was passing through the living room at one point with a box in my hand, however, when something caught my eye: the piano.
I stopped and looked at it for a few moments. This past week, I hadn’t been playing it much. But now, in the late morning sunlight, it looked tempting. So, setting the box down on the floor, I decided to sit at the piano and play one last song before we left.
At first, I played quietly and tentatively. I hated being overheard, as having an audience made me oddly nervous. Despite my public speaking abilities, I couldn’t stand playing the piano in front of people. But as I played a little more, I soon got lost in the song. I started playing more fluidly, closing my eyes as I felt the smooth keys beneath my fingers. I stopped caring if anyone overheard me, and simply felt the music move through me.
I didn’t know how long I played for. It could have been minutes or even hours. All I knew was that when I opened my eyes, I wasn’t alone anymore.
She was standing by the window, looking out at the city. The sunlight streamed in and illuminated her red hair like fire. She was wearing a light, loose dress — I never would have admitted it, but I couldn’t help but notice that I could see the outline of her shapely body as the sunlight shined through her dress — and was holding her belly with one hand and rubbing it with the other.
Lately, her belly had been growing larger. It was much harder to hide it now that she was a few months along, and werewolf babies were notorious for growing a little faster than human babies. Seeing the protrusion of her round, full belly beneath her dress made me smile just a little bit.
She slowly turned to look at me, noticing that I had stopped playing. There were tears in her beautiful green eyes, although she still held her head high, just like she always did. Flashes of the way that she held herself together, even when my brother had her at gunpoint, floated through my mind as I looked at her.
For a long time, Moana and I just looked at each other without a single word said between us.
During those moments, everything that I had made up my mind about that past week was instantly torn away. As I looked at Moana, seeing how beautiful she looked in the sunlight and the way that the tears in her emerald eyes just made them sparkle even more, I knew that I couldn’t leave this place.
This was our home.
