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“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “It was a mistake to pick up. I didn’t mean to cause you any more pain. I should go…”
“No!” Amanda exclaimed. “No, don’t go. They’re tears of relief, Kat, because I didn’t think I’d ever get to talk to you again. It’s so good to hear your voice, tamahine. I’ve missed you.”
“You what?” The room spun. Kat sank onto the sofa in case her trembling knees gave out, and her breath wheezed unevenly past her teeth. “But I thought you blamed me,” she said, dumbstruck. “It’s my fault Teddy is gone.”
“No, darling. No, no, no,” Amanda gushed. “I was worried you might believe that. Why do you think I keep calling? It was an accident. Just a stupid accident. There was nothing you could have done about it.”
Her vision blurred. “I was driving.”
“I know, darling. I’m putting you on speaker phone. Motu is here with me.”
“Katarina,” Teddy’s father said in his husky smoker’s voice. “Someone else t-boned you. He was a drunk asshole who ran a red light. That’s on him, not you.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, formed a fist with her empty hand and bit her knuckles so hard it hurt. The pain grounded her. “I should have seen him coming. I should have been able to prevent it.”
“Oh, baby,” Amanda crooned, like she was a scared kid. “You’ve got to let go of the hurt. No one could have saved Teddy. Not the way it played out.”
“You don’t know that.” She heard how pathetic and self-pitying she sounded, but could do nothing to stop it.
“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” Motu ordered. “That drunk served time. He got what was coming to him. The crash wasn’t your fault, and we would have told you that in person, but you vanished and we didn’t know where you’d gone.”
Kat clutched the fabric of her shorts and asked the question she most dreaded hearing the answer to. “Do you think you could ever forgive me?”
Amanda laughed a watery laugh. “You’re not listening to us, darling. You don’t need our forgiveness because you did nothing wrong. We miss Teddy every day, but nothing you could have done would have saved him.”
Kat rolled onto her side, rested her head on the arm of the couch and curled into a ball, trying to hold in all of the emotions unfurling within her. The room seemed to shake around her, and she realized it wasn’t the room that was moving, it was her. Her entire body was trembling uncontrollably.
“You need to let yourself off the hook,” Amanda said. “We don’t hold you accountable, and our son wouldn’t want you hurting yourself the way you have been. He adored you, and he would have wanted you to let yourself be happy.”
Kat’s chin wobbled. “I miss him. He always made everything seem better than it was.”
“Nothing ever shook that boy,” Motu said. “Funny, the things you remember.”
“And the things you forget,” Kat murmured. She needed to think. “I’m glad I talked to you both. I’m sorry I’ve ignored your calls for so long. I was afraid. I didn’t want to hear what you had to say.”
“There’s nothing to apologize for,” Amanda said. “But if it eases your conscience, we’d really like to visit sometime.”
Kat nodded. That might be okay. “I’ll text you the address. Just let me know if you decide to come.”
Amanda hesitated. “Please don’t shut us out again, Kat. When you and Teddy were married, we loved you like our own daughter. When Teddy died, it felt like we lost both our tamariki at once. All we wanted to do was to keep you close and give you all our love. Our aroha. To grieve with you. We know you had no choice but to miss the tangi since you were in hospital with your injuries, and I hate thinking that you’ve bottled everything up all that time.”
“I won’t shut you out,” Kat said. “I promise. If you call this time next weekend, I’ll answer.” She hesitated. “It would be—” she considered her word choice, “—nice to have you in my life again.”
“We’ll talk later,” Amanda replied. “Goodnight, darling.”
They hung up, and Kat dropped her phone to the floor and buried her face in a cushion. She screamed, the sound muffled so much she doubted anyone outside the room heard. The weight of the world should have been lifted from her shoulders, but it hadn’t. And she thought she knew why. Sterling had been right. Amanda and Motu, too. It wasn’t their forgiveness she needed. It was her own. A thing that should be simple, but somehow seemed an impossible task.
Curling into a ball, Kat fell into an exhausted slumber on the sofa.
