The Forbidden Throb Chapter 159

Nicholas's POV:

Daniel's voice was quiet—too quiet.

The kind of quiet that preceded earthquakes.

My hand was still gripped in his, our positions reversed from moments ago when I'd grabbed his arm. His fingers were steady, controlled, the grip of a surgeon who'd spent years learning to keep his hands from shaking no matter what chaos erupted around him.

But there was something in his eyes. Something I'd never seen before.

Not anger. Not the cold dismissal I was used to.

*Exhaustion.*

The silence stretched. Five seconds. Ten. Twenty.

Finally, I couldn't take it anymore.

"Isn't that exactly what happened?" My voice came out sharper than I intended, almost a snarl. "You grew up with Grandfather, didn't you? Everyone knows how he feels about Mother—how he's always looked down on the Anderson family. He probably fed you all kinds of lies about her. "

Daniel remained silent, his expression unreadable.

The silence only fueled my anger. "Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about," I pressed on, my tone growing more vicious. "Grandfather never thought Mother was good enough for Father. He's spent years poisoning your mind against her, turning you against your own mother—"

"Nicholas." Daniel's voice cut through my rambling like a scalpel. "Have you ever wondered why Father stopped practicing medicine?"

I froze, wrong-footed by the question.

"What does that have to do with—"

"Answer the question."

I shifted in my seat, uncomfortable. I floundered, grasping for the narrative I'd always accepted without question. "Because he never really liked medicine in the first place. He was mediocre at it anyway. Mother gave him an out, a way to escape from something he was never passionate about. Why wouldn't he take it?"

It was the story we'd grown up with. Father, the adequate-but-uninspired doctor who'd been rescued from a career he'd never truly wanted by Mother's business acumen and the Anderson family's success. Mother, the brilliant entrepreneur who'd built her empire while generously allowing Father to save face by giving him a role in her company.

I'd never questioned it. Neither had Sophia.

If anything, we'd internalized it—maybe even looked down on Father a little for it.

The silence that followed was deafening.

Then Daniel laughed. But there was something hollow in it, something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

"Mediocre," he repeated, as if tasting the word. "Is that what they told you?"

"It's what everyone knows," I said, but my voice sounded uncertain even to my own ears. "Father was never as brilliant as Grandfather. He was good enough to get through medical school, but he didn't have the talent for surgery."

"Nicholas." Daniel turned to face me fully, and in the direct light I could see something in his expression that made my stomach drop. "Father was nominated for the Lasker Award when he was twenty-one years old."

I blinked. "The what?"

"The Lasker Award. It's called the American Nobel Prize." His voice was perfectly level, perfectly calm. "He was the youngest candidate in the award's history. "

My throat had gone dry. "What are you talking about?"

"Father resigned from Harvard Medical School after I was born," Daniel continued, his tone still maddeningly calm. "Withdrew his name from the Lasker nomination. Declined the Johns Hopkins offer. Shut down his research laboratory. Gave it all up."

"For Mother?" I said quickly. "Because he loved her and wanted to support her family's business—"

"For Mother," Daniel agreed. "But not in the way you think."

"Mother was struggling," Daniel continued quietly. "Severe postpartum psychosis," he said, swirling the amber liquid.

"She tried to jump from the third-floor balcony of our Beacon Hill house when I was three months old."

The room tilted.

"What?" The word came out as barely a whisper.

"Father found her in time. Pulled her back. But the doctors at McLean Hospital said it was only a matter of time before she tried again." He took a small sip, his expression never changing. "Unless they removed the trigger."

"The trigger," I repeated numbly.

"Me."

The single syllable landed with devastating simplicity.

Daniel set down his glass with careful precision. "The medical team recommended she never see me again. Every time she looked at me, she experienced severe hallucinations. Sometimes she thought I was trying to hurt her. Sometimes she thought she was trying to hurt me. Either way, the result was the same—complete psychological breakdown."

I couldn't breathe. Couldn't process what I was hearing.

"Father took her away," Daniel continued in that same clinical tone, as if he were reciting a case study rather than his own childhood. "Far from Boston. Far from everything familiar. He left me with Grandfather and focused entirely on her recovery."

His fingers traced the rim of his glass, the movement precise and controlled.

"She spent several years abroad. Recovering. And eventually, she got better." He paused, his gaze distant. " And not long after that, you were born."

The words landed like physical blows. Each sentence delivered with perfect emotional distance, as if he were describing events that had happened to someone else entirely.

But I could see the truth in the rigid set of his shoulders, in the way his jaw tightened almost imperceptibly between statements.

"Daniel—" I started, my voice hoarse.

"You asked why I keep my distance from Mother," he said, cutting me off. His gaze finally lifted to meet mine, and what I saw there made my chest constrict. "Why I don't visit her in London. Why I sit as far away from her as possible at family dinners."

He paused, and something flickered across his face—a crack in that perfect composure.

"The phrase I heard most often as a child was 'stay away from me.' Sometimes it was 'don't let me see you.' On particularly bad days, it was 'you're not my child—please stop calling me that.'"

My stomach dropped.

"Jesus Christ," I whispered.

His eyes met mine again, and the exhaustion I'd seen earlier had deepened into something rawer.

"So yes, Nicholas. I stay away from Mother. I keep my distance." His voice dropped to barely above a whisper. "Because that's what she asked me to do. "

The silence that followed was suffocating.

I stared at my brother—this man I'd grown up with, competed with, resented—and realized I'd never known him at all.