Coming Home(66)

She curled and uncurled her aching finger as she shook her head sadly. “You have to understand something, Danny. After my mom died, I did my best to take on her role. I mean, there I was—twelve years old—cooking dinners and doing laundry, making sure my little sister took her bath, reminding my father of doctor’s appointments.”

She turned her head to see that he was watching her intently. “Nobody asked me to do it. I wanted to. I wanted our family to be normal again, and a normal family needs a mother.”

Leah looked back down, playing with the same thread on the pillow. “Everyone relied on me, you know? My dad was so frazzled for a while after, and he couldn’t do it all on his own. So I stepped up. I was basically a really young mother. Or a really old teenager, however you want to look at it,” she said with a tiny laugh, and then she lifted her head, looking at him. “But I never felt like I was losing anything, you know? I had good friends. I played sports. I never felt like I’d given anything up. I loved my family. I wanted to take care of them.”

Danny reached over, swiping a stray hair away from her face, and instinctively she leaned into his touch.

“Everything was fine until I went away to college. I mean, you would think I would have been good at being independent, right? But I was miserable. I felt so guilty being away from them that I couldn’t enjoy any of it.

“So after the first semester, I came home and enrolled in a local college. My father didn’t ask any questions; he just welcomed me back with open arms, and everything went back to the way it was before.”

Danny was watching her carefully as she spoke, but she could see in his face that he was confused; that he didn’t understand how any of this fit in with her being estranged from her father.

Here we go.

Leah inhaled deeply. “The year after I graduated, I met Scott. He was funny and sweet and handsome and just…perfect,” she said, her voice trailing off as she shook her head. It was so hard to say those words, to view him in that light now. “He was so good to me. And it was nice to be the one being taken care of for once. I didn’t realize how badly I’d needed that.”

She stopped as her chin began trembling, and she pressed her lips together.

“Hey,” Danny said softly, running his hand over the back of her hair. “You don’t have to do this.”

Leah turned so that she was fully facing him on the couch. “I want to,” she said.

He looked down before he nodded, and then he took one of her hands, interlocking their fingers before resting it on the pillow between them.

She gave it a gentle squeeze before she said, “About six months after Scott and I began dating, he started getting upset over the amount of time I spent with my family. In a twisted way, part of me thought it was really sweet that he wanted that much of my time, that he didn’t want to share me with anyone,” she said, shaking her head. “God, I sound so stupid when I say that out loud.”

“You don’t,” Danny said. “You’re allowed to make mistakes, Leah.”

She smiled sadly. “It went far beyond a mistake. Because the more time I spent with him, the more I started looking at things differently. He would plant these little seeds in my mind—it was so gradual, so smooth, I didn’t see it. He would talk about how much it upset him that I lost my childhood—how it wasn’t my fault my mother died, and that I shouldn’t have had to pay for it. How it wasn’t the job of a teenager to take care of a family.”

Leah could feel her embarrassment growing, but she forced herself to keep her eyes on him as she said, “He told me that my father shouldn’t have let it happen, that he watched me grow up too fast and didn’t do anything to stop it. He said he shouldn’t have allowed me to come home from college either—that if he truly wanted what was best for me, he would have done everything in his power to make sure I got to experience life. He said my family took advantage of my kindness. And after a while, I believed him.” She shook her head. “And I was so thankful that I found someone who cared about me that much. Someone who was looking out for me, and not the other way around.”