Page 39 of Chasing Your Ghost

“She’s not my mom,” Riley replied more forcefully than she’d intended. “She stopped being my mother the second she decided to leave me and my dad behind.”

Asher was quiet as she sliced the cheese and spread a layer of mayonnaise on the bread. “I don’t know the whole story, but she talked about you all the time,” he finally said when she was placing slices of ham and cheese onto the sandwiches. “Chris, Noah, and I probably know way more about you than we know about our own families.”

Riley lifted her head and frowned at him. “What?”

“It was kind of weird,” he said with a wince. “When we had dinner here, Edith would tell us about what you’d done that week and how your ballet lessons were going. When we were younger, I asked Noah about it because I didn’t understand why she spoke so much about someone we didn’t even know, and he just shrugged and said it’s the way it’s always been.”

Riley groaned in embarrassment. Hugh had told her something similar, but Edith sharing stories about her with Noah’s friends was a lot stranger than her only sharing them with Hugh, Olivia, and Noah.

“Well, that’s just great. It’s always nice to know complete strangers were hearing about my entire life.” Her voice came out shrill, and she was glad nobody was in the house to overhear her and think she was talking to herself.

“It wasn’t that bad,” he assured her. “I just didn’t really get it when I was a kid. Now I know she was missing you, and it was her way of including you.” He paused, looking unsure about if he should say his next words. “It’s obvious that she loves you, so what happened that you didn’t start coming here for summers like you were supposed to?”

Riley sighed. “You knew I was meant to come here during the summer?”

Asher nodded. “We all knew. She was so excited, I think everyone in Alexandria knew you were coming. Then Noah told me you didn’t want to see Edith anymore. We all assumed it was because she had a new family, and you resented her for it.”

Riley wasn’t sure she wanted to go into the details of why she resented her mother, but she could see that Asher didn’t understand why she was so angry at someone who supposedly loved her so much. It shouldn’t have mattered to her what he thought. But it did. It mattered.

“Did you know my mom left when I was a baby?” she asked.

“Yeah. Noah told me and Chris a while back. But she came back a few months later, right?”

“Yep, but I only found out when I was eleven when my parents thought I was finally old enough to know. Until that point, I thought they’d just broken up, and that’s why I only saw my mom every once in a while. I didn’t know that she’d chosen to leave me.”

“It wasn’t really about you, though, was it?” he asked carefully. “Noah said she had postpartum depression and couldn’t cope.”

She swallowed the ball of emotions in her throat, wishing it had been that simple. “She was sick, and I can’t blame her for that, but it was more than postpartum depression. My dad knew I’d be able to see ghosts like he could, but Edith didn’t know until after she’d had me.”

“Oh damn.”

“Exactly. I was an accident, so my dad couldn’t exactly prepare Edith beforehand for the fact that any kids he had would have the same ability. He also waited a lot longer than he should have to tell her, so it’s not all Edith’s fault, I suppose. But when she found out, it completely freaked her out.”

“I didn’t realize she knew. I guess I assumed it was a secret between you and your dad.”

“Nobody else knows. Just her,” Riley told him. “Anyway, she would watch me staring into space, probably always wondering if I was seeing a dead person, and it scared her. She never knew if there was someone else in the room with us, someone she couldn’t see, and the postpartum depression only made things worse. She wasn’t sleeping properly, and she was constantly terrified.”

“It almost sounds like you’re defending her,” Asher noted.

Riley let out a shaky laugh. “The funny thing is I get it,” she admitted. “I get how petrifying that would be, especially to someone who didn’t even believe in ghosts up until that point.”

“But?” he asked, knowing the story couldn’t end there.

“But Edith did something when I was twelve that told me she was still terrified of my abilities. Of me. I could have forgiven her if leaving for a few months to get the help she needed was all she’d done. I could have gotten over it if she didn’t make it abundantly clear how much she still hated what I could do.”

Asher’s brows drew together in a frown. “What do you mean? What did she do?”

Riley chewed on her bottom lip. She’d never told anyone but her dad about what had happened, and she wasn’t sure she could get the words out without her voice cracking. “On her last visit to New York, a year after they’d told me the truth, she took me to a church,” she finally managed in a mostly steady voice. “There was a priest she wanted me to speak to.”

She gave up on preparing the sandwiches but couldn’t meet Asher’s eyes as she continued. She didn’t want him to see how badly Edith had hurt her, how much her mother and that awful priest had chipped away at her self-esteem.

“She’d told him about what I could see, and when he took us back to his office, he explained to me that what I had wasn’t a gift. It was a curse, it was evil, and he wanted to help me get rid of it.”

“What the actual hell?” Asher hissed, and Riley couldn’t keep her gaze on the unfinished sandwiches any longer.

She turned to him and met his horrified gaze. “Edith didn’t disagree with anything he said. She just sat there and nodded along as he told me I needed to be cleansed. She didn’t stop him when he flicked holy water at me like I was some demon child. She just watched, and I was so confused and shocked by what was going on that I just sat there while a priest urged the devil to release the grip he had on me.”

“Riley…” He shook his head, looking stumped.

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