AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“So am I, Mads,” I reply. “You should see yourself, it’s like you’ve come alive.”
She closes her eyes and tilts her head to the side. “You do that to me, the city’s just the icing on the cake.”
“I hope you still feel that way after you meet my mother tomorrow,” I chuckle.
She frowns. “You anticipate it not going well? How much does she know about me.”
“Word travels fast, she knows all the obvious things about you, and she knows I’ve brought you to meet her.”
“And?”
“She’ll be fine.”
“Will be fine?” Mads sits back in her chair and eyes me carefully. “Let me guess, she’d prefer you’d brought home a nice Russian girl. Definitely not one of mixed heritage?”
I shrug. My mother’s never been one to harbor hateful attitudes toward any ethnicity, but then again, I’d never dated a non-Russian girl. “She comes from a different generation, Mads. Allowances must be made. But the important thing is, she knows I’m absolutely head over heels in love with you and she’s making her peace with it.” I nod. “Who wouldn’t love to have a stunningly beautiful surgeon as a daughter-in-law?”
“Ah, well. It’s not like we’ll see her very often with her living in Moscow,” she replies soberly as she sips her expresso.
My heart sinks a little. “She’s going to love you, Madison, you’ll see.” I don’t want her to have any excuse to avoid returning here.
“By the way, did you ever ask your mom about…”
“About what?”
She scrunches her nose as if she doesn’t want to say it.
“What?” I laugh.
“Sergei’s claim that he’s your father?”
“Oh…”
“I’m sorry if you don’t want to talk about it.”
“No, it’s…I haven’t asked her.”
Her brows pinch together. “Why not?”
“What’s the point?”
“Uh, to find out which one of them was your father.”
“Alexi was my father, end of discussion,” I say a little too abruptly.
“Okaay,” she says and sips her expresso.
I sigh. “What if that miserable, depraved bastard was my dad? I don’t want to hear that. I don’t want…what good could come of it?”
She bites her bottom lip as she considers it. “Well, if she gets all judgmental about us, you could always throw the fact that she slept with your dad and his brother in her face.” She hitches up her shoulders. “And then lied to you about who your father was.”
Hearing it phrased that way, makes me realize why I’ve been avoiding bringing up the subject with my mother. I didn’t want to face what all of it implied about her. When I saw the video recording of Sergei making advances at her, I didn’t consider that he might have just been trying to rekindle their relationship. Had they really been an item before she started up with his brother…my dad?
“I just have too much on my plate to deal with that right now. He’s gone, I just want to forget about all of it.”
She raises her brows and looks away as she says, “Not the healthiest way to deal with it, but whatever.”
“Look, I’ll deal with it, just not during this visit, okay?”
