Page 170 of Mama Si's Paradise

“They are beautiful,” I breathed when I was close enough to touch the iron of the cage, to feel the air when their small wings beat furiously, some flying away from me, some curious enough to come closer.

Before I knew it, I was smiling again.

Before I knew it, I was sitting in one of the recliners, and Grey was sitting with me, and we were watching the birds in the cage in silence.

Then he said, “Do you want me to let them out?”

Fuck yes!“Is that a good idea?” I asked instead.

“It is. I’ll catch them and put them back in later,” he said with such ease, it was hard to imagine he was who my eyes insisted that he was.

“Okay then.”

Grey didn’t hesitate. Before the minute was over, I was in shockfirst and then laughing my heart out at the birds flying out of the cage, taking over the room, testing their wings, chirping twice as loudly. They looked like ordinary birds with a million colors on them, and the sound of them was even better than I’d remembered.

Holy shit, it wasamazing!I stayed seated because I didn’t want to spook them more than Grey was already doing, and he came to join me on the recliners again, too.

So many birds. There must have been at least fifty of them, and they seemed sohappyas they flew around the room. They made me feel like I was out there, like the sky was blue over my head and the sun was shining down on me.

“I can see the appeal,” Grey said after a while. “I can see why you’d like them.”

I laughed again. “I can’t believe you spied on my conversations.” And he’d even admitted it to my face.

The question was,why wasn’t I mad about it?

“It was the only way I could find out what you liked,” Grey said, eyes on the birds around us, but his attention was always on me.

“It’s still wrong to spy on people,” I said because common sense said I should have been at least a little pissed off.

“It is. However,” he said, turningto look at me. “I still know nothing about you. You revealed only the most basic things to the brides.”

I shook my head. “There really isn’t much else to say about me.” Unfortunately.

But the birds, though. Whatever song they were singing so beautifully together waseverything.

“Tell me anyway,” Grey said, and it surprised me.

I leaned back on the recliner. “What exactly do you want to know?”

“Where you were born. How you grew up. I want to know everything,” he simply said, his voice hushed, almost lost to the song of the birds.

And maybe that wasit.

Maybe it was that sound that calmed me down like a magic spell, or maybe it was Grey’s eyes, so wide and curious andpassionate,or maybe it was the fact that he’d taken the time to spy on my conversations so that he could build me this room…

Whatever it was, I was speaking before the minute was over.

“I was born in Detroit to a crackhead mom who never really knew who my father was—prematurely so I spent about two months incubated, if you know what that means. She was twenty-two when she had me, and she was living with her mom in a trailer—my grandmother Missy,” I said, calmly, slowly, like I had all the time in the world. “Missy also had my mother at twenty-two to a man she didn’t know, but my mother was supposed to know better. My mother was supposed to be her salvation, herriseto a better life, one she couldn’t make herself, but counted on her daughter to make for her. My mom, you see, sang like an angel. That’s what Missy used to say, and that’s how she knew that my mom was going to make it big. Become a superstar.” I shook my head at myself. “But thenIcame along, and my mother basically becamehermother, and soMissy hated my guts because she said I was her downfall.” It’s why she’d started to call meFallwhen I was still a toddler.

“Anyway, my mom died of an overdose at a house party when I was four, so Missy raised me. She never wanted me to call her grandma, just Missy. She rarely did drugs, though. Alcohol was more her thing. She left me alone most of the time.” And I soon learned to count that as a blessing.

“Then there was Brandon.”

It was like a knife right through my heart—not because of my mother or my grandmother or Brandon—just because ofme. Just because of how clearly I saw myself from where I sat now, how obvious it was to me how much better my life could have been if I’d just had one person who cared. Just one person who told me to be brave and search for my own path, at least. If I’d just known how to stop Missy’s words of ending up alone forever from making me so vulnerable. So desperate.

Everything would have been different if I’d just had more courage.

“His house was very close to the trailer park where I lived so we played a lot together as kids. He was a bit older than me, but we started dating when I was sixteen. He was my first boyfriend—and friend, really—all I knew. I stuck to him because he was safe, because he wasthere, and when he came to Roven and asked me to join him, I said yes. Screw having a life of my own or trying to figure my own things out—no, that was too scary. I would rather just run.” And wasn’t that justsad? “So, I ran with him, and we lived together in Roven for two years.”

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