Chapter 1775:


    Henrik exhaled, the tension leaving his shoulders. “I was afraid I’d chosen poorly.”


    Gillian watched him move into the room, his steps light, the refined paper bags swinging gently at his side. She pressed her lips together.


    She had money now — enough to change things. She had already set some aside for her parents, and from this point forward, she was determined to give Adide what she had never been able to before. All the sweets Adide had once gazed at through bakery windows, pressing her small nose against the ss — Gillian wanted her daughter to taste every single one. Once the surgery was behind them and Adide had fully recovered, she would enroll her in a proper kindergarten too. She would do whatever it took to give her child a real beginning — not just survival, but something worth building on.


    She made herself a quiet, private promise: Adide would never be trapped in the same kind of life she had known, where every step felt uncertain and sinking further was always one misstep away.


    And yet doubt crept in at the edges.


    ????а?? ???????? ???????? p???????? ???? ??а??????????l??.c????


    Had she made the wrong choice by keeping Adide from the Martel family? If Adide were raised as a daughter of that household, her path through life would be iparably smoother. The Martels treated what others considered luxuries as ordinary. The things Adide could only dream of would simply be her daily life.


    But there were other fears. If Alban one day married and had children of his own, would Adide still be looked after? Would she be weed, or merely tolerated?


    Gillian watched Henrik’s back as he walked ahead of her, and felt the thoughts pull her in every direction at once. She had no answer — not yet. She only knew what she wanted: a better life for her daughter. Everything else remained unresolved.


    “Mr. Martel.” Adide’s soft, clear voice rang out the moment she spotted him.


    Henrik paused. Something quiet and bittersweet moved through him at the sound of the formal address. So much distance in two small words. He allowed himself a moment with the feeling, then let it go. Once Adide came home — when that day finally arrived — she would call him Great-Grandpa, and none of this would matter.


    He settled beside her bed with a warm smile and carefully lifted the small pink rabbit-shaped cake from the bag with a flourish. “Look what I brought — ta-da!”


    He held it up and tilted it gently toward her, watching her face.


    Adide’s vivid emerald eyes lit up at once, brightening as though amp had been switched on behind them.


    This was the cake she had stood outside bakeries imagining. She had watched other children in neat, pressed clothes eat these delicate little things, and she had never once asked her mother for one, because she already knew the answer. She had never med her mother for it either. Next to her mother’s arms around her at the end of the day, no cake in any window had ever seemed worth the asking.


    “Do you like it?” Henrik asked, his voice soft, his eyes warm with a tenderness he wasn’t entirely managing to contain.


    “I like it very much,” Adide said, and gave him a smile that reached her eyes.


    Henrikughed quietly — a short, contented sound — and began opening the outer box. “The doctor says only a little for now, alright? Not too much.” He tapped the edge of the box gently. “But once you’repletely well, I promise we’ll go out together and eat as much as we please. Is that a deal?”


    Adide was already nodding when her eyes drifted to Gillian instead. She knew better than to agree without her mother’s permission first.


    .


    .


    .