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"Yes."
"How long?"
"Since Leala was pushed through the table," I admitted.
"I thought about it," she said in a whisper, rocking Leala while I carried Elisa who had fallen back to sleep sometime before.
"About what?" I asked, sitting watching the water, wondering how long it would be before my contact would come back.
"About killing him," she admitted. "I would lay there in bed when he was passed out with drink. I would think how easy it would be. To bash him over the head with the lamp. To hold a pillow over his face. I had hundreds of chances I never took. Not even after he started whipping you when you were a boy. Not after he pushed my girl through a table. I couldn't do it for me. And I couldn't do it for you either."
"I never blamed you," I assured her, wrapping my free arm around her slight shoulders.
"You should have. It was my job. To protect you. To keep you safe. I failed."
"You never failed," I told her, shaking my head. "You tried to give us a better life than you had. We were never cold or hungry or had to wear rags to school."
"I think I'd have rather seen you in rags than watch you all shrink away from the man who was supposed to love you."
"He wasn't capable of love. All he knew was power and pain. That was all he could give us. You couldn't have known that when you met him. And by the time you realized, it was too late for you."
A low, quiet sob escaped her at that, her chin falling to meet her chest, her hair falling to hide her cut and bruised cheek.
"It's over now," I reminded her. "No one will ever make the girls feel that way again. Or you. We can start over."
I'd been perhaps a bit too optimistic. I had been young; it came with the territory.
And comfort was all I had ever really known.
So when we had finally stepped onto American soil, I had expected things to be much the same. A comfortable home. Food. Good clothing.
The reality had been watching my mother work her fingers to blisters and bleeding, cleaning houses or hotels, working in laundromats, just to keep shitty, leaking roofs over our heads, Good Will clothes on our backs, rice and beans and ketchup in our bellies most nights.
Hard work and sacrifice became our lives.
But little by little over time, all the girls stopped ducking their heads and pressing their lips together around men. The programming that had been so much of their young lives unraveled, leaving them just typical little girls with only vague memories of the times before.
That was my mother's - and my - burden to carry.
"That is why you wanted to provide for her. You feel responsible."
"In a way," I agreed, shrugging. "I had been the reason she had to come here and start over. Work so hard. I wanted to give her a break from that when I was able to."
"I'm sure she would make this choice - even with all the hard work - a thousand times over. To be able to watch her girls not learn that all men are scary. To see her son not become a carbon copy of his father. To never feel angry hands on her skin again. She wanted this for herself and for all of you."
"She did," I agreed, nodding. "But I wanted her to be able to enjoy life a bit too. I work hard now so she doesn't have to."
"You're a good man, Roderick," she said after a long moment, tone dripping with sincerity.
"You know what, Livvy?"
"What?"
"You're a damn good woman too."
Her cheeks went the slightest bit pink at that, her gaze staying stubbornly forward despite being in bumper-to-bumper traffic. "It's true," I insisted. "I know a lot of damn fine women. So I know what I am talking about."
"Thank you," she said, voice small.
And as I watched her profile, a proud little smile teasing the edge of her lips, I had a thought I had never had in my life before.
My mother would love her.EIGHTLivianna"What's with the bad mood?" Astrid asked, following me into my room, shutting the door behind her. "Grinder's remorse?"
A strange snorting noise escaped me at that. "There was no grinding."
Okay.
So there was some grinding.
But it was practically innocent.
I mean, not that my body knew that
It had been on high alert since the moment we had gotten out of that bed.
It only amplified while he told me his story, at times his feelings so strong that he slipped in and out of Spanish while he spoke.
And Roderick speaking Spanish in that deep voice of his? Yeah, let's just say my lady business didn't stand a chance.
By the time we had finally gotten back to the city, the aching pressure on my lower stomach was becoming oppressive, impossible to pretend it didn't exist.
