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“Oh, please, spare me. You’re throwing your life away, and for what?”
There’s a red hot anger building up inside of me, bubbling to the surface. I fight to keep it at bay. I need this conversation to end with her accepting us and our baby.
“Mom, if you would just give him a chance, you’d see—”
“I’ve already seen it. Hell, I’ve lived it! That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I loved a great guy who swore to love me forever, chose his baby over my career, watched him leave, and struggled on my own to somehow build a life while raising a kid. Yours isn’t the first story of its kind, Emily. There’s nothing special about it.”
I don’t know how to respond to that. I’ve never heard my mother talk so candidly about her past, and especially about what her life was like when I came along. The hurt in her voice is almost unbearable. Her disappointment in me seeps into the air between us.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry that your story went the way it did, Mom.”
She gives a bitter laugh, shaking her head again. “Right. And you believe yours will be different.” Then she gets up with a sigh. “I know there’s nothing I can say that’ll change your mind. Because I know what I would’ve told my mother.”
“Can we just talk about this some more? Peter’s on his way. He wanted to talk to you.”
“I can’t deal with this right now. I’m going to need some time.”
And with that, she walks off.
I don’t know what to feel. There were so many charged emotions in our short exchange, and only some of them had to do with me. It’s clear that my mother still has a lot of demons in her past that she hasn’t dealt with. I wish she would let me help her with them, instead of using me as a kind of carbon copy do-over for her life.
“Miss McAfee?” Ted appears beside me all of a sudden. He has a habit of doing that. He also refuses to call me by my name. The whole ‘Miss’ thing always makes me feel at least a hundred years old.
“Yes, we can go home now,” I say, rising slowly to my feet. “Maybe stop at the McDonald’s drive-thru on our way, or—”
“No, ma’am, I can’t take you home just yet.”
“We can’t?” His face is inscrutable, but my heart picks up speed and the strangest feeling crawls through the tiny hairs on the back of my neck.
“There’s been an accident,” he says.
Chapter Eighteen
Peter
“I wish you had told me about it first,” I say to Emily.
She’s frantically folding laundry on the bed, acting strangely distant with me. I can’t help feeling like she’s taking this out on me. Like it’s my fault that lunatic clipped my car and forced me off the road.
“Look, it was the right thing to do,” she says, looking up at me. “Your father’s already on his way over, so it’s no use you going on and on about it.”
She hands me a pile of freshly folded t-shirts. I move to take them, but she doesn’t let go immediately. Instead, she fixes me with a steady look.
“He has a right to know, Peter.”
I give her a stiff nod and she releases me to go about my packing duties.
“I know this is the plan,” I say, putting the t-shirts into my closet one at a time. I’m deliberately making the task longer than it should be because it’s easier to talk to the darkness inside there. “To get them both on board with this. With us.”
“Exactly.” Her voice comes from behind me, where she’s still folding away.
“I’m just saying, a heads-up would’ve been nice.”
“Yeah, well, you were drugged up and asleep when he called you. Of course he had questions when I answered your phone. I didn’t have a choice but to invite him over.”
I rub the stiff strain in the back of neck. I was lucky to get out of the accident with nothing more than a few scrapes—also lucky to get super-strength painkillers for my whiplash. They knocked me out and allowed me to escape reality for a little while.
Imagine my dismay coming back to the world and finding out that the first order of business would be seeing my dad.
