Part 2:Revelations

"You compelled me?" she gasped, accusingly. "How could you, Klaus? How could you?" She came around the bar, planting herself squarely in front of him.

"In my defense, you consented to being compelled," he defended.

She struggled to make sense of what he was saying. She did remember agreeing to be compelled for a short time in order to keep Hope safe. But it'd been years. How could he come for her now…after so long? How could he do that to her? To Hope?

"You're here for Hope aren't you?" she asked, repeating her question from before. "Aren't you?" she demanded.

"Yes, Camille. I am," he replied, softly.

There may have been regret in the words, but Cami couldn't hear it over the roaring panic rising inside her as she contemplated life without her daughter.

No, not her daughter.

Her eyes filled with tears at the thought. She felt dizzy and sick. She couldn't catch her breath.

She remembered being compelled, but she also remembered being Hope's mother. Those memories, those emotions, were real.

"You can't just take her from me, Klaus!" she cried, nearly begging. "You compelled me to believe she was mine, and I've spent the last three-and-a-half years loving her like she is." Her words were pleading. Her eyes begged him to understand her sense of loss, to be compassionate. "Please…" she sobbed.

"I don't want to take her from you, Camille," he assured, taking her face in his hands and brushing the tears from her cheeks. "I came for the both of you."

She closed her eyes in relief at his words, sending more tears cascading over her cheeks and Klaus's hands where they remained pressed against her skin. Her mind raced, remembering the past as she'd believed it to be as well as how it had actually been. It was overwhelming, and she grappled with the juxtapositions. Hope wasn't hers, but she had raised her. Cami was the only mother the child knew, but she also had a mother somewhere else. Hayley was out there somewhere, missing her daughter.

Cami's heart broke for all of them.

She had lived the past three-a-half years with her time in New Orleans wiped from her mind. She'd believed, with Klaus's help, that she was a young woman whose husband had died, leaving her alone with a small child and another on the way…

She froze, her eyes flying to his.

Except that last part hadn't been compulsion.

She played back his words from that day so long ago.

You will forget all about your time in New Orleans.You will remember only that you have a beautiful daughter, whom you love, and that you loved her father, but he died, leaving you to care for her.You will start over somewhere new, somewhere far away from here.And you will be happy.Now take Hope and go.

She'd been in Maine before she'd realized she was pregnant. She'd been compelled, and she'd just believed that her son belonged to Hope's father.

To Klaus.

Could he really be to blame for the fact that when he compelled her to mourn a husband…a father to her child…that it was his face her mind had supplied? She supposed not, but the fact remained that she did blame him. He hadn't compelled her to forget him, specifically. In fact, he'd compelled her to remember that she'd loved Hope's father. And he was Hope's father.

But now that the compulsion was lifted she was faced with the reality of her pregnancy for the first time. And the reality was, she didn't know who her son's father was. Or if she did, she had no idea how it was possible.

She paled.

"Camille?" he asked, concerned with her sudden quiet and pallor.

"Cami?" he shook her gently, trying to get her eyes to focus on his. He didn't like the glazed quality they'd taken on.

"I have a son," she mumbled, numbly.

"Sorry?" he questioned, thinking he'd misheard.

"I have a son," she repeated, her eyes finally finding his through her haze of confusion.

He dropped his hands from her as if he'd been burned and took a step back.

"My, you do land on your feet, don't you, Camille?" he spat, acidly. He was already picturing her in someone else's arms. Growing round with someone else's child. "And Hope's poor father barely cold in his grave," he tsk-ed, coldly.

"Shut up!" she yelled, closing the distance between them only to shove him away from her. Her eyes watered and her chest hurt with the effort it took not to collapse into great wracking sobs.

"I don't know how this happened…" she whispered, shaking her head.

"Oh, love…I'm quite certain you know exactly how it happened."

She ignored his jab, focusing instead on making sense of it all.

"I don't know, Klaus! I-,"she searched her brain, trying to piece it all together. "I must've already been pregnant when you compelled me. I just didn't know it yet. And when I realized I was pregnant, I was under the compulsion…I believed he and Hope shared the same father…" Her eyes filled with more tears as the reality of her current situation dawned on her. These last three years, she'd believed Klaus to be the father of both of her children, only to discover the truth—one child wasn't hers…and the other most likely wasn't his.

"I don't know who his father is, Klaus. I…I don't know. There was only you. I know it isn't possible, but…"

"No, it isn't possible, Camille," he sneered, hurt and anger at her obvious betrayal causing him to lash out. The part of him that cared for her should have been happy that she'd been allowed the chance to experience motherhood, something his sister still missed, bitterly; but the selfish part of him, the overwhelming majority, was livid that she'd found someone else…and devastated that that someone else had given her the one thing he never could.

"I don't understand," she whispered, brokenly. She was so confused. She'd only been with Klaus. There'd been no other man in all those months since Marcel. And then that night, before she'd agreed to be compelled, she and Klaus had acknowledged their feelings and said their goodbyes in the only way they could. There had been no one else, before or since. But he couldn't…they couldn't have created a child. It wasn't possible.

Oh, God. Had something happened to her? Had someone drugged her? Had the compulsion damaged her brain somehow?

She pictured her son as he'd been this morning. Her sweet boy. His blonde curls and rosy cheeks. His chubby baby hands clinging to Hope's arm in his sleep.

Her heart ached.

Her baby….her poor, poor baby.

Bastard was such an ugly word.

Seeming to read her thoughts, Klaus poured salt in her open wound. "Even my dreadful mother knew who fathered her bast-"

He never finished the nasty thought. She slapped him. Hard.

"Go to hell, you sonofabitch!" she yelled at him, tears streaming down her pale face, unchecked.

He regretted his words immediately and was uncharacteristically contrite, but it was too late. He could see it in her face. He felt it deep in his bones.

In his anger and hurt, he'd broken something priceless.

"Cami, I-" he tried, but she was already on her way out the door.

"Stay away from me," she warned, fiercely. "Stay away from me, and stay away from my children. Both of them. I mean it, Klaus." With that, she walked out of the bar, slamming the door behind her.

The lights were on and the door was unlocked, but the place that had meant so much to her just this morning, that had represented a fresh start, now meant next to nothing to her.

It had all been a lie.

As she rounded the corner of the bar and headed toward what used to be home, she finally let the wracking sobs overtake her.