“It’s a panic attack. It happens because you panic. In through your nose and out through your mouth.” Ramona hands me a stress ball she has sitting on top of her tv stand. I squeeze it as hard as I can, trying to make the fucking thing disintegrate, then watch it puff back up to its normal state. Repeating it over and over, my breathing calms and I’m not as desperate for oxygen. The engagement ring catches my eye, and I tear it off my finger and toss it in the direction of my ringing phone.
I shake my head, covering my nose and mouth with both hands. “I can’t do it. Who am I kidding? This was a horrible idea. How did it get this far?”
Ramona waves to Vin, who peeks his head out of the bedroom. I don’t acknowledge him because I’m too busy choking on my bad decisions. “You know you won’t think clearly until you’ve calmed all the way down. You also know that me telling you to calm down won’t help you calm down. Drink the water, think about your breaths, and I’ll deal with your ringing phone.” I do what she says, because even if I’m losing my mind at the moment, I recognize the truth in her words. Ramona picks up both my cell phone and my ring. She slides the ring on her right hand and answers the call.
“Hey, it’s Ramona. She’s with me.” That’s all I hear before Ramona goes into the bathroom and closes the door. She appears a few minutes later, and I’m still trying to get ahold of my heart rate.
“Dude, I don’t think he’s going to stay away. I told him to give you some time but it sounded like he was getting into a car the second I told him you were here.”
Standing, I pace the small space and tug at my hair. “How did I get in this deep? Why was I so careless and stupid?”
“You love him, Maeve. You’re in love with him. Love is always a little careless and definitely stupid. Stop beating yourself up over something you have no control over.”
That hits me like a gut punch. “But I should always have control over that.”
She laughs and tugs on the ties on her robe. “You are dumb for such an intelligent person. Do you think I particularly enjoyed going back to Stavros time and time again? Was it pure bliss forgiving him for the same thing over and over? Love is the one thing you have no control over and you shouldn’t.” She lowers her voice. “Which is a good thing because how would I explain him?” Ramona hikes a finger over her shoulder. “I can’t even begin to try.”
Processing her words takes a while, but it’s enough to pull me from the black fog. I’m calmer than I was moments before. I hate how panic attacks hit like a ton of bricks and leave like a feather. It doesn’t seem fair. I exhale slowly. “You’re right, but you know I’m going to sit with this for a while.”
She’s peering out the window. “You have about ten seconds, five if he runs.”
It takes him four seconds. Pounding on the door startles me. “Want me to get it?” she asks.
I shake my head. This is mine to deal with. I open the door, and Lincoln is standing there, still in his uniform, but he looks… wrinkly. His eyes are red and I can tell he’s been crying. Then I see the set of his jaw. “I couldn’t go in,” I whisper, wiping tears from my face. Lincoln grabs my left hand, sees the empty finger and takes a deep breath, fury emanating so thick I can breathe it.
“You know what? I can’t take this anymore. You’ve been distant. I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with this if you can’t be a grown up and tell me what’s on your mind. What do you want, Maeve?”
Silence hangs awkwardly until I muster courage. “I don’t know.” I know what I want, but what I deserve is what I’ll never be able to reconcile. Self-sabotage looks different at every stage of life, apparently this is what it looks like today. “I don’t know what I want.”
He nods solemnly once. “That’s a shame, because even now when you’re too afraid to be with me, I love you. Any time you’re lost, I’ll love you, but right now? You need to find yourself.” He sucks in a ragged breath. “Because in my time of need, you’re only thinking about yourself. You’re downplaying how important you are to me—leaving me when I need you. You’re supposed to be on my six, right? Where are you? Where’s your ring?”
Ramona comes in. “It’s right here. She just took it off to wash her hands.” It’s a lie and my best friend is trying to save me, but neither of them realize I’ve been gone for a long time now. She tries to force the ring on my finger, but I stop her.
“No.” I shake my head. “I never should have accepted this.” With a shaking hand, I extend the ring to Lincoln, and he visibly recoils. His downcast eyes meet mine.
A tear slides down his face, but he’s quick to wipe it away. “You keep it.” His jaw works. “Hang it on the necklace next to the other one. A talisman of failures.” He swallows hard. “Pretend I went down in the helicopter with my brothers.” Lincoln turns and heads down the stairs. My knees buckle when the door closes behind him.
“What did you do, Maeve? What did you do?” Ramona kneels next to me and pulls me into a hug. I let out a blood-curdling scream as my heart shatters into a thousand pieces.
“I didn’t think you were supposed to chug wine,” Aspen says, reaching over to take the empty wine glass from my hand. “You need an alcohol break. Where is Ramona? It’s her turn to watch you.”
“I need no breaks from the wine. Pour me another.” When you feel like you can’t control anything, sometimes the opposite happens. Or at least that’s what I told myself on the party bus at the third winery. The flight to Sonoma was fuzzy, and everyone keeps looking at me like I’m pitiful, which drives me to drink even more to prove them right.
Tasha appears next to me, sliding onto the barstool holding her own wine glass. There’s an old antique bar that covers an entire wall. Our rental house is massive and beautiful. If I was sober, it would be awkward talking to Tasha, but because I feel nothing at all, I welcome all company. “You doing okay?”
“More than okay,” I slur. “I’m fabulous.”
“I’m worried about you,” she says.
I shake my head and the room spins. “Why would you be worried about me? That’s not your job.”
“I care about you and you seem to be a bomb imploding. I know what you’re feeling. The apprehension, the cold feet, the fear that comes from loving a man that seems to be dispensable.”
I forget to breathe, so I suck in a noisy, drunken breath. “I’m not saying you don’t know what it’s like, but I’m a little more complicated than you.”
She furrows her brows. “How do you know that? Why does your trauma trump anyone else’s?” Tasha holds up a finger. “Don’t answer that. I’m sorry you’re hurting, but Lincoln is a good man and you’re hurting him for no good reason.”
I want to argue, but can’t so I lay my head down on my arms instead. “Isaac wanted me to remind you that Lincoln set up that interview with Autumn Glass tomorrow morning. If I were you, I’d go sleep it off now if you intend on talking to her.”
In the midst of my self-inflicted heartbreak, I’d forgotten the whole reason why I wanted to come here in the first place. Now, it is serving as an escape route, at least for a little while.
Raising my head to reply to her, I see she’s already gone. I’m running people off left and right. Ramona is watching me from across the room. She’s wearing a bathing suit, probably getting ready to get into the hot tub. I stumble off my stool and make my way upstairs to the bedrooms and push myself into the first open door and fall face-first into the bed.
Ramona shakes me awake before the sun rises. “Get up, glutton. We’re going to prison.”
“Oh, God. That’s real? I thought I dreamed that it was happening today.” I press my palms on each side of my head and press against the pounding headache. “Tylenol,” I gasp. “Stat!”
“I’m only indulging you because you ruined your entire life.” Ramona fetches the bottle, hands me a couple pills and a glass of water. “You broke the man’s heart when it was already broken.” She acts like I didn’t break my own in the process.
I swallow
the pills and chug the water. “A man is not my entire life.”
“You didn’t let him try, Maeve.” She coughs. “I’m not going to argue with you. Go get in the shower. This might be the only chance you have to get closure with this woman, and I won’t let you fuck this into the ground on my watch.” When I don’t move, and continue staring blankly at the wall, she yells, “Go shower, Maeve!”
That gets me up and into the bathroom. I crank on the hot water and stumble into the water before it’s hot enough. Rubbing my arms to rid myself of chill bumps, I let my mind wander to Lincoln and Turner. The ache in my chest is sharp. I’m in no condition to talk to my birth mother. Maybe it will be a good thing to feel this humbled and broken. I’ll hate her less for the things she did. Monster mommy. My stomach turns over and I realize I haven’t put anything except wine in it for at least a day.
I clean myself, take my time with my makeup, and put on the outfit Ramona has laid out on the bed. She’s waiting in the rental car when I open the large front door and head down a grand staircase. The sun is just rising in the distance as we drive toward the prison. The silence is broken up by my cell phone ringing. It’s Aspen. She wishes me luck, and I thank her in a droll tone. We have to fill out paperwork and show our driver’s license to get behind the barbed-wire fences that seem to touch the sky. Ramona has to drop me off because I’m the only one on the list. A guard escorts me from the car and walks with me to the front office, if you can even call it that. This is different from the jail where I visited Rufio. This is grittier, scarier, a place where all dreams go to die. I swallow the stale air as a female guard ushers me into a side room to search my person. She remarks that I must have friends in high places to be able to see Glass.
I don’t tell her I’m her daughter. I would never want to associate myself with someone like that, but bile rises in my throat as I think of being born of her loins. “Does she know who is visiting her? Or don’t they tell the prisoners the names of who is coming?”
She shakes her head and clears her throat. “She won’t know. She’s usually in solitary, so just getting out of there will be a thrill.”
My heart pounds. “For what? Why is she in solitary?”
The woman finishes patting me down and lets me button up my shirt. “Glass ain’t right in the head, ma’am. Figured you’d know that. She don’t play well with others.”
I nod, I know that. Not. Doors are locked and unlocked as we make our way through the maze of cages to reach a room with a single table, and a small woman sitting by herself. She’s cuffed to the metal table. She doesn’t see me yet, but I already feel the tears welling behind the anger and hate. There’s also a relief coursing through me. “You have two hours. Just signal when you want out and unlock the door.”
“I’ll be locked in?”
“You’re safe. She can’t move, sweetie.”
My gaze hardens as she uses a nickname. A condescending one that was thrown around during my youth. “Noted,” I say, without taking my eyes off hers.
Autumn’s gaze lights on me as soon as she hears the key enter the lock. I don’t say anything yet. I’m not ready, I’m shaking, my legs trembling as I cross the cold room to sit in front of her. “Who are you?” she asks, voice hoarse. From either disuse or screaming. I can’t decide. They said she’s crazy.
I inhale a deep breath. “I’m Maeve Ahern.”
Her face changes. “Maeve? My Maeve? Mommy’s sweet girl?”
My eyes close softly. “Autumn, I just have a few questions for you and I’ll never darken your prison cell again.”
When I open my eyes, she’s crying. Tears cutting thick paths down her cheeks. “You made it. You made it out.”
There’s no composure when I see her reaction to knowing I’m her daughter. “How? How could you give me away?”
Her face shatters. “Give you away? They took you from me, sweet girl. Oh, I can’t believe it’s really you. You’re so beautiful. Perfect. I never thought I’d get a chance to apologize to you. I would never give you away.”
“Do you know what I went through? The foster homes,” I choke out. “The orphanage.”
“Oh my God, what happened?” She tries to grab my hands, but her cuffs stop her. It’s a small reminder that this isn’t a joyous reunion. Autumn is a killer, and has a daughter following in her footsteps.
“I was fourteen when I gave birth at the home for girls. They sent me away to have the twins.” Her eyes match mine perfectly and they glaze over as she goes back to the obviously horrible memory. “They didn’t tell me I wasn’t going to keep you girls. Not until I gave birth. The family came and they called me in to meet them, but my own adoptive parents weren’t there so I was alone and didn’t have a leg to stand on. I was an orphan as an infant too.” She looks at me, and I recognize the pain. I look away. Autumn goes on, “The family only wanted one baby and they took your sister. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”
“Rena,” I whisper, goose bumps prickling my skin. “Rena got a good family.”
“A week later I saw they had another couple scheduled to come in and I panicked because I didn’t want to lose Maeve, I mean, you, I didn’t want to lose you too. I packed a bag with as much as I could, loaded you into a carrier, and escaped the girl’s home in the middle of the night. It was… hard.” Her tears haven’t stopped, and now they pick up the pace. “The things I had to do for money while we were on the streets, well, I’m not proud of them, but I had you, and oh my God, Maeve, did you look at me like I was God. Like I was the only person who mattered in the entire world. You became my entire universe and I did whatever I had to do to take care of you.” Her blue eyes freeze as she stares out the window, unblinking. “Then they found us. I was shipped off to a juvenile detention center and you went to an orphanage. They stripped me of my rights and I never saw you again. Do you know how much I wanted you?”
It seems like an impossible story, but it makes sense with everything that I’ve discovered about her life this far. “I’ve been in a lot of therapy in here and I know it’s the reason I turned out the way I did.”
“What do you mean?” Is she suggesting I’m the reason she became a psychopath?
“Maeve, I had an okay life after I went back to my adoptive parents, but I became a sex addict. The doctor thinks it’s because subconsciously I wanted another baby—one I could save. Because I lost the twins. Once you have one addiction others follow, and I got real mixed up and all my gauges were smashed. I never knew what was right or wrong because I lived two separate lives. I was the person the world thought I was and then there was the real me, buried under the layers. The real me was messed up. Too messed up to be a mother. Too messed up to live a normal life in society with other folks.” I know she used to be beautiful, I’ve seen photos. But the weathered, battered woman sitting in front of me is a shell of her former self.
It resonates, though. What she said about being two different people. I was almost there. Combining all the versions of myself because Lincoln loved me back together. Then I let my past creep in. Autumn is staring at me, like she’s trying to commit every skin cell to memory. “Tell me though. Tell me you’re not like me.”
I let a tear slip when I blink. “I rose above it all. I’m not like you.”
“You didn’t let the darkness bring you down?”
I shake my head. “No, though sometimes it tries hard. Rena did though. She’s a murderer. Just like you. Not only that, but she wants to kill me.”
“The other twin,” Autumn whispers. “I never knew her like I did you. She left me too soon. I didn’t love that one like I did Maeve.” She realizes her mistake. “Like I love you.”
“Who was my father?”
“He wasn’t a good man.”
“Who was my father?” I ask again.
“I suppose I’ve never said it out loud. My adoptive father.”
I close my eyes and let the pang of a familiar fear lace my veins. I worried about something similar happening to me w
hen they’d place me with a new family. It was always a concern, and I knew of nightmare outcomes. I didn’t realize I was born of one. “Jesus Christ,” I whisper.
“He had nothing to do with it, Maeve. Don’t bring him into it. He’s the reason I’m able to talk to you. He brought you here to me.”
Born again Christian. Of course she is. “Did he help you kill people?”
Autumn’s nostrils flare. “That was the devil’s curse,” she screams hotly, pulling on her restraints. “The devil did that to me. The devil led me to that man. Pure evil stole my freedom.” Ah, now the crazy the guard was talking about appears. At least I got something from her before she flipped the bat shit switch. “God will forgive me.”
I nod. “Listen,” I order. “I’m sorry about the hand life dealt you. I wanted to visit before they, before, well, you know your sentence is carried out. I want you to know that despite the rocky start, I managed to pull out of there with a meaningful life.” Her eyes go round as I tell her about college and the love I have for my job. Then I make a hasty decision to give her something to hold on to. Something to take to wherever she ends up next. “I have a son. You have a grandson and he is spectacular.” It’s not an outright lie.
Autumn is sobbing, rocking back and forth, and it’s odd to feel empathy for a monster, but isn’t that the root of my entire life? Me believing I’m some kind of unlovable monster, and those around me trying to convince me otherwise.
“The father? Is he a good solid man?” Her question pulls me from romancing my past.
Now I break down. “He is. He is the best man. One you probably wouldn’t think existed if you hadn’t met him.” My words are tinged with sadness.
“Oh no, Maevey,” Autumn says, and my heart rips open. “What happened?”
Turner. Oh, I am a monster. I am like her. What have I done? My boy. This is the part where I tell a murderous felon my whole sordid story. I don’t know why I do. It’s not because I feel some familial bond with Autumn. It’s just because it bubbled up right now, and if I don’t speak it, I’m afraid I’ll bury it instead. She stays silent, watching me closely as I tell her about Rena and Ramona and Stavros. Autumn hangs on my every word like my story is the most exciting part of her life. She asks me how I’m feeling. She tries to make the hurt go away by saying kind things. Her eyes reflect my agony and I know she feels it, too. Because despite everything. This monster is my mother. And this monster loves me unconditionally, without question or pause.
On His Six : A Summit Seduction SEAL Novel (The Summit Seduction SEAL Duet Book 2) Page 13
