The Summer of Sunshine and Margot(111)

“I do want children,” she said. “With you.” She took his hand in hers. “We done talking?”

“We can be.”

She smiled. “Excellent. Your place or mine?”

“Mine is closer.”

“I like how you think.”

  Time did not heal and Alec was pissed about it. Margot had been gone over a week and he was still missing her as much as he had the first day. Maybe more. The entire situation was ridiculous and frustrating and he had no idea what to do about it.

He went down to breakfast, determined that today he would eat something and that it wouldn’t sit like a rock in his stomach, only to find his mother already at the table. She had a cup of coffee in front of her and looked tired. For once she wasn’t wearing makeup, which made her look older than she usually did.

“Good morning, Mother. Are you feeling well?”

She smiled. “I’m not sick, if that’s what you’re asking.” She pointed to the carafe sitting out. “Get yourself some coffee. We need to talk.”

He didn’t like the sound of that, but knew there was no point in trying to avoid the conversation. She would simply stalk him until he was cornered. Better to get it over with and get on with his day.

When he was seated across from her, she looked at him.

“I’ll admit at first I thought what was happening was charming. You were falling in love with Margot and really coming out of your shell. I enjoyed seeing that side of you. I thought the change was permanent. But as you grew to care about her more, you started to worry about your new behaviors. What if you were turning into me?”

Alec couldn’t have moved if the building had caught fire. He considered himself self-contained, intelligent and relatively inscrutable. In a handful of sentences, his mother had laid him bare, exposing his deepest, darkest secrets as if she’d known all along. Which, apparently, she had.

“Before you tell me I’m wrong,” she continued, “you are in love with her. That’s the problem. Or do you want to argue about that?”

In love with Margot? He couldn’t—He wasn’t—Dammit all to hell, she was right.

He picked up his coffee. “Go on.”

“Alec, you have always been my first and greatest love. When I found out I was pregnant, I was so excited. I didn’t ever really want to get married, but I loved the idea of being a mother. I thought we would be a team. I wanted so much for you—mostly that you would be happy.”

“I have been happy. And we were a team.” Bianca had her flaws, but when he’d been young, she’d looked out for him, had cared for him. She might not have believed in rules, but she had believed in love. Later, things had gotten complicated, but not while he’d been a kid.

“Alec, you’ll never turn into me. You don’t have to worry about that.” Her gaze was steady. “You can’t. Margot was right—there is a secret from my past, one I’ve never wanted to tell you. I’ve been thinking about it and I now believe the only way to convince you is to explain why I’m broken and you’re not.”

Dread coiled in his belly. Whatever she was going to say, he didn’t want to hear. With an intuition he didn’t believe in, he knew her truth, her secret, was bad. Worse than anything he could imagine.

“You don’t have to tell me anything.”

“I do.” Her smile quivered a little. “I worked very hard to keep you whole. To give you confidence and to make sure you knew, no matter what, you were loved.”

“I always knew that.”

“I’m glad.” She drew in a breath. “My mother, your grandmother, was a very stern woman and extremely religious. She didn’t believe like regular people believe. Her view of God was vengeful and ritualist. Her beliefs were cruel and absolute. I don’t know if she never wanted me or if she hated me after I was born, but by the time I was four, I knew she resented me with every breath she took.”

He wanted to run, only there was nowhere to go. “I’m sorry,” he said automatically, loathing the uselessness of the words.

She shrugged. “I tried to make her happy but I couldn’t. Eventually I figured out she hated that I was pretty. As I got older, she slipped into madness. By the time I was nine, she was convinced the devil lived in me. She said only the devil would make a child so beautiful. She locked me in a closet. She beat me and starved me. She would scream at me that the only way to get the devil out of me was to kill me and when God told her it was time, she would do just that.”

He couldn’t imagine. Even though her words painted a picture, it wasn’t real to him. No child should go through that.

“I told a few adults what was happening but no one believed me until I was twelve and she tried to strangle me. I was put into foster care.” She sighed. “They were mostly in it for the money but they were so much kinder than my mother, I didn’t care. You know the rest. I was discovered when I was fourteen and an emancipated minor by the time I was fifteen.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, too stunned to think of anything else to say.

“I know. It’s done. I never saw my mother again. I got word that she’d been committed and, shortly thereafter, killed herself.”

She picked up her coffee, then put it down. “I never told you because I didn’t want you to know. Some of it was because I was ashamed and some of it was I never wanted you touched by her evil. I wanted to protect you.”