Chapter 20

                                    

                                          
When Mary Margaret had asked her for advice, Emma thought it would be about what to cook for dinner. She hadn't expected the conversation to take such a turn.
                          
Her mother was looking at her, slightly distressed. She'd just told her about the different versions she'd heard from both Regina and Cora, about the absence of Regina's dead.
                          
"I didn't know if I should have told her," Mary Margaret said. "Normally, I know what to do in these kind of situations, but I didn't know if I'd make things better or worse, if I told her the truth."
                          
Emma was sitting at her desk. She had just been doing her homework, but the conversation had been taking over thirty minutes, and she still had no idea what she'd have done had she been in her mother's shoes.
                          
"I think she has a right to know the truth," Emma eventually said. "I just don't know if she's going to believe either one of us."
                          
Mary Margaret nodded slowly. "But isn't the truth going to be more painful, knowing that she had a father that loved her, but was forced to move away?"
                          
"It's much better than blaming yourself for your father leaving," Emma said.
                          
"Fair point," Mary Margaret said, and sighed in discontent. "I'm sorry I'm bothering you with this. I know that as a responsible adult, I shouldn't be doing that."
                          
"That's okay, mom," Emma said. She felt a knot in her stomach. One that she'd started feeling, ever since her mother came into her room with a conflicted expression.
                          
"What do you think you'd want to hear?" Mary Margaret asked.
                          
Emma kept quiet for a moment. She knew Regina's family situation was complex, she'd figured that much, but she hadn't realized it was quite like this.
                          
"I would love to know that there's a dad out there who loves me. One that's never been to jail." Emma said the last sentence jokingly, but Mary Margaret didn't appreciate the joke. She only winced, and nodded slowly. The whole situation had made both of them quite tense, in the past few weeks. "What's his name? Regina's dad, I mean."
                          
Mary Margaret was evidently thinking for a moment. "I think she called him Henry. I don't know about a last name."
                          
Before she'd even finished her sentence, Emma was googling the name Henry Mills, on her laptop. She didn't know why, but she felt herself becoming quite invested in the story. She wanted to do what was right to make Regina happy.
                          
Why, she thought, why do I suddenly feel the need to make her happy? She had absolutely no clue. Regina wasn't a friend of hers, but she wanted to fix her broken house, just like hers had been "fixed" years ago. She felt the girl deserved it.
                          
A few suggestions popped up on her screen and she clicked opened several websites. Most of them weren't anything useful, though. Then, she found a Wikipedia page of a man called "Henry Brown". She didn't expect it to be anything, until she read the caption, the one that always used the words she'd tried to find.
                          
..he's been referenced to as Henry Mill...
                          
She had to click on the page to continue reading and she scrolled down to look for the information she was really interested in.
                          
"Did you find something?" Mary Margaret asked, but Emma merely shushed her. She knew that if her mother hadn't been so intrigued herself, she would've commented on that, but fortunately, both were too tense.
                          
Emma found out that Henry Brown was a very, very successful lawyer, who had just won a very important case against a corrupt corporation. He was an environmental lawyer and lived with his wife and daughter in a house.