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“Would you rather I didn’t see him?” I asked.
“No, no, that wouldn’t be fair.” But she didn’t like it.
“Life isn’t about fair,” I said.
“Hey, that’s my line,” she said, smiling at me.
I took a sip of wine.
“I have more news,” I said, taking a deep breath and telling her about what happened with me and Michael.
She listened to the whole story and when I told her how he’d said he wanted me to move in together, she drummed her hands on the table and whooped out loud.
“That’s wonderful, honey!”
“I know. I am so happy.”
She smiled at me, pleased for me, but I saw reservation too.
“Where is he now?”
I told her he was at the hospital visiting his mother. I didn’t tell her how quiet he had been on the drive back or on the flight home. He’d barely spoken to me, his faced closed off and shuttered. I could tell he was in some kind of turmoil and reached for his hand. He clasped it tightly and I knew it wasn’t me or our relationship. He was dealing with his mother and what this hospitalization of hers meant. He had told me what the doctor said, about how his mother wasn’t ill and speculated that she might have had a panic attack. Even though he didn’t say it out loud, I sensed he thought she was faking it. Trying to guilt him into coming to see her. It was a terrible thought and I felt deeply sorry for him to have to deal with that. My relationship with my mother was so precious to me, I could not imagine a life in which she was my greatest adversary, or even worse, an enemy.
“Are you sure about him?” she asked, carefully.
“What do you mean?”
“He hurt you so badly in college. Remember how cut up you were? When you started working at the company, you told me what he’d said to you.”
“I know.” It wasn’t easy to talk about this, but I knew it was important. Even if my heart was filled with love and the memory of what had happened between us, I had to be able to talk about our past.
“He’s different now.”
“I’m worried that you think that now, and then two years down the line, he changes right back. You know a leopard doesn’t change its spots?”
“The thing is, he didn’t mean the things he’d said to me back then,” I said. “He wanted to hurt me because he thought I’d cheated on him. I hadn’t, but I can see why he thought that.”
I told her about Gabe, and how I’d flirted with him to make his boyfriend jealous.
My mother shook her head. “No wonder he got jealous, that would make any man furious!”
“I guess.”
I told her what I had learnt about his family and his mother, about his loneliness growing up and how he’d had to protect himself, by not getting involved with anyone.
“It’s like he’s never shown his emotions, so, they’re all fragile and tender, like new grass shoots,” I joked.
“I mean, when I look at myself, the boyfriends I had in high school, the friends I have had and the way we’ve always been able to talk, it feels like my emotions are stronger, tougher, you know?”
“You’re like me, I guess,” my mother grinned at me. “We’ve had to be tough, learn how to roll with the punches.
“Matthew hasn’t had that,” I said thoughtfully. “He’s never allowed himself to feel anything. Even his father’s death. He just buried his grief and pretended everything was fine. It turned into anger, I think, and resentment.”
“Not healthy.”
“No,” I thought about it. “That anger has driven him in his life, I think, in his career too. When he became the CEO and took over the company, and he wanted to make it this success. It was the anger at his mother and his fate, I guess, that made him push so hard.”
“And take it out on you when you started there.”
