But right now, in this moment, Bastian is alive and warm beside me, his hand on our baby, his breath stirring my hair.
Right now, that’s enough.
47
ELIANA
morning prep /'môrniNG prep/: noun
1: mise en place completed before service begins.
2: bacon in the pan, tea with honey, the quiet work of learning to be a family.
I wake alone. My hand reaches across the mattress before my brain fully engages, searching for warmth that…
… isn’t there. The sheets on Bastian’s side are cold. Not recently-vacated cold, buthours-ago cold.
My heart jabs my ribs as I jackknife upright.He’s gone. He left. He?—
Then I hear voices in the kitchen. Bastian’s rumble, hardly audible through the walls but unmistakably his. Sage’s sardonic teenage drawl. The clatter of pans. The hiss of bacon.
I collapse back against the pillows, my pulse slowly ratcheting down fromimminent cardiac eventto something quasi-normal. The domesticity of those sounds feels almost obscene aftereverything we’ve been through. Yesterday, I thought the father of my child was rotting in a Chicago morgue. Today, he’s making breakfast.
Life comes at ya fast, et cetera.
Right on cue, as if to continue the theme of life just recklessly blowing past every speed limit ever conceived, my mom knocks on the door. “Bastian told me you take your tea with honey now,” she explains, hovering at the threshold like she’s not sure if she’s allowed inside. “Because of the baby and all. So I brought you some. Can I come in?”
“Yeah, of course.” I push myself against the headboard and pat the mattress beside me. “Come in, Mom.”
After a moment’s hesitation, she slips inside and settles onto the mattress next to me. “How’d you sleep?” she asks.
“Fine. You?”
“Oh, fine, fine.”
Awkward silence follows. I wring my fingers, she clears her throat a few times, neither one of us says a word. Until, with one more cough, she launches into something she’s clearly been waiting for.
“I know I say sorry a lot,” she begins hoarsely. “But I’ve never really said it right. So I’m going to try.”
She takes a shaky breath.
“Do you remember a boyfriend of mine named Rodney? I let him stay three months after he called you a ‘burden’ to your face. You were eleven.” Another breath. “On the day of your eighth-grade graduation, I was passed out in the parking lot of a Denny’s withsome trucker whose name I never learned. You walked home all by yourself in your cap and gown.” Hitching, rolling sobs begin. “All those voicemails you left when you first moved out… I listened to every single one, baby. I just—I couldn’t pick up. I was too drunk and too ashamed.”
I feel my face wetting with tears.
“Those are just a few of the things I’ve done wrong, and I’m sure there are a million more I’ve repressed or forgotten. I don’t expect you to forgive me,” Mom continues. “I don’t deserve it. Lord knows I’ve given you every reason to write me off forever.” She fumbles for my hand and squeezes it with those bird-bone fingers. “But I’ve been going through the steps. Making amends, as they call it. So I just need you to know something, Elly: Even when I was at my worst, I loved you. I loved you so much it terrified me. And did I screw up? Oh, God, of course! So many times.” She brings my hand to her lips and presses a kiss to my knuckles. “But you were never unloved, Eliana. Not for one single second.”
My throat burns with everything I’ve held back for years. I open my mouth with no plan of what I’m going to say and just let things pour out.
“I didn’t think I was ever going to forgive you, Mom. I’m still not sure I can.” I wipe my eyes and keep going. “I spent my whole life trying not to become you. Because I looked at you and saw someone who needed to be loved so badly that you couldn’t think of anything else. But Mama… that just messed me up in its own way. I built walls so high I couldn’t see over them. I wasso careful. Until Bastian came along and bulldozed every single one of them.
“I fell for him even though I knew better. Well, that makes it sound simple. It wasn’t, though—because I ran from him first. Ihatedhim for making me depend on him. Because you taught me that depending on others was a surefire way to ruin your life. I don’t know how to get over that fear. It’s, like, insideme. You put it in my bones. Every day now, I’m so fucking terrified that loving Bastian is going to destroy me the same way loving all the wrong men destroyed you. I keep thinking I’ll wake up one day and realize I’ve repeated every mistake I swore I’d never make, all the mistakes you spent my whole life making. I’m so mad at you for doing that to me, Mom. God, I’m so fucking mad at you.”
Out of nowhere, I’m full-on sobbing. Mom doesn’t try to shush me or fix it. She just pulls me into her arms and holds on while I fall apart.
“I know, baby,” she whispers into my hair. “I know. You have every right to be angry. Every single right.”
She pats my back like a mother ought to. I honestly didn’t know she knew how to do that. Where was it when I needed it most, all those years ago?
