When Cainan gets home, he walks into his room and makes his way to his bed and on getting to it; he throws himself down on it and his eyes close briefly.
“Trouble in paradise?” a voice asks and Cainan knows too well whose voice it is because a smile appears on his face and stays there for something good on a bad day.
“Mom,” he says with great relief.
Ada, the forty-nine-year-old woman, smiles and pauses only when she’s standing beside him, “Thought I told you money can’t buy everything? It can’t buy love and certainly can’t buy happiness.”
She’s wearing an orange gown that matches her shoe and her dark skin glows in the fabric. Her hair is in an all-back weaving reaching her shoulders and there seems to be little or no trace of make-up on her face. She looks amazing.
His smile widens, even though pain pangs his heart. “I do not recall arguing with you about that. I only said I’d rather be filthy rich and brokenhearted than broke and brokenhearted.” He reminds her.
Ada sits down and Cainan pulls himself up and puts his head on her lap, “Who’s the girl that finally made you let Samantha go? Because you sure kept her around for three years even when you had no feelings or interest in her.”
Cainan's brows furrow how she knows. “It’s all over E! Son,” she clarifies.
He looks up at her, “Clara?” his suggestion is a lie and his mother seems to know that as well.
Clara wasn’t the reason he finally ended the charade with Samantha, Neriah was, and he hasn’t gone back to rethink his action since the breakup.
She shakes her head. “You loved Clara, but that love never gave you boldness. So who’s the girl that’s finally made you pull your head out of your arse?”
Cainan winces at the last part of her word and he takes his head off her lap and back to his pillow.
Hurt shows on his face now and Ada is the only person who can make that show on him. “You didn’t have to make it obvious, mom,” he says wryly with a sad voice.
“It has always been obvious, son. Clara was never yours from the beginning. She needed a man and called and treated you like a boy.”
The truth of his relationship, although not completely open to the world, was always open to him and those around him, but it still hurt a little whenever references are made to how terrible his relationship with Clara was.
His mother continues to speak snapping him out of his thoughts, “I hated that after hurting you the way she did, you still loved her and she still had so much power over you and up to a few months ago, she still did.”
“Samantha,” Ada pauses, scoffs and rubs her head, “how you’ve kept her for three years is still a miracle to me. I’m not saying you’re the best partner because you are horrible and you cheated on her many times and I raised you to be better than that man Clara made you into; I’m saying she was only after your money and the fame you brought and you needed a drama queen to make the charade buyable. In the end, you two were too toxic for each other and those types of relationships never last.”
“You seem to know everything from the beginning to the end, don’t you?”
“Yes I do, I’m your mother. So who’s the girl?”
“Her name is Neriah,” he says in the admission that there is actually a girl like his mom suspected.
And the next half hour he spends narrating the story of how things came into being and how the girl he thought he’d passionately hated over three months ago is now the girl he can’t live a day without seeing and knowing how she is.
“So you’re only figuring your feeling for her out now or have you always known?” She asks, and he knows he has to admit the truth to her even if he tried to hide it from himself as well.
He takes a while to reply as he thinks it through. “I think I’ve always known. I think I developed feelings for her the first day I saw her and although I really couldn’t figure out what it meant, I summed it all into anger and the need for revenge for the embarrassment I felt that day. It only magnified and became obvious these past weeks when I tried to kiss her.”
“What stopped you?” 
“That would have been wrong on so many levels. She has a boyfriend, and he walked in on the little intimate moment we shared... Long story short, he asked me to stay away from her and I’ve been doing since yesterday.”
“And how’s that going for you?”
He glances at his mother to see if she meant her question and she looks like one who means it. “It going horribly. I can’t focus and I want to see her and this week has been hell.” He admits, with a heavy sigh.
“What do you want to do now?”
“I don’t know, things are not that simple mom, she has Shawn and they are wonderful together. I don’t want to get between that.”
“Oh, a feeling you can’t express is as painful as a heartbreak.”
He can feel tears well up in his eyes, but he blinks them back and clears his throat. “I know, but if we will be together, then we will be. The first thing on my mind now is seeing that she pulls through this alive and in one piece.”