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“Letting me hold you when you need someone is enough, my gorgeous girl. You are enough.”
I am enough. Am I? My mind drifts to Clark and I sit back. “Can I ask you something? Do you wish you’d never met him? I don’t mean whether you should have had me or not, I just mean the two of you. Do you wish you’d never met him so he’d never hurt you?”
“No. He made me happy once, and if I’d never married him, I’d always have wondered about what could have been. We were good together once, believe that.”
“I love you.”
She tilts her head to one side and smiles. “I love you too, darling.”
IT TAKES ME a couple of turns of my head and a few blinks to realise I’m lying in my bedroom at my mum’s house. I don’t know what time we came up to bed, but I remember being so exhausted I just crawled under the duvet. Now, as the sun streaks through the open blinds and across my face, I regret it.
With a groan, I lean down to the floor where I dumped my mobile and see it’s after nine already. My iPhone screen is full. Missed calls from Teddy. Missed calls from Rachel.
It really wasn’t a bad dream.
I type in my passcode and open my messages. I skim Teddy’s and Rachel’s names and land on Clark’s.
JUST LET ME KNOW YOU’RE OKAY. PLEASE.
I hold my phone to my ear and dial my voicemail.
“Dayna, answer your goddamn phone. Clark told me. I need to see you.”
Fuck off, Teddy. Fuck off, world.
I drop my phone to the floor and lie back on the bed, staring at the ceiling until there’s a soft knock on the door, and my mother comes in with coffee.
“Good morning,” she says. I refrain from saying is it? “How are you feeling today?”
I push myself up to sit and pull the covers over the t-shirt she loaned me to sleep in. “I’d like to switch that coffee for something harder.”
“You’ll have to settle for Guatemala’s finest beans, I’m afraid.”
She sits on the bed, looking pretty in a cerulean sweater that matches the colour of her irises. I take the coffee from her.
“Dayna, I know this is hard for you. I know it might change how you feel about your father, but you being upset is what we tried to avoid.”
“I know. I wish I’d known though. Mostly I wish I hadn’t blamed you, but it’s not just that, Mum.”
“I figured as much, but I also figured if you wanted to tell me the rest of the story, you would have.”
I give her a half-smile. “I feel like I had this image of life, my life. Like I’d make you and Dad proud. I’d come home, and you’d swing me around because I’d made you both happy. And you’d be happy. I’d go to university, have a job I love. Find a husband, maybe have a child one day.”
“Are you really so far off course?”
“Oh gosh, I can’t even see the path, Mum. I don’t know if I want to head up the company anymore. I don’t know if I even want to be in the industry. And a husband?” I laugh but feel my face contort, as a pain I’m becoming increasingly familiar with strikes my chest. “The only man I ever thought I would want to spend the rest of my life with walked away.”
She rests a hand on my knee. “You’re loved. You’re intelligent and pretty. You have everything going for you, darling. You just can’t see the sky for the clouds right now.”
“How did you do it? How did you pick yourself up when everything you thought you had was taken?”
She smiles, a soft, thoughtful smile. “I remembered what was good in my life. And I found Richard. He loved me and wanted to protect me. He’d go to the ends of the earth to do what he thinks is right by me, even if he gets it wrong sometimes. You’ll be fine, Dayna. You’ll find your someone special, and you’ll think everything that happened in life is somehow okay because it brought you together and resulted in a life you want.”
“I’m not sure I’ll be as lucky as you.”
My mother strokes my hair and rubs a thumb across my cheek. Regret weighs heavily on me. “Anna and I are going to have our nails done and get lunch together. Why don’t you come with us?”
“Oh, that’s really not my… You know what, sure. That sounds nice.”
