“You did,” I agree, my attention directed at the road so she doesn’t mask herself.
She scoffs, “Okay, so …”
“You also told me that the mere idea of walking away from them left you feeling broken, that you wanted to fight—”
“That was before.” The hurt lacing her retort nearly has me turning around.
“Yeah, it was.” I careen onto her parents’ street, but pull off to the shoulder instead of the driveway, peering at her. “Before everything got flipped upside down and beat to a bloody pulp. But we’re past that.”
She crosses her arms over her chest. “Well, I’m not.”
“I don’t mean over what they did or what they said. I mean, we’re past that horrific incident.” I thread my fingers with hers. “But if you aren’t, that’s okay.”
Her chest inflates with a deep breath. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. If you don’t want to go in, that’s fine. And if we go in and you decide you’re done, that you don’t want a relationship with them, I’ll support you one hundred percent. But it kills me to let your last moment with them be a threat that hinged on what was going on with me.” I bring her knuckles to my mouth, brushing my lips over them. “That will grow to resentment someday, baby girl.”
“No, it won’t,” she insists, but her confidence in that statement is fragile.
“We’re getting hitched with the least amount of baggage possible, I’ve decided.”
“And this is how we get less baggage?” She howls a dubious laugh. “I don’t know how to forgive them. And at the same time, I feel stupid for not recognizing how lost those relationships had already been.”
“Then tell them that.”
She stares at me for a long beat. “I don’t see why this matters, especially if the end result is the same as the current situation.”
“It won’t be the fucking same, Tess. You will have taken your power back, not because you were falling apart at the thought of losing me. But because you’ll be making a decision with a clear head.”
“They don’t deserve—”
“They certainly don’t,” I growl, throwing my arm toward the house. “This has nothing to do with them. Fuck what they deserve. My only concern is you.”
She sits with that for about five minutes, soaking in the consoling silence only found in the country. The tittering birds and the rustling trees.
“And you really think I need this?” she eventually asks, her query ripe with the trust we’ve built.
“I do.” With her hand still in mind, I share something that’s been weighing on me. “My mom wasn’t perfect. When someone’s gone, you dismiss the shit they did. She was a good mom, loved us. But she was sad. A lot. All the time, actually. Even right after we were having a blast, swing dancing in the living room, she’d be choked up. Tears for him.”
“Your father?” she surmises.
“No. Maybe.” I shrug, not really certain about any of it because I was so young. “She was tired of my father cheating on her, so she ended up cheating too. She left us with people to do that, sometimes babysitters or friends. For years, she’d takeus to our grandmother’s and jet off to see some guy. We spent our summers in Oklahoma without my father, so it worked. She prioritized her affair—not always, but enough.
“The day before she watched me with the balisong, I called her a hypocrite because I knew she was cheating. I’d overheard her discussing it with Axel and got so pissed that she’d been leaving us for the same reason my asshole father had. I only got one more moment with her after that, but I’m so grateful that I did because at least we parted on a good note.”
Tessa presses her palm against her sternum. “I get that. It’s why I always conducted myself with at least a modicum of grace, no matter what they threw at me, but it feels fresh. It’s not even what they did. In their ass-backward way, they were trying to help me. But their opinion of me is …”
“False. Fucked up. Absurd,” I fill in.
“Then, it was, which pisses me off, but let’s face it. Now I’m practically a serial kil—”
“Slow down,” I interrupt her. “You’ve only protected yourself and those you love. But you can’t let their criticism take root, which is why I want you to do this in a way you feel proud of. Whether you give them another chance or shut them out forever is irrelevant. When I marry you, I want you to feel confident about where you landed with them.”
“Okay,” she whispers, so I pull into the driveway and park as she asks, “What were the groceries for?”
Planting a kiss on her lips, I pluck the bags off the back seat. “I plan to make this an encounter I’m proud of too.”
When we reach the front porch, both her parents are waiting. They were expecting us. Her father smiles, tentatively putting his arms out for a hug, and she hesitates for only a moment. He’s the one I knew she needed to see most. She keeps his letter in her art room, and I catch her reading it a few times a week.
