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“I know. Should we bring decoys?”
“You certainly might want to start.” Liam was lukewarm toward my mother, but she adored him, so he got away with bringing the girls he did to dinner. Mom always liked that they were “pretty” and “physically fit” but that was just about it, since they were generally also loud and heavy drinkers with proud social opinions that she and Vic were likely to oppose. Still, Mom gave them all more of a chance than she’d ever consider giving me – no matter how many f-bombs they dropped or wine glasses they broke.
Liam snorted. “The whole point of bringing the girls I bring to dinner is so your mom will eventually stop asking me to bring girls to dinner.”
“I know. But she’s desperate for a grandkid and you’re her only hope since Riley’s child-free and I’m… whatever I am to her.”
Something in the air shifted as Liam tipped my chin up to face him. “What did she say?”
“Nothing,” I replied, though I knew there was no hiding from Liam. His jaw tightened.
“Sash, you need to tell her why you broke up with Ethan. He was a fucking abusive piece of shit.”
“I’ve told her things. She just says I’m being too sensitive or too picky. You know her.” I pursed my lips, wondering if I should say it. “You know she likes me best when I’m attached.”
A stone expression fell over Liam’s face. His muscles stiffened beneath me, his entire body rigid now. Shit. I knew I shouldn’t have brought it up.
“Sash, this is enough. We can’t keep sweeping it under the rug. It’s fucking bullshit.” His words were even as he spoke but I felt his heart beating faster by the second under the skin of my palms.
“Liam, I shouldn’t have brought it up. Let’s just change the – ”
“No. We’ve been changing the subject for years now and look what it’s done.” I straddled his shins as Liam sat up completely straight now, eyes blazing at me. “You don’t deserve to be treated this way. Day in and day out. It isn’t fucking right and you know it’s not. I know you do.”
“Yes.”
“Then what – are you really content to live like this, Sasha? With your mother resenting you forever for something that wasn’t your fault?”
“She was… nice to me the past few years,” I said lamely.
“Don’t defend her. She liked you because you were engaged to that worthless prick. She shouldn’t need to know you’re tied down to someone insane and controlling in order to like you. What she needs to do is face the fact that she’s been fucking wrong and delusional for ten years and she’s not ever going to do that if you don’t list every reason why.”
I stared blankly forward at Liam’s chest, listening to the chatter of my own teeth in my head. What he said was true. All true. But I wasn’t equipped to deal with any of it. I thought burying my demons was enough, or at least similar enough to facing them. But apparently not.
Swallowing, I tried to think of something to say to Liam, but my chest was clenching with the anxiety that hit every time I thought about this topic. “You’re right,” I conceded. Liam waited for me to go on but instead, I slipped quickly off his lap. “I should go make breakfast.”
I was out the door in seconds, but my legs were like jelly as I bee-lined through the living room, because I knew he was coming furiously after me.
“Sasha.” Liam’s voice was tight with anger. I could hear him hastily pulling sweats on as I grabbed my panties off th
e floor and yanked them on. I went for the kitchen, quick to grab the eggs out of the fridge and turn on the stove. “Stop it,” Liam growled. In a flash, he was behind me, turning off the fire and gathering my hands behind my back. “We’re going to talk about this now.”
I closed my eyes. “Please. I don’t want to.”
“You have to. We both do.” He spun me around to face him. “I want you to bury these skeletons, Sasha.”
“How?” I asked, my stare dead and calm despite the tears in my eyes. “You’re not going to change my mom. She’s not the type to be changed.”
“Then I won’t see her or my father again till she acknowledges what happened, and that it had nothing to do with you.”
“Don’t do this to me, Liam.”
“What?” He yanked me close when I pulled away. “What, Sasha? What am I doing?”
“Stirring up drama where there doesn’t need to be! Digging up all this dirt and filth that’s going to ruin everything again,” I argued, losing control of my voice. “It’s going to disturb basically ten years of peace for us, Liam, and you know that.”
“For fuck’s sake, this is what you call peace, Sasha? This isn’t peace. You survived what happened only to take on a whole new kind of abuse because you’re too afraid to tell your mom that she’s out of her fucking mind. Owen wasn’t the love of her life, he was a piece of human shit, and you weren’t some conniving homewrecker, you were a fifteen-year-old girl. Her daughter. Now I’ve kept my mouth shut with her all this time and I’ve played nice because you’ve asked me to but the truth is it takes every ounce of strength in my body to so much as look your mom in the fuckin’ eye when I see her,” Liam hissed. “I am this close to letting go of this act and humiliating her like she fucking deserves. I am so goddamned tempted to break down exactly what happened for her till she’s crying in the shame she’s deserved to feel for over a decade now. The only reason I don’t is because you love her for some absurd goddamned reason I can’t even – ”
“Stop!” I couldn’t take it anymore. “I am begging you. I want to go to Thanksgiving in peace, okay? I want to see my cousins and my aunts and my uncles and I don’t want to bring up Owen. I don’t want to talk about him ever again – please!”
