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“Your mother has her own way,” her gramps said. “You knowthat.”
“Boy, do I.” Julia couldn’t keep the sarcasm from hervoice.
“Don’t be unkind,” hescolded.
It was an old argument. Her gramps wasn’t exactly approving of the path Julia’s mother had taken, her pattern of dropping everything for the wrong man again and again, of neglecting Julia and Elise while she doted on one loser after another, but Lisa Taylor-Berenger-Burns-Maher was still hisdaughter.
“I haven’t heard from her once since Elise went missing,” Julia said. “The last time I talked to her was two days after Elisedisappeared.”
“You can reach outtoo.”
Julia leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. She knew she was acting like a child but couldn’t seem to help herself. “Why does it always have to beme?”
“Because you can’t change people,” he said. “And trying only frustrates all concerned. Your mother loves you, she just doesn’t know how to show it the way you want her too, the way I wish she would. And apparently Ray’s out of thepicture.”
“Now I get it,” Julia said. “She’s alone again, so it’s back to her perpetual PlanB.”
After the Plan A of her newest man inevitably failed, Julia and Elise were always their mother’s backup plan — for affection, for purpose, forvalidation.
Her grandfather was silent as he took a bite of his pasta salad, his gaze pulled outward to the trees surrounding the house, their shadows long and deep as the sun sank closer to thehorizon.
“It might make you feel better too, you know,” he finallysaid.
“I doubt that. And it’s a waste of time anyway. Ray might be gone, but it’s only a matter of time before Ray 2.0 steps into the picture. It’s not worth rushing the gap. She’ll be back to Plan A in notime.”
“Forgive me dear, but at what point do you intend to let go of these old hurts?” She looked at him, wounded as always by his insistence on trying to bridge the gap between her and Elise and their mother. Why did it feel like disloyalty? “I have news for you: none of us are perfect. Not even you, although personally, I can’t seem to find yourfault.”
His words softened the crust that had been building around her heart. “Don’t be ridiculous. I know I’m not perfect. I just don’t see why it’s so bad to protect yourself from someone who’s hurt you over and over again. Isn’t that just self-preservation? Isn’t it the smart thing todo?”
Her gramps sighed. “I’m hardly the arbiter on smart, but I will say there’s a fine line between self-preservation andavoidance.”
She took a bite of her steak as she turned over his words. She’d been telling herself for years that avoiding her mother was the intelligent thing to do. In modern vernacular, her mother was toxic, their relationship damaging to Julia’s psyche, her peace ofmind.
Had she been lying to herself? Was she just avoiding the painful work of forgiveness, of movingforward?
She wished Elise was there. They would buy wine and hash out their feelings on the sofa in the tiny apartment Julia couldn’t bear to live in anymore. Elise, with her breezy tendency to blow off anything that didn’t make her feel good, might be more forgiving, but she would understand Julia’s perpetual angst over theissue.
There were a million things she wanted to talk to Elise about: Ronan and the way he made her feel, her easy slip into the Murphy household, her affection for serious Nick and devil-may-care Declan, her worry that everything had happened too fast between her and Ronan to be sustainable, that they’d come together under circumstances that had heightened feelings that would otherwise havefizzled.
Despite their differences, Elise had been Julia’s confidant. Julia had a few acquaintances from her jobs over the years, and there was Emily Goldberg, a friend from college that she saw a couple times a year when the stars aligned, but without Elise, Julia had no one to talk to about the details of her life that were too intimate to share with hergramps.
She thought about Ronan. He would listen. He would hear her out withoutjudgement.
But she wasn’t ready to give him all the sordid details of her fucked up childhood. Not when he looked at her like she was the sun and the moon, like she was perfect and pure. Not when their relationship seemed built on the finest of sand, on the peril they’d faced in Dubai, on their shared mission to find Elise and bring herhome.
It was working right now. It was more than working: it was perfect. She didn’t want to rock the boat, and she was aware of holding back, of keeping a piece of herself apart from Ronan even as she verbalized her love forhim.
It was one thing to say it. It was something else to have faith init.
She tried not to think about what would happen after they found Elise. Would they settle into a normal life? Go out to dinner on Friday nights? Sleep in onSundays?
It seemed an impossibledream.
She thought of his blue eyes, an ocean that pulled her under again and again, that made her believe it would be okay to let go anddrown.
Except letting go was a mistake. Letting go meant losing herself the way her mother had lost herself time and time again. All the unspoken things between them were for the best, just like they were for the best with hermother.
Sometimes it was better to let sleeping dogslie.
