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Grief didn’t end. It didn’t go away. It just became easier to manage. A person got better at swimming with the tide instead of letting it drown them.
But this, now, it was like I was back at the beginning.
I could see the tsunami heading my way and it was like I’d forgotten how to swim.
My mom... God, I missed her so badly.
“You can’t,” he denied me, and his words really pissed me off.
“You want to tell me that I can’t do something? Finn, really?” I got in his face, hissing, “You lied to me. For years. You let me get close to Lena, you let Jake think of her as a fucking grandmother when you had to know that I’d never want her anywhere near him, you bastard.”
I didn’t see it happen.
I didn’t even know I’d raised my hand.
Suddenly, I felt the sting in my palm and the ache in my bones as I slapped him.
I screamed, a long, loose warble of pain that wasn’t eased as I carried on hitting him.
Loose hits, slaps, smacks, something I’d never have thought I was capable of, but I did it.
And he let me.
He let me hit him.
He let me slap him.
He let me smack him.
I screamed again, but this time, the torrent of grief poured from me in a bubble of tears.
“I hate you,” I sobbed as my hands collided with his arms, with his chest. I knew I hurt myself more than him. “I love her—how could you do that to me? How could you let me love her when she killed my mom?”
After the day I’d had, this was more than I could handle. The starch in my bones disappeared, melting into dust as I sank to the ground, crying, shoulders rounded, hunched over as I grieved the loss oftwomothers.
And when he huddled on the floor in front of me, I didn't shove him away as he tucked me into his embrace. As he hauled me into his arms and held me through the twister of grief that sucked me in with ragged claws and fangs as if Mom had died yesterday and not years ago.
