The Falling (Brightest Stars, #1)(23)

“I think I did, actually. But I came up with my own interpretation after almost dying a few times,” he said, and I nearly choked on my breath.

“Sorry, I—” I began.

He held up his hand. “Sorry for what? Why is it your first instinct to say ‘sorry’? Did you send me to war? Did you hold my hand while I enlisted? Do you profit millions from sending me off?”

I was sort of stunned at the way he was speaking to me. It was like something inside of him had woken up and crawled out to play. There was a harshness laced with truth there, and honestly, I had never really thought about how a soldier felt after coming back from war. Especially a young one. I villainized my father for missing half of my life and I made sure to stay away from other soldiers, for the most part. Until now.

“Well, did you?” he repeated.

I shook my head. “I almost apologized again.”

“I know.” Kael turned his body so he was leaning toward the window, his face out of my eyesight while I drove.

As I skipped ahead in my playlist and Shawn Mendes started again, he reached to take his phone out of his pocket.

He didn’t do what most people our age did and mindlessly scroll, he checked the screen and put it in the cupholder. He didn’t seem bothered the least bit about the uncomfortable silence between us. His disaffection, mixed with the relief that dinner was over, allowed me to start to relax.

A few minutes went by and I found myself softly singing along to the music. I wasn’t great at singing and wasn’t trying to be. The song ended and I looked over at Kael, surprised to see that he was already looking at me. I didn’t feel the embarrassment that I was expecting. I smiled at him and kept on driving. An old Mariah Carey song that reminded me of my mom trying to hit the high notes came on and I swiped up on my phone and closed Spotify altogether.

We were on the highway now, only about five minutes away from my place. I didn’t want to ask him if he had anywhere else to go; it felt rude.

“You seemed to like my stepmom,” I half asked, half told him.

“How?”

I thought on it for a second. “I guess just that you were nice? I’m an asshole. I want you to dislike her or at least call her out for being snobby or obnoxiously fake. I think it bothers me that she’s the opposite of my mom. She’s not fun. My mom was really fun when I was younger. She was spontaneous and would never have made such a fuss around a dinner. And absolutely not on a weekly basis. Every fucking Tuesday? Like, who does that?”

Kael’s expression didn’t give me anything in return, but I still felt the urge to keep going.

“My mom used to listen to music every time she was in the living room or kitchen, and not on a fancy speaker that plays throughout the house.” I looked at him to make sure he was at least paying attention if he wasn’t going to speak. He was. I could feel it in the way he was watching me.

“She basically had a soundtrack to every moment of her life and would dance around the living room listening to Van Morrison, waving her arms around like a bird or a butterfly. She wore sparkly clothes and shoes, and colorful feathers, beads, and sometimes even sticks in her hair. She had soft eyes.”

“Is she alive?” Kael asked. I was so thankful not to be on the highway anymore. The town’s quiet streets were a much better place to handle such a blunt question about my mom.

“Yeah. I mean, technically.”

He raised both his brows. “Technically?”

I nodded, pulling to a stop at the red light. “She isn’t around, but she’s not dead. Not today.” I thought about it. “Not that I know of, at least.”

There it was. My oversharing, which made most people uneasy. I continued to do it even though a really shitty boyfriend I had in high school told me to stop telling people “uncomfortable” things about myself. He said it was weird, so did my brother, and a few therapists I managed to scare away. But it didn’t stop me. I drank in Kael’s face as he smiled a little, and I silently rejoiced that finally someone got my dark humor and didn’t get uncomfortable. Kael found me funny, I could tell. Maybe he was the only person in the world who didn’t think I was weird?

“My point is that my mom was cool. Effortlessly. She was confident. And so likable. Everyone who met her loved her. She was moldable. Sometimes vibrant, sometimes bland. Sometimes appearing as a brilliant piece of art and sometimes just a blob sitting on a sculptor’s table, waiting to be morphed into the next version of herself. She wasn’t like Estelle. She didn’t have to wear jewelry and heavy makeup and heels around the house. Estelle is like glass, once she shatters there won’t be anyone there to put her back together, but my mom . . . she was like clay.”

Until now, I had never thought or spoken about my mom in this way. I usually condemned her for leaving me and didn’t really take the time to appreciate who she was—or might still be.

I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the headrest of the car. I couldn’t think of a single time that I sat in my car without music playing, just talking to another person. The thrum of my engine cutting through the thick Georgia air was all I could hear. That, and the whisper of my mom’s laughter as she shook her hair. Her hair always tickled my face, and the two of us would laugh until our stomachs hurt.

“She would stand over me and shake her hair, like a wild woman. I loved it. I can’t imagine Estelle doing that. Or laughing in general.”