Devoured: A Novel(53)

“Yeah, I’m fine, I . . .” I start, pausing when I hear her sniffling. “Gram, what’s going on?”

“It’s Rebecca,” she says. I listen, stony-faced, as she tells me about how my mom had gotten into a fight in prison with several other inmates after stealing a pair of shoes. I feel that bitter feeling in the pit of my stomach, the shame, as she talks about Mom having to be sent to the county hospital for surgery. “I don’t understand why she’d take someone’s shoes, Sienna. I put money on her books. I give her as much as . . .”

I sink down on the floor, leaning my back to the side of the sofa. It looks like I won’t have to confront Gram about my mother. She’s revealed that she’s been going to visit mom herself, but I wish with everything inside of me that I could be the one suffering instead of her.

My grandmother has stopped talking now. I hear her sobbing quietly on the other end and a creaking noise. She must be in bed. I ball my hands into fists, banging them into the couch.

“Gram, I can’t yell at you about going to see her. I’m not going to argue with you or any of that because I’ve got no room to talk, but please, please, please stop letting her take advantage of you.”

A few years ago, when Mom’s whereabouts were discovered after she skipped town, the bounty hunters had caught up to her approximately two days after the $300 grand cash bond Gram paid was forfeited to the court. If my mother’s worthless ass had been caught just 48 hours earlier, Gram would never have been in this situation.

But even after Mom screwed her over, tried to talk Seth who was just a teenager into taking the rap for her—even then Gram stood by her side.

My grandmother, with all of her kindness and humility, deserves so much better than my mom. Seth and I deserve so much better than our mother, and though I hate to admit it, more than our dad, too.

Because a phone call every other week and the occasional awkward visit on holidays was about the equivalent of a hello from the homeless man who trolls the coffee shop I go to for Tomas in Los Angeles each morning.

“I know,” Gram says, her voice catching on a sob. “It’s hard—what with the house and Rebecca. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going anymore.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be home soon and we’ll take care of everything. I swear it.”

“It’s hard,” she says once more. “I-I’ve got to get to bed, sweetheart. I’m going to go back to the hospital for your mom tomorrow morning and I’ve got a doctor’s appointment of my own. But baby, I love you so much.”

“Love you too, Gram.”

But when I hang up, my teeth are gritted together. Lucas finds me like this with my head buried in my hands, grinding my teeth furiously. “Don’t gri—” Then he sucks in a mouthful of air, striding his way across the marble foyer and into the living room in a matter of seconds. “What the hell is going on?”

“I’m fine.”

“Sienna,” he says in a cautioning voice, and I glance up at him, revealing my tear-streaked face. He rolls his body down the side of the couch until he’s right beside of me. It’s almost comical, how absolutely helpless he looks when confronted with my tears, but he pulls me into his arms. Lucas Wolfe, the most commanding man I’ve ever met, lets me sob into the front of his white shirt, allows me to drip mascara all over him.

I sniffle. “My mom got beat up in prison.”

Holding me by my shoulders, he pulls away from me slightly, placing just enough space between the two of us so that he can look into my eyes and feel me out. He frowns, rubbing his lips together. “I’m taking it you’re not exactly sad about your mom getting an ass-whipping.”

I laugh, in spite of the tears, and drag the backs of my hands across my face. “God, no. She’s had it coming for years. It’s”—I let out a small, strangled sound and he buries his head in my hair again, stroking the back of my neck, making me feel safe—“my grandma, you know. My mom’s been so awful to her, and yet Gram keeps taking the kicks over and over again. It just hurts. It hurts so f*cking bad.”

Lucas murmurs that he understands, but I can’t miss how his voice hitches. How it feels as if there is something left unsaid between the two of us.

But he listens to me sob, listens to every complaint I have about Mom. It’s like a dam bursts and I tell him everything, breaking every dating rule in the book. When he firmly tells me to go to bed, tucking me into the king sized bed in the master bedroom, the unsaid words are clear to me simply by the way he looks down into my eyes.