I closed my eyes. I wanted to kill him. “And… do you think he will?” I asked softly.
“No,” she said. A tear escaped from the corner of her eye and ran down her temple.
“I think you were right about Elijah,” I said in response. “He says whatever it takes to make everyone happy, even if he doesn’t mean it.” Like Dad, I didn’t add. I still wondered how much of what Elijah had said was a lie. Had he known the woman pretending to be Dr. Franklin before our sessions? Had he known Michael knew her?
“I told you,” Mom said.
I laid my head on a small patch of cushion next to her arm. “You did.”
I’d dimmed the lights during her nap, and an overhead fan spun on its lowest setting above us. The breeze tickled the small hairs on the back of my neck that had escaped the ponytail I’d pulled my hair into earlier. The cushion smelled of the lavender laundry detergent we used.
After several moments of silence, Mom drew in a breath. “I’m angry all the time.”
“I know,” I said. Maybe it was taking until now to realize that’s exactly what it was, this distance between my mom and me. She’d been angry for fifteen years, and I’d been the nearest target. I wondered if this was the closest thing I’d ever get to an apology from her. “I’m mad at him too.” And byhim, in this instance, I meant my father.
She gently patted my head. “You’ll be okay.”
“So will you.”
CHAPTER 42
“Knock, knock,” Tara said, poking her head into our hospital room. “I heard you were here.”
I’d taken my mom to the hospital early that morning because nothing had changed overnight. The rotating Tylenol and ibuprofen schedule and cold compresses throughout the night had done nothing to shake her fever.
“Hi,” I whispered, getting up from where I’d been attempting to sleep in a chair. It wasn’t working. My mom was on fluids and antibiotics and was very much asleep. They still weren’t sure why she had a fever, but they were running tests and treating it like an infection in the meantime.
I joined Tara at the door. She opened it wider and I stepped out.
She immediately pulled me into a hug. “Are you okay?”
“I’m tired,” I said. “Wait, why wouldn’t I be okay? Is this more serious than the doctor made it seem?”
“No,” she said, walking toward a row of chairs across thehall. “No. It’s just a lot. You went away for a weekend and you came back to this.”
“Yeah,” I said. I came back to a lot more than this, but I couldn’t think about that right now. With everything that had happened with my mom, I hadn’t followed through with my threat to Michael about telling Tara. And I was honestly too emotionally and physically exhausted to want to tell her now, even though I knew I should.
“She was fine when I hung out with her Friday. Maybe she just caught a bug or something,” Tara said.
“That’s what the doctor said.”
She sat down. “I broke up with Michael, ended our engagement.”
“Whoa, what?”
“You know why.”
So heactuallytold her on his own. I nodded slowly while I sank into the chair beside her. “Areyouokay?”
“No,” she said, her flat expression unchanging. “But it was my only choice, right? He lied to me and jumped through a million hoops for what? To get out of a few weeks of therapy? How stupid is that?”
“It’s pretty stupid.”
She sighed. “If he can’t even do this one little thing for me, how is he going to be as a husband? A father?”
“I’m sorry.”
She blinked rapidly, obviously trying to hold back some emotions.
