Teach Me Right

Chapter 20

*A/N - Picture credited to the fan art owner.

Maitri's POV

When I was barely four years old, my biological mother left me, my two, three-years-old, brothers and my dad and eloped with the man who worked as a co-pilot of the private jet that belonged to my father. Appalled by what she'd done her younger sister, aunty Apsara, took on the role of taking care of the three of us. My biological mother has always been an aloof figure for me and my siblings and to be honest we adored aunty Apsara more than our birth giver. In fact, we've always called aunty Apsara Xiao Mama, which means little mama. So while we did not understand why we won't see mommy any more, I believe, with time, we adjusted pretty well to having aunty Apsara taking care of us.

I think me and my brothers were not even surprised when my dad and aunty Apsara got married one year later. But the youngest of the twins, Tadeo, was worried for a while that if dad and Xiao mama were to have kids of their own, we'd be forgotten just like with our biological mother. But he need not have worried since Xiao mama had all the love in the world to give to us. So a year later, when a little sister joined our family, we were all nothing but happy.

Time passed and the four of us grew up happy and secure. We were privileged but never spoiled. Because mama, we've dropped Xiao by then, was very strict about our upbringing. Soon the twins, Tadeas & Tadeo, and I were university students and our sister Lana had entered high school.

What non-of us expected at that time was for mama to get pregnant again. I was 22 and had just started working at the company, the twins were in their final year of university and Lana was a sixteen-year-old high scholar. Mama was 46 already and the news was more surprising to my parents than the four of us. Both my parents never even thought of terminating the pregnancy and neither did their children. My parents were teased mercilessly though but I could tell that my father was rather proud of himself.

However, fate has a way of fucking things up. This time it came in the form of a woman we've forgotten since long ago. Our biological mother.

I won't bore everyone with the gory and distasteful details. Only that because of that woman, the mother who raised us and gave us all the love in the world was killed. She had a fatal accident when she was eight months pregnant with little Kongpob. Even though she was rushed to the hospital quickly, due to the accident and her advanced age, the doctors could only save the baby and not the mother.

It had been a trying time for all of us. I thought for sure that Lana would hate us. Because it was our biological mother who caused the death of her own mother. But that never happened. Because to Lana we were all her mother's children and we all lost our mother because of that woman.

She was sentenced to life in prison and the courts have also issued a restraining order so that not even her shadow will fall on any one of our family. But by the end of it all, what good would it have accomplished when we have lost the most precious person of our lives.

Mama was our support system. For a while all of us felt like we were in a broken ship, drifting in the vast see. Only thing that pulled us together was the last gift mama left us with. Our little Kongpob.

But the problem with life was that it never goes in the direction we expect it to. By then we all had our own responsibilities and none of us could dedicate our life to bring Kongpob up like mama did for us. So while Kongpob did see us a lot around the house while growing up, he had always been taken care of by one older nanny and two more part-time caregivers.

And the worst thing was dad's attitude towards Kongpob. Because when mama had the accident, had she not been pregnant at the time, there was a possibility that she would have been saved. This was too much of a blow for my father to handle who blamed himself for all that happened. And because of that he has always treated Kongpob very different from how he had treated us.