More Than Anything (Broken Pieces #1)(101)

“Damn it, Tina,” he swore mildly as his fingers traced the familiar contours of his pendant. She must have slipped it over his head while he was sleeping. Part of him wanted to remove it immediately, but the other, much larger part was relieved to have it back. He had felt incomplete without it. The pendant had always made him feel more connected to Tina. And now that she knew he was wearing it, that attachment felt much stronger.

He left it where it was.

It was a crutch—he knew that—but he also knew that he was going to need something to lean on once he let her go.

After seeing his face, he had agreed with Tina’s assessment that he probably wasn’t fit to be seen in public and had postponed all his meetings and appointments. But he needed to speak with Smith. He wasn’t sure if his friend would be willing to meet with him, but Harris had to at least make the attempt.

When he called, he was stunned when Smith picked up on the first ring.

“What?” The word was loaded with hostility.

“We need to talk.”

“You looking to get your ass kicked again?” Smith asked belligerently.

“Look, Smith, Tina would be devastated if we don’t at least attempt to mend fences. She’d blame herself.”

“Don’t you fucking dare say her name!” Smith’s voice had a dangerous edge to it.

“I didn’t know about her pregnancy; she didn’t tell me.” Harris was trying to defend the indefensible, and he felt lower than a rat because of that.

“That’s beside the point, Harris! The point is, you got my eighteen-year-old sister pregnant! You seduced her when she was barely out of school! And then for ten years, you still acted like we—you and I—were friends! Like everything was still the same. When it wasn’t. When there was this between us.”

Fuck.

“Not that it makes any difference,” Harris muttered, feeling sick to his stomach, “but I’m in love with her. And if it makes you feel better, the feeling is not reciprocated.” His hand crept up to his pendant, clutching it through the cotton of his T-shirt. “So, if you want me to suffer, I’m suffering.”

Smith was quiet for a long time, the silence punctuated by nothing but the sound of his angry breathing.

“Good.” Smith severed the connection after that single, abruptly spoken word, and Harris screwed his eyes shut, mourning yet another loss.

Tina’s mother had called shortly after her meeting with the real estate agent and demanded—because the woman was incapable of making polite requests—that Tina join her for lunch. Tina had been tempted to tell her mother to stick her invitation where the sun didn’t shine, but curiosity had won out over indignation, and she’d agreed to lunch at the house with her mother.

Now she cursed herself for acquiescing to this awkward sham. She couldn’t remember the last time she and her mother had shared a meal without someone else present. Definitely not since before her pregnancy. And as she sat facing her freshly Botoxed mother, she futilely tried to gauge how the other woman was feeling.

Serene . . . and slightly startled. That was all she was getting from her mother’s shiny, smooth face.

Her mother abruptly spoke into the increasingly strained silence. “After three boys, I was desperate for a daughter. And I was so happy when you came along. My precious baby girl. I imagined us doing so many things together. But the older you got, the more apparent it became that we had very little in common.”

“Not quite the raving beauty you—”

Her mother interrupted her sharply. “You stop that! I was never disappointed in the way you look. Although you can stand to lose a few kilograms, Martine! Let’s be honest.” Tina rolled her eyes at that but kept her own counsel, waiting for her mother to continue. “You’re my daughter. I love you! I was disappointed that you never wanted to go shopping with me or experiment with makeup or do all the mother-daughter things I was expecting us to do.”

And the prickly, defensive teen Tina had been had always assumed that her mother’s attempts to shop with her or teach her about makeup had been the older woman’s way of trying to improve her disappointing daughter. It had never occurred to Tina that maybe it had been her mother’s idea of bonding. She stared at her impeccably dressed mother—with her perfectly made-up face and her Botox injections and her discreet cosmetic “improvements”—and felt sudden and complete shame at the way she’d always assumed the worst of the other woman.

“I was naturally disappointed when you got pregnant.” Her mother continued to speak after taking a delicate sip of tea. “You were always a marvelous student. I was never that good at school, and I was proud of you. Of your ambition. You would have made an excellent doctor. But a baby, that was something else. You couldn’t raise a baby. You were only a baby yourself. You were my baby.” Despite the absolute lack of expression on her mother’s face, Tina was shocked to see the tears in her eyes. There was a wobble in the older woman’s voice as she uttered the last two words, and Tina’s own eyes flooded with tears.

“I felt like you were ruining your life,” her mother continued. “I didn’t agree with your decision to keep him, and perhaps I should have been more supportive, but all I wanted was for you to get your life back on track. He was a beautiful baby. But I didn’t want to bond with him, because I truly believed he was destined to be someone else’s grandchild. What happened was terrible. Your father and I weren’t sure how to deal with it, how to deal with your grief. I’ll be the first to admit that we handled it wrong. But we were saddened by his death, Martine. He was a helpless baby. We wanted more for him. We just didn’t want that more to come from our baby.”