The Winter Sister(53)

“Mom,” I said. “What’s going on?”

She rocked back and forth, her cheek pressed against her knee. “I don’t want to talk about him,” she said. “How do you—how did you even know?”

I took a couple steps toward the bed. Reaching out slowly, I put my hand on her back, trying to be as tender as I could manage, but her spine arched away from my touch.

“I asked you a question,” she snapped. “How the hell did you know?”

For a few seconds, I watched the tears gather in her eyes. I was struck by how fragile and beautiful they looked, their delicate sheen seeming to turn her eyes to glass.

“I ran into Ben,” I started. “Will’s son. Persephone’s . . . yeah. And he showed me an old picture of you and his dad. It was clear something went on between you guys, so I asked Jill about it and she confirmed that you used to date him.”

Mom blinked up at me, tears spilling onto her cheeks. “You ran into Will’s—you ran into his son?”

I nodded and then swallowed, hoping she wouldn’t ask me where I’d seen him, hoping that, if she did, I’d be able to offer a convincing lie. She didn’t need to know, I reminded myself. It would only make her chemo even more difficult each week. I didn’t know if she’d react the same to Ben being at the hospital as she had just now to the mere mention of Will’s name, but looking at the hollow of her collarbones, how scooped-out they seemed, I knew it was a risk I wasn’t willing to take.

“Why didn’t you ever mention him?” I asked her softly.

She leaned her forehead toward her knees, and when she spoke, her words fell into the space between them. “I don’t like to talk about it,” she said. “It hurts just to . . . just to hear his name.”

With slow, careful movements, I sat down in front of her on the bed. “What happened between you guys?” I asked.

She shrugged, shaking her head. “We were in love,” she said. “We were in love, and . . .” She sniffled, wiping her nose. “He broke my heart. What more do you need to know?”

Everything, I wanted to say—Tell me everything about loving a man so hard that, even decades later, it brings you to tears—but instead, I moved a little closer and kept my voice gentle.

“How did he break your heart?” I asked. “What did he do?”

She lifted her head and met my eyes, her gaze so intense that I felt it on my skin. From all the way down the hall, I could hear the clock ticking, counting time as if it were endless.

“Stop sniffing into my life,” she finally hissed. “There’s nothing there. Nothing.”

Pushing back with her hands and feet, she moved toward the headboard. She crossed her arms over her chest and turned her head to look at the windows. I looked, too, for just a second, as if there was anything to see there but curtained darkness.

“I’m not sniffing,” I objected. “I just want to—God, Mom, I just want to feel like I actually know you. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. So, come on, what happened? Jill said he married another woman.”

The air blew out of Mom’s lips in a quick scoff. “He only married her because he got her pregnant,” she said. “It should have been me. He loved me.”

“Okay,” I said, “but you guys were broken up. Right? I mean, he was at college, and he met someone else, and—”

“We weren’t together,” she spit out. “But we still belonged to each other.”

I paused. My mother—the woman who left men with their mouths watering at our front door, who said second dates were for people who lacked independence—was talking about Will as if they had a lifelong commitment.

“I’m sure that was . . . hard for you, then,” I said, my words like feet tiptoeing across a cold floor. “You thought you’d be together forever, but he chose someone else.”

“Oh, please,” she said. “He didn’t choose her. That was all Richard, I’m sure of it.”

“Richard?”

“His father,” she reminded me, and I remembered his name on lawn signs, back when I was a kid and he was running for reelection to Congress.

“He chose her for his son,” she continued, “because she was of perfect breeding with perfect hair and perfect behavior. Just like a show dog.”

She gave a quick, bitter chuckle before continuing. “It wouldn’t do,” she went on, “for him to be with me. Diner waitress. Student at the community college. How embarrassing for the family. How embarrassing to the legacy of Emory Builders, if the boy being groomed to take over ended up with someone like me. No, no. Richard wouldn’t have that. So he found Susie Perfect, planted her at his son’s school—probably paid her damn tuition—and welcomed her into the clan with open arms. A baby? Oh, how wonderful! A daughter-in-law who irons her underwear? What man would settle for anything less!”

Something thick and constricting coiled around my stomach. The more she finally spoke about it all, the more she sounded—paranoid. Delusional, even.

“But, Mom,” I said. “That doesn’t really make sense, right? I mean, it couldn’t have all been his dad, because, well, he still got her pregnant, didn’t he? He still chose to marry her after that. Don’t you think that if he really wanted to be with you, he could have figured something out? He could have been a father to Ben and . . . I don’t know—eventually married you, I guess?”