“I don’t know…I don’t understand. You’re…you’re supposed to be dead.”
She clicks her tongue on the roof of her mouth. “That did happen, didn’t it?”
A surge of grief and anger clutches me by my throat, the water from the floor suddenly in my eyes. I have a hell of a time blinking through it. Half a sob works its way into my mouth before the water returns to my shins. “You left me.”
“Oh, darling,” she mewls around a sorrowful tone. “I’m so sorry.”
“No, you’re not,” I accuse, burning up from the inside out. The water floods higher, sneaking past my kneecaps. “How can you be? You only ever cared about one thing.” And it surely wasn’t me.
Her face falls. Her beautiful fucking face. She’s the same person from the picture Aunt Bess gave me for Christmas. She’snot sporting a pregnant belly, but there’s life in all of her features.
“That’s not true,” she tells me, standing from the bed and stepping closer. She’s still half a room away. I hate her and want her gone, but I also really want her to make the trek to the door so I can hug her. Just one last time. “I loved you deeply, Colson. I still do love you. I’ll never stop.”
An ugly tear seeps from my eye and drips down my cheek. “You say that, but I don’t feel it.”
“I made plenty of mistakes when I was with you,” she agrees. “But buried beneath all of my shortcomings was my love for you. Perhaps it was hidden, but it never faded. I’m sorry I couldn’t show that to you.”
“You could’ve tried,” I clip out. “You were too busy doing whatever the fuck you wanted.Clyde Lincoln, really Mom? You married him,andhe’s my father? Why didn’t you ever tell me? I deserved to know the truth.”
She gives me a sad smile. “He was one of many mistakes. I couldn’t see that at the time because I was so deep in it that he felt like home to me. But now…” She averts her gaze, fumbling with her fingers. “I can see I’ve hurt you, and I really, truly am sorry for that. I never wanted to cause you pain. I wasn’t good when it came to feelings. I can admit that now.”
The sob that I swallowed down makes itself known again. My eyes fill with tears. I don’t bother hiding them. I need her to see the truth of what she left behind. I need her to look at her son and understand how deeply she scarred him—and how that’ll stay with him forever.
“There’s a part of me that wants to hate you for what you’ve done. For all the bullshit you put me through, for never making me feel like I was enough to forget about all the other stuff. But then my heart wins out because…I still love you. I always fucking will, and that’s the hardest part in all of this,” I tell her.
I don’t want to care, but it’s etched into the marrow of my bones. I can’t get away from it even if I tried.
“You're just like Bess in that sense,” she tells me with a small smile, walking closer again. “She always had the biggest heart. Always put herself in other people’s problems thinking she could fix them if she tried hard enough. That can be both a strength and a weakness, Colson.”
“She paid Clyde off to stay out of my life,” I mutter out of the blue. “I could’ve known my father, but she kept him from me. Did you know that?”
Mom gives me a rueful smile and shakes her head. “I told you, a strength and a weakness. She did the right thing, Colson. Don’t be mad at her when she was only trying to protect you from something I wasn’t strong enough to.”
She cancels out the last few steps and stands in front of me. The water sloshes around my upper thighs now and she notices, reaching out until her palm rests against my ribcage. The water moves violently below me, bubbling into a wavy mess without the added heat.
Emotion like I’ve never felt surges through me like an electrical current. It renders me immobile. All I can do is blink at the woman in front of me who has put me through so much yet is telling me to let go of it all.
How can I possibly let go of all the pain she caused?
“Easy,” she answers like she’s in my head, hearing my thoughts as I’m thinking them. “You have to forgive.”
“How can I do that when everyone has betrayed me?”
Her. Clyde. Bess.
She tilts her head, and her eyes glow a beautiful shade of green that draws me in. I blink and there’s another person in the room. My eyes cut to the form standing behind her.
A ridge forms between my brows. “Violet?”
“She hasn’t betrayed you,” Mom points out.
Violet turns on her foot, looking around like she’s trying to figure out where she is. Like a double-sided mirror, she can’t see us, but we can see her.
“Did you bring her here?” I question my mom, frantically looking between the woman who raised me and the love of my life.
“I know she is,” Mom says softly.
“What?”
