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The first thing she did was check the restaurant cameras on her phone, and she nearly dropped her phone when she saw a woman standing by the register who she thought she would never see again.

Afterwards, she told Tito to have her wait for around an hour before hanging up the phone and running back inside to jump into the shower.

She borrowed a car from Luna and drove over 100 miles an hour to reach her restaurant in exactly thirty minutes.

Her heart was thudding in a way that it never had been before, and she wanted nothing more than for Malachi to be beside her in this moment.

At the end of the day, Sei was a normal woman who had a lot of lingering trauma from her past.

It was only natural for the man she was dating to become the pillar of her strength. She silently pulled out her phone and found herself scrolling through all of the pictures they had, but it only served to make her heartache even more prominent. Stuffing her phone into her back pocket, she took as deep a breath as her lungs would allow before she stepped out of the car.

With every step, she felt like her knees were going to give out, and she wasn\'t even sure if she was going to make it to the door.

"This is crazy..."

Pulling open the door to her restaurant, she couldn\'t find it within herself to be happy with the full house she had in her restaurant, or be annoyed by the blatant stares she was receiving from men.

All she noticed was the gray-haired Asian woman sitting comfortably in a booth in the corner of her restaurant, with a plate of tempura that looked like it\'d hardly been touched. "Is it not to your liking...?" Sei asked hesitantly in Japanese. Her mother finally looked up, and Sei could see that even though she had aged, she was still beautiful and no worse for wear.

She wore a dark red dress with a bold black line down the center, and a sweater that was draped over her slender shoulders.

"Out of practice it seems." Her mother replied in english.

"O-Only a bit..." Sei muttered with a red face.

In an instant, her mother looked her up and down, and immediately disapproved of what she saw. "Why are you wearing such an outfit when you\'re already over thirty and you\'ve gained a substantial amount of weight?"

Her words easily pierced her daughter\'s heart, and for the first time in a long time Sei felt like she was a child being scolded. "I was just out with some friends and I-" n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

"Sit down, your rear is drawing too much attention."

Just as she\'d said, every man in Sei\'s restaurant who\'d gone through puberty was looking at her incredibly voluptuous and charming figure. She quickly sat down out of embarrassment, and covered her chest to protect it from further scrutiny.

"I suppose I should ask how you\'ve been." Her mother said robotically. It seemed as though she was only asking out of formality and not genuine interest, but Sei gave her a crash course in the past twenty years nonetheless. She was particularly vague when it came to her relationship with Minoru ending and the years where she lived with her former boss, but other than that she told her everything.

Whether or not it went in one ear and out the other, she couldn\'t say.

"But... how did you find me?" Sei asked. Her mother Ayame scoffed as if she found that question to be absolutely ridiculous.

"Your relationship with that... boy is everywhere. It took a two minute search on the internet to find this restaurant."

"Ah, I see... A-And he\'s not a boy. He\'s a very dependable and loving man."

"He\'s... nevermind." She said dismissively.

Sei\'s mind was flooded with various questions, ranging to why her mother was looking for her to if her father was even still alive.

But for some reason, she could not bring herself to ask any of them.

"Have you ever had any thoughts of coming back to our family?"

"W-What?"

The words Sei least expected to hear out of her mother\'s mouth, seemed to fly out so casually without any real concern. "I-I have but I thought that I wasn\'t welcome..."

"Yes well, there are ways around that." "A-Around...?" By now, Sei had no idea where this conversation was headed, and she\'d practically given herself whiplash on this emotional roller coaster. Ayame fixed her clothes and continued to speak in the same empty and emotionless tone. "I\'ll be brief. Your father\'s company has encountered a bad stretch of luck lately and money is tight. If you make a donation to him, he and I will forgive your prior embarrassments and you can return home."

If one listened closely, they could hear the sound of Sei\'s gentle heart breaking into pieces. "You\'re... asking me for money...?"

"I\'m giving you a chance to come home and stop disgracing yourself here. Being seen on tv in the arms of someone young enough to be your son is hardly becoming of someone your age."

"I-I..."

"I could understand if you are just doing this for financial security, as I\'m sure someone like him has given you quite a sum to play around with. As long as you use two million dollars of that money to help your father out of his hardships, you can come home and you won\'t need to-"

"You don\'t even respect Malachi... but now you\'re asking me to use his money to help keep your lights on... how can you be so heartless...?" Sei asked in a choked voice. Thinking back on it now, Ayame had always been like this. As long as Sei did what she was told, her mother would shower her with praise and affection and proclaim her to be the greatest daughter. But the moment Sei fell below the top 1% of her class or showed interest in something deemed to be low class, her mother\'s deluge of affection would vanish like a trick of the light. It was embarrassing that she had never paid attention to those things until years later. "You forget yourself. You have already proven once before that your taste in men is deplorable when that first miscreant left you, do you require another hard lesson?"

"Malachi is nothing like Minoru! He\'s taken care of Serana and I, even when he didn\'t have to and he-"

"Yes, yes, I\'m sure that dating a rich young boy like that must be very exciting for you, but how long do you think you can hold his attention for?

You\'ve already failed to keep one man\'s eyes on you when you were much younger, so how much more chance do you have now? I wouldn\'t be surprised if he had his eyes on a younger girl already."

Ayame\'s words cut deeply, and even though Sei knew that they were completely unfounded, her mind drifted to the memory of Annalise, Luna and even Bianca. The girls were extremely beautiful and their bodies were younger, firmer, and slimmer. She\'d told herself that she was okay with him having other girls, but was that wrong of her to do?

He\'d always told her if she ever stopped being okay with it he would put all of his focus back into her, but what if things had changed and he couldn\'t leave them?

What if when it came down to it, his love for them was inferior to his love for her?

Ayame suddenly twisted her face up in disgust and pushed over a pile of napkins toward her daughter.

"Tsk, clean yourself up. You\'ve always been such an overly sensitive girl."

At first, Sei didn\'t know what she was talking about, but then she touched her face and realized that she had started crying at some point. But when exactly that was, she couldn\'t say. With trembling hands she reached out for a tissue, and a soft feminine hand was placed over hers. "I thought that was you, Sei. Why are you crying?"

Through teary eyes, Sei saw a young woman with unusual white hair and red eyes wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses. The one holding her hand was a younger girl with chocolate brown skin and black hair tied up in two buns.

"Ah, h-hello girls."

Embarrassed, Sei quickly wiped her face of tears and tried to put on a brave face to no real avail. "What\'s the matter? Who\'s making my favorite sister in law cry?" "N-No, I was just-" "Sister in law...? I see, you\'re that boy\'s sister." Aisha and Aubrey glanced at the woman sitting opposite their sweet friend and realized that they had completely overlooked her. But given the overall mood and the condition that Sei was found in, first impressions were downright terrible. "What did you say to her?" Aisha asked aggressively. "You need to watch your tone young lady, what I say to my daughter is none of your business."

Aisha pulled down her glasses and revealed bloody red eyes that were screaming murder. "I\'m telling you it is, so repeat it step by step for me. I\'m a bit hard of hearing."

"Y-You\'re..."

"A friend of hers? Yes, I am."

Even though Aisha was not consciously trying to scare this woman, being blessed by a god of war tends to have that effect on most people. Ayame\'s face finally showed some trace of emotion as she stood up to leave.

"I-I do not have to sit here and listen to this!"

She reached into her purse and pulled out a business card before tossing it onto the table.

"I\'ll be in town until Friday, I hope you\'ve come to your senses by then."

She stormed out of the restaurant without even bothering to pay for or finish her meal, but it looked like Aubrey had one of those things covered already. *Chewing happily* "This place\'s tempura really is the best! It\'s always worth the drive."

For some reason, after everything that she had heard today, the sight of Aubrey stuffing her cheeks happily did wonders to lift her spirit. Tears fell from her face once again, but these ones were far more lighthearted then before. Aubrey finished the last of the dish, and picked up a napkin to wipe Sei\'s face. "You owe us a story time, yea? But no more crying this time, my brother would be crushed if he saw you like this."

Idk if this chapter gonna hit too close to home for anybody so I apologize in advance AnathaShesha

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