Page 139 of Threaded Lies

But the chime going off when the front door opens and then closes tells me she’s here.

That didn’t take her long from text to arrival.

Neither does the clomp of her feet on the stairs as she climbs them or the dread that filters through my system over finally being alone with her and having to face the music.

I keep my head down as I sort through the endless junk Gran saved, hoping to find a few more memorable tokens of hers worth saving.

“What’s all this?” my mom asks from the doorway. I watch her walk in and take in the insanity of this room. The picture wall. The stacks Gran left behind and the ones I’ve made while sorting through it all.

“She left a mess. You know her. She was—”

“Eccentric and over-the-top and absolutely everything to you,” she says softly with a resigned nod of her head. “I loved that you had that with her.”

I slant a look her way. Never in a million years have I ever heard my mom say something like that. “I did. She understood me when no one else did.”

She didn’t come here to talk about Gran, though. I’m not naive enough to think that.

“She did.” She nods and moves around the room, trailing her fingertips over the hutch, pausing to look at framed photos, and stopping when she gets to the jars of collectibles.

“What’s up, Mom?” Heart-to-heart conversations aren’t exactly our forte and yet I have a feeling that’s what’s coming.

And it’s the last thing I want right now.

My emotions are being held together by broken strings. One sharp tug on them and the whole basket will break and everything will spill out.

“I don’t know.” She sighs.

She knows. She most definitely knows.

“Dad’s okay?”

She smiles softly. “Yes. He loves being back at home even if that means we are constantly fighting over me telling him he has to stay in bed and rest. You know how stubborn he can be.” She picks up a paperweight I made Gran in the fourth grade, studies it, and then sets it back down. “He has a long road to recovery. Zero to little stress needed as they are worried about his heart and the toll this whole accident has put on it. I swear Cassie’s death broke it all those years ago and he never recovered from it. It was always you kids and the business that mattered the most to him. Rhett and his twin girls.”

But it’s right here on the printout. The blood type. That means he can’t be …

I don’t know where the memory comes from or why the nurse’s words come back right now. But they do, and they sit, and they hold weight.

I shake the crazy thoughts away. I must have heard it wrong. I must have misunderstood what they were talking about.

“He’s going to make a full recovery, Mom.”

“Yes.” She nods and keeps moving. “And you and Rhett? You’re good.”

“We’ve never really been good, but we manage.”

“I hate that. Just simply hate that,” she says as she smiles at a picture of my dad as a young boy. “And you and Chad? Have you had a moment to sit and talk and reconcile?”

My sigh stops her. It’s loud and obtuse and on purpose. “Say what you want to say, Mom.”

“We haven’t talked since … everything happened.” She waves a hand in irrelevance. “But I think it’s time we do.”

Fucking awesome. I’m here to avoid this discussion, and now she’s forcing me into it.

“I’m going to be blunt,” she starts. “You chose the wrong man. Yes, both are handsome in their own right, but one is kind and forgiving and right for you. The other is … is using you.”

How right she is on that one.

“I chalk Mr. Knight up to being a dalliance. A need to sow your wild oats before settling down with the man you plan to spend the rest of your life with. You sowed them, but I think you accidentally let your heart get in the way, didn’t you? Now it’s broken—now he broke it—and you don’t know how to find your way back.”