I pressed my back against the wall and slid to the floor. Snowflakes fluttered by outside, thick as confetti pieces in the growing storm. A sob peeped out of me. I pressed my face into my knees and cried.
“I hate you, Mama! I hate you for what you did.”
In a desperate move, I grabbed several pages of the book. The temptation to tear each one of them in half, throw them across the room, and scream my rage was almost overwhelming. But I couldn’t. This wasn’t the book’s fault. This wasn’t even my fault.
This was Mama’s fault.
“Put it down, Lizzy.”
The voice came from just behind me. My head jerked up. Bethany stood in the doorway with a concerned expression on her face.
“Bethie?”
“I followed you as soon as Maverick returned. I would have been here sooner, but I had to grab something from home.”
Slowly, I stood up. She shuffled into the room, a coat hugging her torso. Her eyes were more bloodshot and determined than I’d ever seen. She wore a pair of boots she’d clearly shoved on in haste.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you are not Mama, and Mama wasn’t your enemy. Actually, she may have saved your life with all the romance she shoved into you. We have an hour to hash this out before I have to leave to feed Shane again, so get reading.”
She threw a folder to the floor in front of me. Papers spilled across the ground, harshly white in the damaged room.
Before I could ask, she kept talking.
“I knew this moment of reckoning with Mama would come for both you and Ellie, so a few years ago, Mav and I paid a private investigator to dig up everything she could on Mama. I wanted her to build a picture of Mama’s life from the very beginning.”
Oh no. This didn’t feel good.
Bethany nodded toward the papers. “Pick them up. She can’t hurt you from here.”
My hands shook as I gathered the sheaf together with soot-stained fingers. In the dim light from the window, the words were difficult to make out.
Bethany leaned against the doorframe with a weary sigh. “No need to read it,” she said. “I’ve read it so many times I have it memorized. Kat St. Martin. Born four weeks premature in a small city in South Dakota. Her mother didn’t survive the emergency C-section. She died from complications related to a drug overdose minutes after they pulled Mama out.”
Ice formed inside me. A long, cylindrical, pulsing thing that spread cold through every vein in my body. I paused to listen.
“Things didn’t improve from there. Mama went right into foster care. By the age of five, she’d been in three different homes. Can’t imagine a five-year-old knowing three different mothers. Can you imagine Shane in anyone else’s arms but ours?”
The thought made me quake from the inside. My body felt sluggish, my throat thick. “No,” I whispered fiercely. I pushed off the floor, papers in my hands.
Bethany kept going. “By fifteen, she’d been in seven different homes and arrested twice for various minor charges. Petty theft. Some graffiti. That kind of attention-getting stuff. Apparently, and of no surprise to anyone in this room, she was a lot to handle.
“This is where things get interesting. Men from two of the foster homes she’d lived in—the one when she was five, and one when she was eight—were arrested on charges of sexual misconduct with minors after she was sent away. I’ll let you fill in the blanks. The horrifying unknowns of her story. Can you imagine what she must have gone through at five years old?”
“Bethie,” I whispered, chin trembling, “why are you telling me all this?”
Perhaps I’d always assumed Mama had no history. Or perhaps I’d just been too horrified by the possibilities to let myself think about them. I knew she’d grown up in foster care, but she’d never spoken in specifics of her time in the system. Never allowed questions about it.
Bethany watched me steadily. “Because we only knew Mama as the adult who was supposed to protect us and didn’t. We saw only the survivor. The desperate one. The one so broken she broke everything else. Really, she was just a little girl looking for love. Like you. Like me. Like Ellie. Lizbeth, romance was what got her through. She was giving you a gift when she gave it to you. The only gift she had to give.”
I sobbed. I couldn’t help it. Bethany reached out and grabbed me by the shoulders. The puzzle pieces fit together a little too well.
“She broke me,” I cried. “She shoved romance and love into my world and told me to believe in them. Now look at me!”
“Yes, let’s look at you.” She stood back, holding me at arm’s length. “You are a beautiful, functioning college graduate. You can code faster than I think, and you have a successful future ahead of you. You have a family that loves you and will do anything to make sure you’re fed and safe.”
My lips trembled. “I didn’t get the Pinnable job.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Yes. That was too far away. You’d have been miserable. I selfishly just wanted to keep you close, too, but that wasn’t why I didn’t want you to get the job. You struggled with homesickness so much in college. You never wanted to be far away from us.”
“That’s true.” I sniffled. “You’re right.”
“It’s been quite a month. Your car is gone, so is your home and all the books you loved. That really sucks. You’ve lost what you thought was your dream job, and even after working at an impressive hourly wage, still have to pay down some debt. So you don’t have enough money to buy some reliable independence back. Am I still on the right
