Oh my God.
This… This is Wilder’smother?
CHAPTER 53
WILDER
“I just wantto talk to my son, Wilder. It’s been years, baby. All I want is to talk to you. Will you pleasetalkto me?”
Bile rises in my throat, my stomach folding in on itself.
I thought of this exact moment in my head a thousand times over the last twenty years. I’d played out every scenario you could’ve possibly considered if I ever came face-to-face with my mother again.
At least, I thought so.
But now that she’s standing here, I realize how fucking wrong I was.
I never could’ve imagined that I’d have Maisie, my fucking sunshine, who means… Fuck, who means everything to me, cowering behind me, and a sick, desperate kind of worry tightening my chest and making it hard to breathe.
Part of me always thought that if I ever saw her again, I’d turn right back into the broken shell of a boy she left behind. That the reaction I’d have would be similar to the one I had when I walked into the group home again for the first time.
But I don’t feel any of that shit right now. Not the sadness, the pain, or the trauma. Apparently, I’ve done enough of that in the last two weeks to last a goddamn lifetime because all I feelis anger. Anger burning hot enough to consume me and anyone standing in its path, forging its way violently through my veins.
How fucking dare she show up here and call herself that?
While she’s standing there, clearly tweaked the fuck out on some kind of drugs. Probably meth—that was always her drug of choice.
If her dark-circled, sunken eyes, her hollowed cheeks, and the gaunt skin hanging on her bones didn’t give it away, the fact that she can’t stop fucking moving would.
She’s pacing now, tracing the same path over and over, clawing at her shirt.
So unstable that I’m scared. Not for me, but forMaisie.
I can’t control this situation, no matter how many times I thought I had prepared for the possibility of this.
The possibility of one day having to confront the demon of my past head-on.
But that pain and fear that I’ve lived with my entire life is nothing in comparison to the fear I have right now about something happening to Maisie.
When I step back, attempting to curl myself around Maisie while still facing my mother, she laughs.
A manic, high-pitched sound that makes me cringe.
Fuck, this is bad.
“What? You think I’m going to try and hurt her? That why you’re acting like that?” She sniffs, dragging the back of her hand beneath her nose, and my eyes catch on the track marks. Some old and faded, some fresh. “Sweetheart, I just missed you! When I saw that article they ran in the paper about you and found out you were back in town, all I wanted to do was see my son.” Each word is accompanied with a tick of her head, a scratch on her arm, a jittery twitch. “That’s all.”
She takes an erratic step toward us, and I shuffle back, my stomach tightening when Maisie makes a noise behind me like ascared animal. I can feel her shaking, and it makes me want to choke this bitch.
That she has the fucking audacity to come here and scare the woman I…
She keeps staring past me at Maisie, and my fucking blood is boiling.
“Save the bullshit, Tara,” I manage to push out through clenched teeth. “Do me a favor and fuck off to wherever you crawled out of. I don’t have shit to say to you.”
For a moment, she looks… surprised. As if she truly has no grasp on the trauma she’s inflicted on me, like she’s the mother she’s pretending to be right now.
Addicts have many faces, and she’ll never fool me again.
