Page 3 of Exiled Mate

“Mom?” I call out, looking for her in the little garden plot that she tends.

“In the shed!” I hear her call back.

I meander over to the shed, where we keep all of our supplies to make the lotions and creams that we’ve been selling.

The shed is really a greenhouse, one that we cobbled together with a variety of abandoned windows. When the pack arrived in Oakwood, building supplies were both expensive and hard to come by. Neither my mom nor I liked the look of the plastic greenhouses that fade so quickly in the Colorado sun, so we decided to just grab any and all windows that we could find in order to build up our little space.

Having a greenhouse is pretty essential if you want to grow delicate things like herbs in an area that consistently gets a few feet of snow in the winter.

My mom’s smile as I open the greenhouse door makes my heart expand, just a little. “Hi, sweetheart.”

“Hi, Mom.”

“How was the mating ceremony?”

She’s elbows deep in mixing what looks like a little tincture; lavender, if the smell is correct. My mom wears long, flowing dresses that have been patched so many times over the years, they start to look like a garden themselves. She’s also got on a floppy sun hat today, and it makes her look like a chaotic mushroom.

I love her so much, in all of her eccentricities.

Skirting her, careful not to bump into her while she’s mixing, I flop onto the little wooden bench that we keep in the greenhouse. “It was fine.”

“Doesn’t sound like it was fine.”

I squint at her. “Zander and Mia are sweet together. They held hands. They kissed. Everyone cheered. And then it was over.”

“And how did you feel about that?”

This is why I didn’t initially want to go see my mother today. “I felt fine.”

“Terra…”

I look up at my mom. Then, just as quickly, I look away.

“Mom,” I say around the thickness in my throat. “Seriously. I’m fine.”

There’s a shuffling sound, and my mom moves closer to me. She wraps her arms around me and pulls me close.

I’m powerless to resist her. Her patchouli and lavender smell envelops me, and I’m immediately four years old again, crying on the playground because I didn’t get picked for soccer.

“It’s okay to mourn the moments you should have had with him,” she murmurs.

I wish I could say that it was. But the grief I have for Rylan isn’t something that feels like it’s going away. I’ve looked it up; there are twelve steps to grieving. You don’t do all of them, or sometimes you do, but generally, people have to go through a process before you accept.

It’s been years. Literally.

And I can’t get to that place of acceptance.

“I don’t need to grieve anymore,” I say into my mom’s shoulder. “I might go for a run if you don’t need me, though. Maybe we can make the rose water products another day.”

“I can manage on my own,” she says softly.

“Okay. Well. I’m… I’ll go,” I whisper.

The sound is muffled, but she nods anyway. “Grief isn’t going to just start and stop when you need it to, my love. It’s something that gets brought up bright and shiny some days, and other days mutes into the background.”

I gulp. I don’t like talking to my mom about him because I don’t want her to worry, but that’s kind of a moot point now. I’m clearly upset, and she’s clearly going to worry.

The tears are just flowing down my face as I press into her shoulder. “It’s not ever muted, Mom,” I whisper.

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