“I needed time, Jill.” Every step I retreated, she advanced. “I needed to figure out what I wanted.”
“And what? You want me now? Why?” My chin quivered. “I’m horrible now!”
“I want us to be a family again.” She stopped and I was halfway around the truck again before I did too. She shook her hair back from her face in a motion that was graceful in a way I’d never be, and smoothed out her dress. “I wanted to tell you this under different circumstances, but…” This was the only chance she was going to get and we both knew it. “I’m getting married.”
My eyes dropped to her left hand, and the diamond was so blinding I couldn’t fathom how I missed it. Dad had never been able to give her a diamond. Her ring from him had been a pearl. I’d always thought it looked like the moon; it was so perfect it glowed. Who could want a diamond over that?
“You are such a hypocrite. What happened to being ‘just Katheryn’?”
She frowned at me.
“That speech you gave not five minutes ago about needing to be you, not someone’s wife.”Not someone’s mother.
Another frown. “Jeff is very different from your dad.”
“I’ll bet he is.”
“Please, Jill. We can start over. If you just gave me a chance, Jeff and I, we want you to come live with us.”
I bent over a little and steadied myself with a hand on the truck. “When did you meet him?” I didn’t really need her to answer. I knew it had to have been before she left. Maybe her leaving hadn’t been about me catching her with Sean at all. Her hesitation confirmed it.
“It happened so fast. I wasn’t expecting to fall in love.”
“It must have been really inconvenient, what with you already being married!” I let my voice grow louder with each word until I was practically shouting. “Jeff? Is that his name?” I didn’t care what happened with her new husband, and I told her that in the crudest way possible. By then it wasn’t just sweat that was dripping down my face. “Does he know about Sean? What you tried to do with your teenage daughter’s friend?”
Mom’s spine snapped straight and her voice lowered. “I don’t know what you think you mean by that, but we both know Sean is a flirt, maybe I let him get carried away that night, but it’s an ugly thing for you to insinuate anything more than that.” She exhaled and placed a hand over her heart. “What happened to you? You never used to behave like this. It’s cruel, Jill.”
My head was going to explode. “Youhappened. You.” Then, like a child, I started to whine. “Just go. Can’t you just go? You and Jeff can start a new family somewhere and leave us alone…just go…please.”
But she didn’t. She walked over to me and looked at me with her golden-brown eyes that I’d envied all my life. “Don’t cry. I’m here now. We’ll get past this. I’m not going to leave ever again.”
I dropped my head and let out a sob. “Why are you doing this? Don’t you get that I don’t want you here?”
“I think it’s for the best. I told all this to your dad.”
Yeah. I remembered that conversation. “You’re insane if you think I would leave Dad.” My tears had stopped, or more likely they’d just evaporated in the heat. I stood there like a statue while she smoothed my hair off my forehead, going back to grab a strand that was stuck with sweat to my skin.
“And you’d choose him over me?”
“Every time,” I said, with as much force as possible. And then I saw her swallow.
“Even if he’s not your father?”
CHAPTER 27
There was an accident at the shop a few years ago. A 2003 Chevy hatchback crashed down onto my foot when the lift malfunctioned.
I remembered the pain. The way it throbbed up my leg like a jackhammer, like an animal crunching and grinding the bones between its teeth. It wasn’t the kind of pain that burst sharp like a firework only to fade away. It consumed and fed on itself, expanding and increasing beyond words likeagonyortorture, like it was the only thing that had ever existed and it was eternal.
Only it wasn’t. The memory conjured only a shadow of the pain. It didn’t seem real, like a dream that slipped away faster and faster the more you tried to grasp it. Pain.
But I had never hurt the way I did when Mom loosed her soft, poisonous words. I could feel them spreading venom through my chest, my heart beating them in burning pulses to my arms, legs, hands, feet.
“Liar.”
When did I sit down? My palm rested on the oily brown stain that spread across the concrete beneath me like a puddle of filth.
She sat down next to me. She ruined her dress. And she was holding me, rocking me. And I let her.
