Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 94609 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 473(@200wpm)___ 378(@250wpm)___ 315(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94609 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 473(@200wpm)___ 378(@250wpm)___ 315(@300wpm)
That was when reality set in for me.
It wasn’t the first time they’d seen one another over the past eighteen years.
“What’s go-g-going on, Grandma?” I asked, feeling sick to my stomach.
“I’m so, so sorry, Theo. She wasn’t supposed to be here. I told her not to come today.”
“Today,” I cut in. I narrowed my brows. “You’ve seen her recently?”
She frowned and nodded, no longer able to hold eye contact with me. “Yes. We have.”
“We?” I questioned. “Who’s we?”
“PaPa and me. We’ve been seeing your mother—”
“She’s not my mother,” I corrected.
“Yes, well… Christina has been visiting us both for a while now,” Grandma said as she leaned against the kitchen island.
“What?”
“She’s been seeing him ever since he got sick. Twice a week.”
“Bullshit,” I said through gritted teeth. “There’s no way… He’s been sick for two damn years!”
“Yes. I know.” She nodded. “She’s been coming up ever since. We made sure she’d visit when you were out fishing. PaPa didn’t want your wires to cross, just in case…”
“In case what?”
“In case after PaPa passed, she’d disappear again. I didn’t want to open that door for you, Theo. I didn’t want you to go through losing your mother again.”
“How dare you,” I growled. I began to pace with my anger growing at a concerning speed. Anger or sadness. It was hard to tell what I was feeling, but it had to be one or the other of those two. Or maybe it was both.
Definitely both.
“Son,” Grandma started.
“You lied to me.”
“No,” she disagreed. “I just thought it best not to share Christina coming back to town.”
“You withholding this from me was a lie, Grandma.”
“No, I—”
“You fucking lied!” I shouted, bringing my pacing to a halt. My chest burned as I stared at my heartbroken grandmother. My chest filled with a million marbles of instant regret. Grief filled the rest of the space. “I-I-I’m s-s-sorry, Grandma. I di-di-didn’t mean to yell like that. I just…” I lowered my head and shook it. “You didn’t think that today, on PaPa’s s-s-send-off, might have be-e-e-n the worst day for me to cross h-her path?”
I was holding on by a thread.
The space between heaven and hell was earth, and at that moment, earth was the last place I wanted to be. I was pissed off at Grandma for holding on to this secret, but I was even more pissed off at PaPa that I wasn’t able to rage at him about how angry it made me. How hurt I felt. How my heart shattered into a million pieces. Because why would she want to see them and not me?
I was her son.
Her heartbeats lived within my chest.
Why did she not want me? Why was I never good enough for her? I would’ve been better if she needed me to be. I would’ve been the perfect son. I would’ve behaved how she told me to. I would’ve never stepped out of line. I would’ve loved her forever.
Still…she left. She walked away and didn’t look back for years. Then when she did make her way back to Westin Lake, she never tried to reach out to me for two years straight. She never tried to check in to make sure I was okay. She never came back.
Fuck her for leaving.
I only wished she had stayed gone instead of fucking up my already fucked-up thoughts that afternoon.
“I wanted to tell you, Theo. Trust me, I did. But PaPa thought it would be too much to put on you, and I wanted to respect his final wishes, and I… I told her not to come,” Grandma stated, her voice cracking. Then the tears fell from her eyes as she shook her head. “I begged her not to come today. I didn’t. I didn’t… I… I…” She stumbled over her words, and I knew exactly what that felt like. To try to speak but nothing coherent came out. I knew that panic. I knew that level of struggle and hurt.
What I didn’t know was losing my soulmate.
What I didn’t know was coming to terms with the fact that I’d never see my other half again.
What I didn’t know was having a daughter who walked away many years ago.
What I didn’t know was the heaviness of Grandma’s grief.
I could only experience my own as a grandson, as a son…but as a partner? As a mother?
Grandma’s heart had cracks in it that I would never begin to understand.
And the last thing she needed was for me to hammer into her about my mother arriving for PaPa’s funeral.
I moved closer to her and wrapped my arms around her. “I’m sorry, Grandma. I didn’t mean to react like that. It’s just a lot to process.”
She patted her hands against my back as she hugged me. “I don’t take words personally during the storms, baby. Don’t you worry. We’re gonna be all right.”