She grabs the coffee pot and flings it across the room, making it crash against the wall. It shatters, and smashes a hole in the sheetrock. Disgusted, she walks over to the wall, grabs a picture frame, full of her mother and her smiling faces, and throws it across the room. Kicking the sheetrock, she busts another hole through the thin wall. It fuels her. She kicks again, and again before her fists come up and she beats against the wall repeatedly.
Quickly, I rush to her side and pull her against me. She fights me at first, before crumbling into my arms and falling to the floor. Her cries ring through the room. They tear out my heart and make my emotions get the better of me. I hold her closer. She lets me only briefly. A moment later, she pushes against my chest and breaks free.
Standing, she looks down on me. She’s an angel fallen from grace, and there is nothing I can do to help her. So I sit as she begins to cry and give her the only thing I can offer her right now. My presence.
“Don’t,” she sniffles. “Don’t look at me like that, Hunter. You don’t know… You don’t know…”
Angry, she spins around and begins to walk away.
“I don’t know what, Rochelle?” I demand. “What it is like to lose a parent?”
Her movements stop. Her body stiffens. Slowly, she turns and looks me in the eye. She doesn’t say a word, but she doesn’t have to. In all the countless moments I thought I may have lost her before, this one scares me the most.
Pushing to stand, I walk a few steps toward her.
“I love you, Rochelle,” I whisper. “I am so, so sorry. No one should know what it feels like to lose anyone. But I know what you are going through. I know…”
“Shut up,” she screams, cutting me off. “You don’t know, Hunter. You don’t know anything. Since the first day I met you, you’ve been telling me you know. That you know me. That you know how hard it must have been for me. Or what it must have felt like for me growing up because you grew up without family, too. But you don’t know me. You don’t know the first thing about what I have been through.”
“Rochelle, I…” she takes a few heated steps towards me and I stop speaking.
“My mother was all I had in this world, Hunter.”
“Bullshit! You have me. You’ll always have me, Rochelle. Nothing is going to change that.”
Stunned by my words, it takes her a moment to gather her thoughts before she speaks.
“Everything in my life has been a struggle,” she grits out. “Everyone, everything, has always been taken from me right when I began to finally believe I was worthy. That I could be something. Why should you and I be any different?”
“Because we are, damn it. Because something bigger than all of this, than us, brought us together and…”
“And it can also tear us apart.”
I shake my head and look away. Pausing, I try to think of the right thing to say, but know that anything I could say to her now will just be the wrong thing, no matter how hard I try to make her listen.
“That is your mother talking,” I mutter under my breath before pushing past her and walking toward the door.
“My mother,” she yells, pushing me from behind. I spin back around and wish I could take it back. “My mother, who did everything she could to raise me with no father, no money, no means to a better life. The one who was just taken from me and I will never know why. Never know if she was hurting. If I could have done something. If I was only here with her…”
“Your mother wasn’t all that great of a woman,” I hiss, spewing more words I fear I’ll wish I never said. “Not like you make her out to be all the time, Rochelle.”
Furious, her eyes widen. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” I bite my tongue, turn, and start to walk towards the door.
This conversation needs to end. Now. So we can both take a breath before one of us says something they will regret.
“My mother was a good woman,” she yells, making me wish I could take everything back, change the course of time, and never have anything hurt her. The truth will shatter her when she finds out. “She raised me the best she could. How dare you say that about her. How dare you…”
“Tell you the truth,” I shout. Spinning back around, her mouth falls open in shock. “Fuck it, I’d rather you hear it from me, Angel, than from the hospital or the coroner. Your mother was an addict, Rochelle. She died of an overdose. She blackmailed Edward, made him pay to adopt Victoria, and then continued to collect money from him to support her habit. She didn’t care for you, not the way a mother should. And not the fucking way you deserved either.”
“You’re a liar,” she whispers. “How could you…Why would you..”
I reach out for her, but she backs away. “I swear to you, Angel. She…”
“Stop it,” she yells. “Stop calling me, Angel!”
She grabs her left hand, and before I have the chance to respond, she flings the ring I gave her across the room at my feet. “I won’t marry a man who lies. What you just said, what you just lied to me about... I could never forgive you…”
