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Jesus Christ.
“Are you trying to upset me?” Remy asked.
She turned again to him, but before she could say anything, he spoke.
“I left the five people I love most in all this world sitting at a table together, an unusual circumstance, in order to have an important conversation with you, and you lead with giving me shit about your bird bath and saying hideous things about domestic violence?”
“So I’m not one of the people you love most in the world?” she queried.
He’d opened himself up to that one.
He skirted it.
“You chose not to have breakfast with us, and here I am.”
Her eyes flashed with irritation that he’d deftly sidestepped her first parry.
“You can’t blame me for putting my shield up,” she retorted. “Of course I’d be defensive. Your visit hasn’t exactly been loving.”
“Yes, I can blame you because you’re my mother. You should never need a shield with me. And I could say the same to you about how this visit has gone, times four, because my wife and children have endured it along with me.”
Her gaze turned hard.
But he kept at her.
“And the reason you need a shield is not because of something I did, but rather, the opposite.”
“I love your father with everything I am,” she shot back.
“Which begs the question, Mom, of why you’d hurt him.”
He took a deep breath, and when she didn’t answer, he lowered it on her.
“And me.”
She looked away.
Right…
No.
“We need to discuss this. We leave tomorrow, and as I’ve already made you aware, I’m not crazy about the idea of leaving Dad with you.” It took him a moment before he could finish what he wanted to say, but he did it. “And I deserve some answers.”
“You can’t possibly understand. Wyn worships you. You’ve always been her su…” She cut herself off from what she was about to say, fidgeted with the fringe of her pashmina, and instead said, “From the moment you met her, you became her world. She’d never do anything like that to you.”
Remy might not, until recently, have understood how highly his wife regarded him, but he’d never once worried she’d step out on him.
So what Colette said was true.
He couldn’t possibly understand.
But they both knew that was a weak excuse.
Or did they?
“Mom,” he said carefully, “I don’t condone Dad’s cheating, but it isn’t okay what you do to him, and it really was not okay what you did to me.”
She grew silent.
Remy didn’t let it go. “I’m out here because I’d like to understand.”
“I’m dying, Remy. This may be the last time you see me breathing, and this is what you want to discuss?” Her head whipped in his direction. “Really? This is the only private moment I’ve had with my only child during your visit, perhaps your final visit, and this is what you bring up?”
“This may be the last time you see me too,” he returned.
“Yes, exactly,” she spat, leaning slightly his way, a look on her face that made his insides twist, he was so familiar with it and that long-remembered terror of what it might bring. “And I’d much prefer to discuss something else.”
He kept a lock on the fact he was getting pissed, but he didn’t give in to her demands.
“Right, then let me share that for the last three years, Dad has been kicking his own ass because he thought he was the reason I tanked my marriage, when in fact that reason was you.”
She gasped, her eyes getting huge.
“Would you rather discuss that?” he pushed. “Because, like I needed to be perfect for you… No, that isn’t right. Like you needed me to be perfect for you, you needed me to be everything for you, and I lived with that so long, I absorbed it. Which meant I also needed to be perfect for Wyn. To be everything for her. And when it came clear she didn’t need me for everything, she could make her own money, she could contribute to our family, our lives, she was a success on my level, I couldn’t deal with it. I didn’t know who to be if I wasn’t taking care of her. I didn’t know how to be.”
“I will never understand why she went back to work when she didn’t have to,” Colette muttered.
Christ, she never changed.
“Damn it, Mom. Are you serious?” he bit out.
She tilted her gaze to the sky. “I cannot believe you’re being this cruel to me in my final days.”
For fuck’s sake.
Remy took a calming breath and slowly released it, before he urged, “Please, Mom, for the love of me, of Dad, of your grandchildren, your family, the legacy you’re leaving, stop the fucking drama and talk to me. I’m sitting here because I want to understand.”
Her eyes sliced to him, and she snapped, “Watch your mouth around your mother.”
Remy stared at her.
