Page 140 of Where Roads Lead

Responsibilities. I laughed under my breath. I’ve had responsibilities since I was six years old, when I was told wearing the princess costume to our holiday dinner would disgrace our family.

“And what are my responsibilities, Mother?” I asked stiffly, hoping to rein in my emotional reaction.

“The fact that you’re asking that is outrageous, Elspeth.”

Stop calling me that, I mouthed against the phone, stop, stop, stop.

“You need to make things right with Andrew. I don’t care what you have to say or do. You just need to fix it.”

“Mom, there is no fixing this. Andrew and I, we wanted different things. I was never going to make him happy. You know that, Mom.”

You know it more than anyone.

“Listen to me, Elspeth Cameron.” My mother’s icy voice held power, even through the phone. I fought the urge to cower. To give into her, yet again. “You need to get back here and fulfill your obligations, or else you risk making a mockery of not just yourself, but two entire families. Do you want that? Was that your intention?”

“Mom, are you forgetting that I went along with all of it? That he was the one who walked out on me?”

“And you know perfectly well why he did!” she shrieked, and the geese that had been leisurely floating along the water’s surface all flew upward, as if they could hear the decibel of her disappointment even from there.

Fly away, I thought. At least you guys can escape this conversation.

“The way you behave, Elspeth!” she continued in my ear. “Honestly, it makes one question who raised you. Certainly not your father and I.”

“No,” I muttered under my breath. “Certainly not.”

“What was that?”

“I said,” my voice grew louder, “certainly not. You left that to a string of nannies, remember? Because you couldn’t be bothered. It’s not like you’re my mother or anything.”

“Oh, don’t give me that,” she hissed. “It was our job to provide for you, and we did. Did you not always have the best clothes? Vacations other girls could only dream of—”

I shook my head against the phone because it didn’t matter. None of that had meant anything to me. Not the way it did to her.

“Did we not send you to the best schools?” she continued, raging against my ungratefulness. “God, the money your father spent on your education! And you wasted it! You could’ve been anything! Anyone!”

“Except for who I wanted to be.”

“And what is that, Elspeth?” she retorted. “A no name writer living off credit cards she’ll never be able to pay off? Someone who chased away a respectable man because she didn’t know how to behave in polite society? Tell me, is that everything you dreamed of being?”

I sucked in a breath, humiliated to have my worst fears for my life painted so vividly by the one person whose words had always cut deepest.

Humiliated that it still somehow stung.

“I didn’t dream of being in a loveless marriage, either,” I said softly, thinking words I would never say out loud. And I don’t think you did either.

Some part of me thinks she heard them anyway, because for once in her life she remained silent on the other side of the line.

“But I’d been willing to do it. For you. Because that marriage was so important to you. But I’m not the one who ran out the night before the wedding. That was Andrew.”

Charming, perfect, prodigal Andrew, who my parents had wanted for a son-in-law since the sonogram proved I’d be a daughter.

“And do you know what he said to me, Mom?” I asked her, eyes welling with tears. “He told me that he couldn’t marry me because he couldn’t bear to spend the rest of his life with a wife he was ashamed of.”

When I said the words out loud, I felt the memory play out like a punch to the gut.

How broken I’d been by his words, my mother’s disappointment, the embarrassment of all of Boston knowing what my family had always made me perfectly aware of: I wasn’t good enough.

Not for the Cameron name.