Chapter 322: Blood Doesn’t Heal Abandonment

"Even if I didn’t see you for a hundred years," she said softly, her voice trembling with emotion, "I would still recognize you the moment you stood before me."

She paused, swallowing the lump in her throat.

"Because I’m your mother."

The words echoed through the silent living room, hanging in the quiet space between them.

A bitter, hollow laugh escaped Matteo’s lips. "So..." he murmured, turning slowly to look his mother straight in the eyes. "You knew."

His mother gave a small nod. "I knew the moment you spoke. No matter how much you tried to sound like Mark, you’re still Matteo. A mother could never mistake her own child."

"You recognized me," he muttered, a sharp edge of betrayal lacing his words. "Yet you still let me sit there pretending to be someone else. You sat there and watched me play a part."

His mother looked at him, her lips parting as if to defend herself, but no sound came out.

"You say you’re my mother," Matteo said, his eyes fixed on hers. "Tell me, what kind of mother leaves her son for years without a single phone call? Without asking how he’s doing, whether he’s eating, whether he’s happy? You shut me out of your life as though I had never been your son."

He let out another bitter laugh and slowly shook his head. "I watched you love everyone else. I watched you celebrate with them. I watched you call them, worry about them, ask whether they had eaten or if they were taking care of themselves. I watched you be a mother to every one of your children..."

"But when it came to me, it was as though I no longer existed. I became the son you could leave behind without looking back. The son everyone called a killer, even though the first blood on my hands was spilled because I was trying to protect the brother you loved so much."

His eyes remained fixed on hers, refusing to look away. "And now you stand here telling me you’re my mother. What exactly did you expect? Did you think I’d run into your arms the moment you said those words? That I’d hug you and cry because we’d finally seen each other after all these years?"

He slowly shook his head. "It doesn’t work like that. You don’t disappear from your son’s life for years and expect a single sentence to erase everything he lived through."

"I’m sorry," Matteo’s mother choked out. I know there are no words that can undo what I’ve done. Nothing I say will ever erase the fact that I walked away and left you behind. I know I can’t change the years you spent without me..." A tear rolled down her cheek as she struggled to continue. "But I’m truly sorry."

Matteo looked at her for a long moment before finally speaking.

"Your apology doesn’t mean anything to me." He said. "You’re not sorry because you left me. You’re sorry because you’re finally standing in front of the son you abandoned, and for the first time, you can’t run from what you did."

He held her gaze, his eyes unwavering.

"Let’s be honest. If I hadn’t shown up at your door today pretending to be my brother, you never would have come looking for me. You never would have reached out. You would have gone on living your life, and I would have remained nothing more than the son you left behind."

He shook his head slowly, a bitter smile touching his lips.

"I’m not easy to fool anymore. I’m not that frightened child you abandoned all those years ago. I’ve grown up, and I know the difference between genuine regret and guilt. Regret makes you go back and fight for the person you lost. Guilt only shows up when that person comes back to remind you of what you’ve done."

"Matteo... please forgive me," his mother pleaded through her tears, taking an instinctive step toward him. "I know I was wrong. I know I failed you, but I was terrified. Leaving your siblings behind... I thought I was protecting them. I..."

"Enough."

Matteo’s voice cut through the room before she could finish. He looked at her with bitterness. "You have absolutely no excuse, Mother. Don’t try to justify what you did. Do you really think I don’t know the truth?"

"You had been looking for a way out of your marriage long before I ever became your excuse. You were tired of my father, and what happened to me handed you the perfect opportunity to walk away. You didn’t just leave him... You left me too because every time you looked at me, you didn’t see your son. You saw my father... and you couldn’t bring yourself to keep either of us."

His mother brought a trembling hand to cover her mouth, tears spilling down her face as she choked out, "Please... please forgive me."

Matteo let out a cold, humorless laugh. "Mother, you always act like you’re better than him, like you’re the noble one. But the truth is, he’s ten times the parent you’ll ever be."

He took a step closer, his eyes burning with fierce loyalty as he finally gave his father the praise he had always deserved.

"When you wanted to leave your marriage, he let you go because he loved you enough to set you free. When you said you wanted to take the children with you, he didn’t stop you. He didn’t drag you into a custody battle. Everything you wanted, he gave you. And even after you walked out that door, he never stopped sending child support. That’s how good my father was. Every decision you made, he supported because he believed that if it made you happy, then he was willing to endure the pain for your sake."

Matteo’s chest heaved with emotion. He didn’t care how his mother viewed his father or what flaws she tried to project onto him; the truth was written in stone.

"My father is one of the best and most supportive fathers out there," Matteo declared, his voice ringing with absolute conviction. "Not just to me, but to all of his children. He never loved one child more than another. He loved all of us equally. Unlike you, Mother, who sits here claiming to be morally superior to him... you don’t even come close."

He shook his head in bitter disgust. "Do you honestly think having blood on your hands is the only thing that makes someone a devil?"

A dark, painful laugh escaped his lips. "No. A true devil is a mother who abandons her own son in his darkest hour. And not only that, you tried to turn my siblings against me. You did everything in your power to keep my brothers and sister away from me."

His expression hardened into an unyielding glare. "But I’m grateful. Because every time you tried to make them leave me behind, they found their way back to me anyway. They saw the truth. They saw what you, my own mother, refused to see."

Matteo pointed toward her, his voice rising with the weight of a lifetime of pain.

"My father would do anything, sacrifice anything, to protect his children. But you, Mother... you abandoned your son the moment life became difficult. So tell me, Mother... who is the real devil among the three of us?"

Unable to bear the crushing weight of his words any longer, Matteo’s mother collapsed back onto the sofa, burying her face in her hands as she cried uncontrollably.

Matteo stood frozen as the woman who had given him life dissolved into a shattered mess across the cushions. The sight of her crying should have brought him satisfaction, or at least a bitter sense of closure.

Instead, it only hollowed him out further.

The cold armor he had worn since walking through the door finally splintered, and the fragile, grieving child locked inside him for years broke free. A choked sob tore through his throat before he could stop it, and the hot, angry tears he had fought so hard to hold back finally spilled down his cheeks.

"I was wrong..." Matteo whispered, his voice cracking violently as he looked down at her through a blur of tears. "I made mistakes, yes. I was a devil, or whatever you see me as. But I still deserved your love. You owed me that as a mother."

He took a shaky step forward, his chest heaving with every ragged breath. "You stayed away all those years. You chose silence. You chose absence. You chose an entirely different life... and yet, after everything, you still managed to lie to yourself. You still convinced yourself that you were a good mother."

A harsh, jagged laugh slipped past his lips, muffled by his tears. "How do you sleep at night carrying that delusion? How do you look at yourself in the mirror and pretend that abandoning a child who was begging for guidance makes you the victim? You aren’t a mother. Not to me."

Without another word, Matteo turned toward the door...