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I’d fucked up.
Letting things get physical again.
Losing control like that.
It complicated shit even more than it already was.
And now she was never going to ever want to see me again.
It was bad enough what I’d done the last time.
She would never forgive me a second time.
And maybe that was exactly why I had to do it to her again.
For her own good.
No matter how much it killed me.
CHAPTER NINE
Amaranta
I was on the verge of tears the entire day.
So much so that my nurse even commented on it, forcing me to lie and say that something in the air that day was bothering my allergies.
I didn’t have allergies.
No.
What I had were memories.
Beautiful and painful ones, both of them fighting for dominance in idle moments between patients. And, of course, it was the slowest day the clinic had seen in months. Because life liked to screw with you like that sometimes.
I’d worked hard not to let all that old crap come to the forefront of my mind when I could help it. Luckily, I worked unendingly long days most days of the week. And when I wasn’t working, I was sleeping. When I wasn’t sleeping, I was frantically trying to catch up on all the life stuff that falls by the wayside when you are so swamped professionally. Cleaning. Laundry. Running errands. Paying bills.
I rarely had a spare moment to really think beyond what I needed to focus on in the close past or near future.
I was thankful for that.
Because the more distant past? Yeah, it had the ability to put me in a funk for days if I thought about it.
It was interesting how one or two bad memories could somehow overshadow years of good ones. But that was how it felt when I thought about Seeley.
The boy who’d been my best friend.
My only friend, really.
The only person in my life who cared about me aside from my grandma.
But, see, the problem was, it wasn’t long after I came to live with my grandma, that it was clear she was not well. It was something she must have lied about to keep me from going into the system. And as much as I was eternally grateful to her for that, I could see that having a child around was taking a toll on her already fragile health.
She wouldn’t discuss it with me back then. So I went a really long time without knowing what was wrong with her, just that something clearly was.
There were good spells, times when things were pretty normal. And those were the times when she would manage to find and hold down a part-time job. Which meant full cabinets and the lights staying on.
But they were always followed by spells where she was too unwell to go to work. So things would get lean. And the lights would stop working.
