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She shrugged slightly. “My dad, two times a year. He calls on my birthday, I call on his. Not my grandparents though. My leaving only proved to them I was exactly like my mom, and I have figured out life’s too short for their negative judgment.”
Cue another wave of guilt to crash at his feet. He vowed right then to make up for being a judgmental ass if it took him the rest of his life.
Whoa. That’s a little far out into the future.
In his head, he turned around and spotted that line he’d crossed earlier about a mile behind him. Desperate for a distraction, he asked, “And you haven’t seen your mom since you were nine?”
“Oh, no, I’ve seen her.”
He raised his eyebrows, and her indecision was evident as she chewed, swallowed, and sipped. Then resignation settled in.
“
I was in the middle of my first year of college when my mom tracked me down. We reconnected, and things were great at first. I thought I’d finally gotten my mother back, but she only stayed four years this time.” Her jaw clenched for a moment. “Just long enough to use me, clean out my bank accounts, and skip town again.”
His hand stilled as he stared at her in shock. “Your mother stole money from you?”
“Over ten thousand dollars.”
“Wow. That’s…unbelievably…low. I can’t even imagine.”
“Because no one in your family would ever do something like that.”
“We have our issues, but yeah, underneath everything, I’d trust any one of them implicitly.
“I will never trust her again,” she vowed.
Hurt was back in her voice, and he wanted to get up and pull her into his arms for a hug. But touching her even in comfort wasn’t a good idea. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
She shrugged. “I don’t care to ever see her again, but on the other hand, I don’t regret that she found me.”
“How do you not?”
“Because I found myself again. It probably sounds strange, but it was like she gave me permission to be me again.” She rested her fork on her plate while skimming her gaze over the shop spread out behind him. “Ultimately, she is the reason I have all this.”
“How so?”
“For years, my grandparents told me my abilities were nonsense. My dad didn’t want to hear about them either, so I stopped talking about the things I saw and felt, and eventually, I stopped listening, too.”
“Listening?” To her grandparents?
“To my intuition.”
Had he asked that out loud?
“To the little flashes that would come to me when I touched someone,” she continued, “or when I read their aura. All the emotions people wrap around themselves like an invisible blanket. I shut it all down and pushed it away and tried to be normal…tried to be someone they could love.”
Loyal had a hard time swallowing past the lump that lodged in his throat with those last whispered words. If she was trying to make him pay for his years of being an ass, it was totally working.
“Not that it mattered.” Another shrug underscored her words. “I guess I look too much like my mom, and every day they saw her instead of me. My grandma told me that’s why Dad stayed away so much. She blamed me for that, too, though it probably didn’t help that he and my mom named me after her as well.”
The hurt in her voice had him wanting to scream at her family for being so horrible to her even though he’d done the same damn thing. But he hadn’t known what they’d done. He hadn’t wanted to know anything about her at all. Now he wanted to know everything.
“They made that big of a deal of your middle name?”
She shook her head. “First name, not middle. My mother is Roxanna Kent, too. I’m the female equivalent of a male junior.”
“That’s unusual.”
