Mia

Chapter Forty-three:"Your father......"

Mia's POV.......

My mom and I just got back from visiting my dad's grave. Today makes it exactly two years since my father passed away.

We're now sitting together on the couch in the sitting room. My head is placed on my mom's shoulder and one of her hands is running on my arm.

"Are you okay, sweetie?" Mom asks.

"Yes. Are you?" I ask.

"I think I am." Mom says.

"You miss him a lot, don't you?" I ask.

"Of course I do. Don't you?" Mom asks.

"I do....more than a lot." I say.

"Mia, you know your father wasn't a bad person, right?" Mom asks.

"I know he wasn't." I say.

"Your dad was a better person than myself. He was one of the nicest men I've ever met."

"Then what went wrong between you two?" I lift my head off my mom's shoulder to face her. "You know you never told me what happened. Why did he leave and never came back?" I ask.

"It's a really long story, Mia." Mom says.

"I still wanna hear it, mom. It's not like there's anything important to do right now." I say.

My mom lets out a light sigh.

"I hope you can forgive me after I tell you this."

"Forgive you? Okay, now you're scaring me, mom. What is it?" I ask.

"You remember your dad had always travelled a lot for business stuffs, right?" Mom asks.

"Yeah" I reply.

"There was a time he travelled to Chicago for a business trip. Few weeks after he got back from that trip, he started acting strange. He had always looked like he was bothered about something that he didn't wanna share with me and he even started treating me a bit differently. Before I knew it, Will was going on a business trip every two weeks instead of once in a month or even two months. I started getting worried and curious about what was going on with him. I had kept asking him what was going on with him but he had refused to tell me. Months later, it got to answering midnight calls that he never answered whenever I'm around him. I had also asked him about the midnight calls and all he had always said was that it was work related but then I remembered that he had never been called for work issue at midnight and he never took any work related calls in secret. I started suspecting that he might've been cheating on me. It made me so insecure and your dad and I had lots of argument because of it. You were yet to turn six when that happened so I don't think you understood that we were having an argument."

"I understood that you and Dad were having an argument but I chose to play dumb."

"Oh.....I didn't know that. Well....my insecurity drove me so far that I was forced to go through your dad's phone and realized that he has been receiving lots of calls and texts from an "Ella". When I saw the texts, I was heartbroken. Your father caught me going through his phone but I had already figured out that he might've been having an affair with someone else."

"What did the texts say?"

"The texts were mostly that "Ella" telling your dad to pay her a visit. Will later explained everything. It happened that he had an affair with a female co-worker who was based there in Chicago and he got that co-worker pregnant during the affair. He had confessed that he had been lying about the every two weeks business trip, that he was going to Chicago to see how the pregnant lady was doing since the lady wasn't gonna abort the child."