Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 84305 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 422(@200wpm)___ 337(@250wpm)___ 281(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84305 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 422(@200wpm)___ 337(@250wpm)___ 281(@300wpm)
Her name still brought a pang, but one more surrounded with nostalgia and warmth than the bitter cold current of grief.
"Mama," Layna called from the room that would soon be her playroom. If we could ever get any of the boxes unpacked, that is.
She was five, just having her birthday the week before our move out of an apartment and into a townhouse a few doors down from Cash.
And she was, well, nothing like me.
How that happened, I wasn't sure. But she got all of Edison's good, and none of my bad. And then extra good bits from, well, everyone around her, all the women and men she was surrounded with on an almost daily basis, the family we had made out of Henchmen members and their families to replace the ones Edison and I no longer had.
She was tall and willowy for her age, something Edison and I both had in common growing up, with dark hair and chocolate eyes, and a roundness to her face that was nothing like me, but did remind me in a remote way of Letha at her age.
"What's up?" I asked, walking in the room, raising my brow at the way Edison was watching me, like he was gauging my reaction.
To what?
Well, that would be Layna on the floor in her silly blue princess tutu and red Chucks, her hair a wild mass around her head because she liked to hide from the hairbrush, and I was just as apt not to have a screaming match every time it got a little crazy.
Hands-off, that was what kind of parent you could call me.
She just got to raise her hell.
And I got to clean up after it.
She was inside a box that must have been labeled incorrectly from one of the many helpers we had had to box up our old place.
Because this box should never have been in her toy room.
It should have been in my room.
I guess it was easy not to understand that.
It was, after all, a child's tea set.
And Layna was holding one of the cups in her little hand.
I understood the look Edison was giving me, knowing as he did that every year, I cried over those cups, even nine years later.
They were a reminder of something lost too soon.
A part of my past.
And here it was, in the hands of my future.
"This is like the one in your picture!" she told me, oblivious to the heaviness in the room, in her mother's chest.
She didn't mean picture.
She meant tattoo.
It was the same cup as my tattoo.
"Yeah, buddy, it is," I agreed, trying to deep-breathe through the swirling in my belly and the tightening in my chest, unsure what the combination meant, but uncomfortable with it on principle.
"That's weird," she told me, shaking her head.
I moved over toward where she was carefully - bless her - taking each piece of the set out and placing it on the floor.
"Uncle Sugar has a tattoo of a mermaid on his arm," I told her, shrugging.
"Yeah," she agreed, putting the tiny teaspoons on the tiny saucers, doing so with an expert kind of precision, like this was a matter of utmost importance.
Just like Letha always had done.
"Mama," she said when she was done, sitting back down on her butt, exhaling hard like the ceremony had taken all her effort.
"Yeah, bud?" I asked, heartbeat at a standstill.
"Do you want to have a tea party with me?"
I could feel Edison's gaze from across the room, knowing that this moment was huge, ready to step in if I couldn't handle it.
I gave him a small smile, then looked back at our daughter, a product of all the love we had made, a beautiful, magnificent slice of innocence in the world, a warmth like the sun that everyone around her leaned into.
Just like Letha.
And it suddenly wasn't hard.
All the knots untied.
My heart moved to a solid pace.
Because it didn't feel weird, uneasy, a piece of my past in the hands of my future.
No.
It felt perfectly, utterly right.
"Yeah, bud, I would love to have a tea party with you."