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I rubbed at my chest then.
“Mom,” I said. “Unless you got married with a preacher here at the beach… you didn’t do it before you got on that yacht. I think he was lying to you about that, too.”
“But the ring…” She held the hand out that had the huge ring on it. One that I’d never seen before but was so ostentatiously gaudy that it looked like it was something Oberon would pick out. “I wear it…”
It was as if everything was finally coming together for her.
“He’s been feeding my fears for years,” she said quietly, the understanding in her voice making me physically ache to hear it. “Every time that I think that I can do it, he fuels me up in a different way. Saying that maybe we should try it again when the sea is calmer. When there aren’t any clouds in the sky. And I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, and I keep saying to myself ‘I can do it.’ Then he’s right there, telling me I can’t.”
“He was manipulating you,” I said.
Just as he’d manipulated everyone. Why did we never think to come to his house? Why did we never follow up? How was she hidden, less than a mile away from where I ‘passed’ every freakin’ day through the channel, and I’d never noticed a thing?
How? How had I allowed that to happen? Why didn’t I just put two and two together?
“Babe,” I heard Alice say. “There’s nothing you could’ve done. You spent days out there working. Days, baby.”
It was as if she’d plucked the thoughts right out of my head.
That’s when my mom’s eyes landed on her.
She tilted her head, studying Alice so hard that I knew she was getting the mom once-over.
Holy fuck, the mom once-over.
I had a mom to give my girl the once-over!
“Alice, you said?” she asked softly. “The girl that works at The Marina?”
Alice nodded.
“Coran had a lot to say about you,” she said softly. “Tell me what happened. How did you get here?”
Alice did, telling her about how she’d smelled something chemical. How one second, she was awake and aware at the place where she got waxed, and the next she was waking up on the boat, pulling up to Oberon’s island.
“Then I was here,” Alice finished. “Coran brought me inside, and that’s when I saw you.”
My mom nodded as if that explained a lot. “Coran isn’t all there mentally.”
I could’ve told her that without having lived with him for the last few years.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to confirm that.
“We knew that.” Alice winced. “But only after he tried to hurt me one night. He tried to take me when it was dark, and I wasn’t really sure what he was trying to do, whether it was to bring me here or do something worse…” Alice looked as if she was reliving that night in her brain, causing me to reach for her and tug her into my embrace. Once she was there, I dropped a kiss to her head. She took a deep breath before continuing. “We fired him from The Marina. From there, he’s spent the last weeks following me around everywhere I go. I’ve had to have a bodyguard so he wouldn’t do it again. The only reason he got to me today was because I had to go to the bathroom, and I honestly didn’t think Coran was stupid enough to try again with Karen and her gun so close.”
“That’s Karen?” my mom asked softly, gesturing with her head to Karen, who was busy trying to contain Oberon. “She’s pretty.”
I snorted. “Mom.”
“Well, she is.” My mom shrugged casually, her eyes going to Coran on the floor. “I’ve spent the last few years trying to make leeway where that boy is concerned. But it’s as if he’s fundamentally broken inside. And Oberon is the only one that can control him. He’s loud, lashes out at anything and everything, gets way pissed off if he doesn’t get what he wants. I’m not quite sure what Oberon says to him to get him to calm down sometimes, but I know for sure that whatever it is, it isn’t nice.”
“Oberon has his own fucked up ways,” I couldn’t stop myself from saying. “Goddamn. All these years, and you were right fucking here.”
“Language,” my mother admonished me.
God, even that felt good.
Alice squeezed me before letting me go, obviously reading that my mother needed another hug. Which I gave her.
“It’s good to talk to you, Mom,” I said softly.
My mom sniffled, breaking my heart a little bit.
“I should’ve called your work.” She shook her head. “The Marina. The guilt, though.” She pressed her hand against her chest. “All these years, I’ve felt so guilty for marrying him against your better judgment. You kept telling me to find a new person to test the waters with, and I’d ignored you. I thought that you really didn’t like me anymore.”
