My phone lit up as Lisa tried to call me for the fifty-eleventh time. I sent her to voicemail.
“What about her?” Whitney asked. “It’s not like she made the decision not to tell you. She was just grandfathered in. Grandmothered in?”
“But she went along with it.” I had always looked up to Lisa. She was no nonsense. Honest. Kind. Direct. Firm, but fair. I wasn’t shocked that she knew. I was just hurt that she let it slide.
She would be the last person I called. Well, except for Ryan. But I wasn’t going to talk to him at all.
My mind went back to all the red bubble notifications I saw when I logged into my social media. I rarely used it, so I hadn’t thought to block him there. A torrent of messages from him sat in my inbox. He had even emailed me through my website.
That left only one person to call at the moment.
“I need to call my mom,” I said.
Wander handed me my phone and Whitney held my hand.
I wanted to throw up as I waited and waited for her to answer. “She’s probably at the salon and doesn’t have her phone on her,” I said to the girls. “I’ll just do it later.”
“Nope,” Wander said as she clapped her hand against mine, trapping the phone against my ear. “Wait it out.”
Just when I thought it would go to voicemail, the call connected.
Mom’s panicked voice came over the line in a hurry. “Hello? Autumn?”
My throat swelled, and I couldn’t get a word out. Tears filled my eyes as all the hurt returned in a tidal wave.
“Autumn? Are you there, hon?”
Wander pulled my phone out of my hand as I dropped my head and cried.
“Give her a fucking second, will you, Cynthia?” she snapped.
“Um . . . Okay.”
I took deep breaths and steadied myself before taking my phone back. “Mom?” It sounded like a pathetic whimper—the way a child would sound when they tiptoed into their parent’s room for comfort after a nightmare.
“I’m here,” she said as the noise of the salon thrummed in the background.
“If you need to go back to work?—”
“No, no. I’m at the salon, but I’m in the back. I’ve got one of the other girls covering my chair. I’m just glad you called. Where are you? Are you safe?”
I let out a deep breath. “I’m fine. I’m staying with friends. For now.”
“Good. Good. That’s good,” she stammered.
There was a long silence. “I don’t know what to say,” I admitted. “I’m fucking angry.”
Whitney’s hand tightened around mine while Wander put her arm around my back.
“I know you are. I don’t blame you one bit,” she said with her voice full of regret.
“Why didn’t you tell me Shep was my dad?”
She didn’t say anything, so I kept going.
“Did you think I would love you less?” The question was barely a whisper.
My mother’s sigh was weighed down with thirty years of remorse. “I have made so many mistakes in my life, Autumn . . . Too many to count. I was holding on to threads and binding them with lies to try to make blankets. I was trying to hold everything together. I just wanted to give you and your sister a good life.”
