“What did you tell her?”
“I didn’t tell her as much as I showed her.” My words were directed to the island, though he had an uncanny knack for hearing me when I didn’t want him to. I didn’t need to be looking his way to hear the sharp intake of breath that statement provoked.
“You saw her?”
Shock was evident in his tone, but whether that was a good or bad thing I couldn’t tell. For all I knew, it was like I had just told him I’d entertained my own mother today. And for all intents and purposes, Patricia Barrett Snyder was as much of a ghost as Abigail Jefferies.
“Matthew,” I cried out, feeling the tears welling up in my vision, “I’m so sorry.”
“For what?”
“I never meant to go behind your back. I promise. Out of the blue, she called me at work and practically invited herself over to my office. I didn’t want to be rude.”
A trace of humor flitted across his face, returned in my expression when I realized it had been my intention once the visit was already a foregone conclusion to do just that. I’d wanted to brush her off, but only after firmly sticking the knife in her gut and twisting a few hundred times. Instead, I’d become an ally of sorts.
“So what was she like?”
His question caught me off guard. Did he really want me to describe his mother to him as if she was some stranger? What did he expect me to tell him? Was he exercising every vengeful bone in his body to wish her ill will? Did he want to hear that she’d gained a ton of weight? That her hair had turned completely gray? That she looked horrid and miserable? None of those things were true, and I couldn’t lie to him, either.
“She reminded me a lot of Blake,” I said honestly.
He nodded. Apparently, this hadn’t changed.
“She’s had some, ahem, work done.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
But I knew as well as he did that he no longer wished to hear of her outward appearances. My superficial observations could only carry this conversation so far. Clearly the purpose of her face to face visit had not been to strut her beauty in front of me like we were at a fashion show and she was posing on the catwalk.
“I wanted to hate her for what she did to you and Blake. Or more accurately, for what she didn’t do. And I started out by reading her the riot act. Even though you don’t need anyone to stand up for you, I still felt like it was my duty.
“But damn it if she didn’t act like she was completely sincere. Like she really cared about the two of you. Like she wanted you to be happy.”
He removed his glasses and set them on the counter, rubbing his hands over his face and considering. He was blind as a bat without lenses of some sort, but I almost welcomed his inability to make heads or tails of my expressions. I had the advantage here. I could see the conflicted feelings written all over his countenance.
“Maybe to absolve herself of over a decade of guilt?” he mused.
“That’s what I thought at first, too. But then she asked to see the pictures on my desk and I passed them over one by one. And she studied each one intently, as if she was questioning why she’d ever removed herself from either one of your orbits. If you could have just seen her, Matthew, the way she ran her fingers over them like she was attempting to connect with you, maybe you’d have an easier time understanding.”
He laughed, a sound almost haunting in nature. A response from someone who had given completely up. “I decided a long time ago that I would never understand her.”
“I know that it seems like too little, too late now. But I really think that part of her motivation for reaching out is sleeping in the next room.” I motioned needlessly to the hallway containing Sadie’s bedroom. “She’s the only grandchild, and she’s minutes away. Maybe she realizes that it’s too late to salvage her relationship with her children, but she can start fresh with Sadie and not make the same mistakes again.”
“But in order to get to Sadie, she has to get through me first.”
Matthew reached for his fork, though not to resume eating. Instead, he twirled it between his fingers for a moment, eventually spearing a piece of chicken and stabbing it into submission. I wondered who the chicken was paying penance for: myself or his mother.
“Or she goes through me to get to you, because I’m the weakest link in her eyes.”
“You’re anything but weak.”
“Funny, your mother said the same thing. Okay, so the most sympathetic of the bunch. She’s done her research, Matthew. She’s been thinking about this for a while. It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to do some internet searches and find out that my mother passed away years ago. Leading me to have a soft spot for a family reunion.”
“Actually, Blake gave her all the ammunition she needed. Remember the birth announcement she put in the paper? The one that listed your deceased mother as Sadie’s grandparent but not my mother?”
“Blake did it out of spite, hoping that Patricia would see it. Obviously, she did. But instead of making her feel simply guilty, it not only did that, but also pushed her into action.”
“So much for that bright idea.”
“Unless secretly she wanted this?”
Matthew shook his head. “Nah. If Blake wanted to reconnect with our mother, she’d just drive right up to their house and ring the doorbell.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I know I am. I’ve only known her all of her life.”
He set the fork down, its handle coming to a rest against the plate with a clicking sound. It might as well have been a period on the end of his sentence. Was the conversation over? I sat waiting with bated breath for a second or two, wondering if he was going to expand on the thoughts clearly running through his head.
“What are you thinking?” I asked when I had run out of patience.
“I’m thinking that you haven’t told me everything.”
I sighed, confirming the truth he already knew. “I sort of told her I would help her.”
He nodded, as if totally expecting that from me. He reached for his glasses, returning them to the bridge of his nose. His face remained unreadable, which scared me even more than if he’d lash out at me in anger.
“I didn’t say how,” I amended quickly. “I made no promises. I don’t even have plans to see her or talk to her again. I just said I would help, and this fulfills that duty. I told you. There.”
I wanted nothing more than to wipe my hands clean of this, to forget it ever happened.
“We both know this is anything but over,” Matthew countered.
I hung my head in shame. “I never should have gotten involved. I should have left the past well enough alone. I should have talked to you first. I should have done anything but what I did. I’m so sorry.”
He raised his index finger to my lips. “Shhh. I’m not mad.”
“You’re not?”
“No.”
The tension released from my body for a split second, only to return in full force. One potential crisis averted, but another yet to confront. Of the Snyder siblings, Matthew had already proven himself the most easygoing, the one who bent to my will. I wasn’t guaranteed this with Blake, not in the least.
“So what next?” I asked, almost afraid to learn his answer.
“What’s next is that you keep that sexy little mouth of yours shut.” His lips tilted into a grin upon saying that, belying the seriousness of the situation. “You haven’t told anyone else, have you?”
“I told Gracie. She told me she wanted no part of it. And wished me luck.”
He nodded. We both knew Gracie could be trusted, even as intimately involved as she was with all parties concerned. Both of us had confided in her before, things she would have taken to her grave had not they been out in the open now.
“Okay,” he paused, by osmosis taking Gracie’s words of advice. He was making this up on the spot. Perhaps a product of his years in management, coupled with knowing his sister’s thought processes like the back of
his hand, he was formulating a plan on the fly. “No one breathes a word of this to Blake until I talk to my mom.”
“You’re going to talk to Patricia?” The mere idea shocked me. He was giving in so easily.
“I don’t really have a choice, do I?”
I winced, even though I wasn’t positive it was intended to be a slight.
“I need to talk to her first. I need to know what’s with the sudden interest. I need to prescreen what she’s going to say. I need to protect my sister.”
“From your mother?”
“Gorgeous, you don’t understand. There are so many things that I did that affected Blake without even meaning them to. I owe her this. If our mother is on some kind of a wild goose chase, there’s no point in bringing this up and reopening those old wounds. If she is sincere like you say she is, then I need to be the one to handle this.”
So many years removed from his indiscretions, they just kept rearing their ugly head and reminding him that he could never completely escape from his past. Just when we thought everything was smooth sailing, when he hadn’t been haunted by his previous mistakes in recent memory, I opened the can of worms back up.
Times like these, I didn’t feel as if I deserved him. I knew he would argue - as he always did - that the opposite was true.
The conversation ended in earnest on that note. We went about the rest of the night as though nothing monumental had occurred. But I felt the shift in the atmosphere, even if he was ignoring it. I quite possibly would have preferred him yelling at me, or slamming doors behind himself instead of the uneasy acceptance of our new reality.
Even as he laid in bed beside me, my body tucked tightly against his, his arm wrapped around me, I couldn’t relax. His deep, even breathing did nothing to lull me into a false sense of security.
Everything had changed.
It was all my fault.
Chapter Seven
Blake
Gracie was acting weird. That in itself wasn’t noteworthy, but it was a different brand of crazy that emanated from my partner in crime than usual. She was flighty, like she knew something she shouldn’t.
My mind instantly targeted the contents of the folder I’d smuggled in the shop and hidden in my desk drawer. I didn’t label her the type to snoop through my personal effects, nor did I even think she would have had had a reason to suspect anything was being hidden from her in the first place. The evidence had now been moved to safety in my own home, locked away to be doubly sure. I’d made certain to stay at work after she’d left for the night so I could pull it out and take it with me without her questioning what I was doing.
So it was clearly my guilty conscious reading into things. Damn overactive imagination.
“So how was your night?” she asked randomly, stoking my uneasiness. Sure, we talked about things like that all the time, but this sounded like a leading question. She was feeling me out for some reason.
“Okay I guess,” I said with a shrug.
“Good.”
Gracie deliberately stuck her nose in the sample book laid out in front of her, insinuating that she wasn’t going to pry any further. But she had my interest piqued. And I was going to walk right into the door that she had opened for me.
“Was my night not supposed to go well?”
“Oh, you know,” she said nonchalantly, “ with the stuff that we talked about yesterday, I just wanted to make sure that you were okay. You seemed conflicted about baby stuff. Or hormonal or something.”
“Oh, that.” Relief washed over me. I was still terrified at the prospect of potentially being pregnant, but at least it made sense. She was walking on eggshells around me because the subject of miscarriages was a difficult one to speak about. She was showing me concern in her own special way, nothing more.
“Yes, that.” I chose to ignore the fact that she also seemed to be convincing herself that this was the only thing weighing on her mind in regards to me. “I hope that you’re talking to Chris about it and not just keeping it under the rug. He deserves to know.”
“Yes, mother,” I joked, though she bit her lip to the point of nearly drawing blood. For some reason, my oddball humor wasn’t appreciated this morning.
I knew that she was making a valid point. I had made a horrible mistake when I hadn’t been honest with Chris way back when and it had stunted our relationship for years. A less strong love wouldn’t have been able to weather the storm that ours had - eventually - and we had barely made it out unscathed. I’d learned my lesson from that, and that’s what I meant with my flippant remark.
Chris was locked into my wavelength now anyway. Before we’d collectively made the decision for me to suspend taking birth control, he’d touched on my reluctance to risk repeating the past. This in turn had led to me scheduling an upcoming appointment with my doctor to attempt to address my fears and confirm that there was no reason to believe that a subsequent pregnancy would end like the first one. An office visit that he was going to as well, to undoubtedly hold my hand because he hadn’t been there to do it when I’d needed him the most. My fault alone, and something I’d never let myself live down.
“I wanted to ask you,” she switched subjects with amazing dexterity, “who is your gynecologist?”
Did she want to check up on me? Make sure I wasn’t feeding her a line of crap? She correctly read the confusion on my face and explained.
“I’m in need of one. I sort of promised Will I would go and get some things taken care of.”
“Rather spend the condom budget on something else?”
“One might say that.”
I scrolled through my contacts on my phone, grabbing a piece of paper from the worktable and writing down the information for her. “You should call now,” I suggested as I pushed the paper in her direction. “She might be booked up for a while. Sometimes it’s hard to get in as a new patient.”
“Do you think I’m delusional?”
“Well, there’s a loaded question.” I sank down onto my stool and rested my chin on my outstretched palm. Work be damned, a gossip session was in order. “What about specifically?”
“About this whole Will thing. Thinking that it can work like this. That one day in the not too distant future, I won’t wake up and want exactly what he said I would: the ring, the white picket fence, the two point five children. I’m not getting any younger.”
“Technically, you’ve already got the point five children. You could count Emma towards that at least.”
She flashed me the middle finger. It was a sensitive subject that she was closer in age to Will’s daughter than to the man himself. As a person, I could tell that she liked Emma immensely. In an alternate reality, they’d probably be friends. Perhaps they’d even work on becoming that now that Gracie and Will’s relationship was out in the open. Besides, Emma had given them an assist, so it wasn’t like they were starting off on the wrong foot.
“You know what I mean,” she said, brushing off my snarky comment further. “I talked a good game when I was working on convincing him that this could work out for us. That I didn’t care about assigning him a title in my life. That I didn’t need him to promise me forever or formally commit.”
“But?”
“But in my head, I realize it’s way more than that. I am in love. And he’s felt all of this stuff with someone else before me, and it’s all brand new for me. So is it just stronger because he’s my first? Or is he feeling the exact same way that I am?”
“Let me guess. You haven’t talked to him since you left his place yesterday morning.”
“Nope.”
I chuckled, enjoying this side of her. The punch drunk, giddy remnants of a person high on a new relationship. Gracie, the woman who had only confident bones in her body, reduced to a blubbering mess because she was reading way too much into his inactions. Which only proved how much she really cared about him.
“He was probably working or something,” I mused. “Or, knowing him, he was pulling back to pr
event looking too desperate for affection.”
“And how well do you know him?”
“It was a hypothesis. Nothing more. He’s your person. If you want to talk to him, you should call him. Stop by at his house after work. Go there now, for all I care.”
Her eyebrow raised at my suggestion.
“Okay, okay. I’m like the last person you should talk to about relationship advice. I never had to worry about dating. I’ve been in love with Chris since I was in elementary school. Except for when I completely fucked it up, he’s been a constant in my life. And I honestly think that even when we were apart, I always knew in the back of my mind that we’d end up together again.”
“Yeah, yeah. You with your happy ever after.”
“Isn’t this stuff more of a Lauren conversation anyway? You see the woman damn near every day.”
Something flashed in Gracie’s eyes before she turned away from me in an attempt to hide it. “She was preoccupied last night. Something happened at work yesterday that had her out of sorts, and we never even talked about me.”
“Did Stalker Jeff come back or something?” I joked.
“Nope.”
I waited for Gracie to expand on it, but that was all I was going to get out of her. It was probably some boring banking problem anyway. Lauren had the tendency to overanalyze things, including her work duties. If I had learned anything from the few months she’d been my roommate, it was that she could create a mountain out of a molehill.
Gracie was likely keeping mum because her best friend had stolen her thunder with some random happening of little consequence. This didn’t explain the nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach that there was something far more interesting going on underneath the surface, something that she wasn’t at liberty to disclose.
So now two were playing that game.
Chapter Eight
Matthew
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