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“That’s a mother’s love. You’d do anything for your baby. Absorb pain. Defy death. Fight evil itself. Now, I want you to look at me and tell me what you see.”
“I see my momma.”
“That’s right. Everything that you feel when you look at Kaela and everything that you are willing to do and sacrifice for her well-being and happiness are the same things that I feel and the same things that I will do for you. Because no matter how old you get, you are my baby girl. If I could have lain down in that grave so you could keep Mike, I would have.”
She lays her forehead against mine. “And you could never disappoint me by being happy.”
“I’m so tired of it all. The anger. Grief. Guilt,” I whisper.
“Guilt for what?”
“For being such a mess and so lost that I haven’t let myself feel joy for the entirety of my baby girl’s first year of life. A year I’ll never get back. She lost her daddy before she even had him, and in a lot of ways, she lost her mommy too. I have been living in darkness, Mom. Perpetual night.”
Tears fill her eyes as I feel the warmth of my own trailing down my cheeks.
“And Weston is your dawn?” she asks.
“I don’t know, but I don’t want to be too scared to find out. I’m afraid if I don’t, then I’ll never be brave enough to share my heart with anyone ever again. Not even myself. And I don’t want Kaela to grow up without seeing what brave, beautiful, reckless love looks like.”
“Oh, Anna.”
I fall into her arms, and she holds me as I let it all out.
“Mike would want that for you,” another voice says.
Mom releases me, and we turn to see Sheila standing in the doorway.
“Do you think so?” I ask.
“I know so.”
She walks over and wraps me in her arms. “Grief lives in the past. It has a chain connected to an anchor that keeps you in mourning. I’ve been fighting that same chain since he passed, so I know what you are going through. You have to break the chain eventually. We both do. And it doesn’t mean you didn’t love him deeply. There’s no prize for who hurts the worst or longest. Moving forward honors what you lost. Because it means you didn’t give up.”
She leans back and looks me in the eyes. “I owe you an apology.”
I shake my head. “For what?”
“I was hurting and grieving, and I was angry that you didn’t move back home. That’s why I haven’t called or come to visit before now. I should have. Mike would be so mad at me,” she says.
“I think he’d understand. I do,” I tell her.
“I know my son. Knew him. One thing that he would never want is for you to stop living or to stop looking for love. I’m sorry that I was expecting you to stop just because he did. Because I did.”
“It’s okay. I expected I would stop as well, but Kaela and maybe a bit of divine intervention wouldn’t let me,” I confess.
“I just don’t want to lose you girls too,” she cries.
“Lose us? Oh, that will never happen. I loved Mike. With all of my heart. I see him everywhere. He is in Kaela’s eyes, her laugh, in her expressions. And I love you because you’re a part of the two of them. We will always be family. No matter what.”
She wipes at the tears rolling down her cheeks.
“If you could talk to him right now, what do you think he’d say?” she asks.
“Who, Mike?” I ask.
She nods.
I think about it for a long moment.
