She let out a low laugh. “Well, it’s quite a bit of money, Ivy. I didn’t think it…prudentto give up on it.”
I smiled at her dry tone. “I appreciate it. Thank you again.”
“I’ll call you next week, Ivy.” With that she hung up.
My mom watched me with wide eyes, “So? What was that about?”
I laughed again, this felt so weird. “My trust,” I told her. “That was the lawyer Smith hired to help me before. I guess she’s been working on getting me the money Max left me.”
“Really?” Her eyes brightened with excitement. She reached out and pulled me into a hug. “That solves your college stress.”
I hugged her back. “And your rent stress.”
I felt her sigh as it rumbled through her chest. “You’re not using your money on me. I am excited about starting this new job. Really.”
I pulled back so she could see my narrowed eyes.
Her hand swatted my shoulder playfully. “You’re such a brat! Iamexcited. I’ve never done anything like this before. It will be good for me.” When I continued to stare at her skeptically, she finished in a humbled tone. “Honestly, Ivy, I think it will help me grow as a human. I could use some of that.”
I softened immediately and pressed a quick kiss to her cheek. “I think you’re growing as a human just fine.”
Her eyes filled with tears, as they usually did when we were nice to each other. “Ryder’s waiting on you. Wear a coat.”
“Yes, mother.”
“And say goodbye to your sister before you go!”
“Like she would let me leave without saying goodbye.”
We smiled at each other and made our way to the living room. Things with my mom had improved beyond anything I had expected or hoped for over the last six months.
Without the weight of the Greek world and Nix’s constant pressure, my mother had become a completely different person… or maybe she’d become the person she truly was meant to be.
It hadn’t been easy. We’d shed a lot of tears over the last few months. She put herself in counseling as soon as we got home and between her therapist and me, she was slowly working through a lifetime of suffering.
There had been a lot of grief, a lot of toxicity and an impossible amount of self-worth issues. She blamed herself for so much. And she’d seen more than her fair share of despicable things.
I had gone to her therapist a few times too. I had a lot of guilt from Exie’s death and there had been times when I thought I would shatter from grief and residual trauma. Sometimes the weight of what I went through was crushing; sometimes it threatened to rip me into a million, unfixable pieces. But when I compared my eighteen years to my mother’s forty-plus… I couldn’t imagine how much baggage she carried.
We were both on our way to healthy, but there was a lot of work left to do.
Our relationship had been our top priority though and her relationship with Honor. It had started the day we came back home. After we’d dealt with Exie’s body and Sloane had gone home to her mother, Ava had gone to bed. Ryder had stayed with me while I opened the letter.
I wasn’t prepared for the thick pages that she’d written for me. I wasn’t prepared to see her guilt spilled on page after page, words mingled with her tears, her pretty handwriting scrawled with shaking hands and a well of regret and disappointment with herself.
She’d filled pages with two sentences written over and over and over. They were written for every day that I had been born. The paper had changed over the years and the older pages were yellowed and sometimes torn.
But for each day I had been alive, she’d written simply, “I’m so sorry. I love you.”
When Nix came for her, she knew she would die. She had hurriedly stuffed the pages into an envelope, her words ending in the middle of her sentence. The last line had said, “I’m so...”
When I showed her the letters the next day, after she’d slept over twenty-four hours, she finished it.
She had pulled me into a hug, maybe the first real hug she’d ever given me and said, “Sorry. I love you,” over and over and over… until I had said them back. Until the words I confessed to her were true.
Since then we’d spent every day trying to be the mother and daughter we had never been before.
We had been given a second chance. Neither of us was going to take that for granted.
