Page 43 of New Hope, Old Grudges

My mother lifted our hands so she could kiss the back of my palm. “Honeybee, you are my sun, my moon, my stars… Every molecule of me loves you without end. There is no way I could ever hate you.”

Tears swam in my eyes. “But I wasn’t there. When Dad …died.I wasn’t there. I failed him.”

“Your father thought, rightly so, that the sun rose and set with you, my darling girl.” My mother looked away from the road again, regarding me with a glistening gaze. “Nothing you have done or ever could do would be considered a failure in his eyes.”

“But the funeral—”

“Funerals are for the living,” Mom interrupted me. “Those who have passed on don’t need them, though I’m sure they love to watch.” She winked. “You know your limits. What you can handle. What you can’t. The kind of pain you can bear. I knew you wouldn’t be able to watch the earth take your father back. He knew that. And he would never have held that against you.”

There was my mother. Perpetually understanding, perpetually forgiving, perpetually loving, no matter what I did to her.

“But you needed me,” I argued, unwilling to let her let me off the hook.

“Maybe,” she conceded. “Selfishly I needed you. But the moment I brought you into this world, I understood that there was no such thing as being selfish in motherhood. Your needs, your wants, everything that you are will always come before what I need. No matter what.”

I was getting irritated with my mother for being so kind to me when I deserved a little cruelty. “But you advocate self-care, filling your cup before you can fill anyone else’s.”

She smiled. “Oh, a lovely theory. But in motherhood, there is no such thing as a full cup if your children’s are not overflowing.”

She peered over at me as we made it to our driveway. “And if you don’t mind me mentioning, my darling, your cup looks to be overflowing. In one respect, at least.”

My cheeks warmed. My mother had always been intuitive when it came to me, had known the first time I saw her after losing my virginity. Unsurprisingly, the woman was not chaste about sex; she was completely open about it, never once making me feel ashamed about my body or its desires.

Despite this, I’d never been a sexual person, and I certainly hadn’t wanted to talk to my mother about it.

“Did you have some glorious makeup sex with our sheriff?” she asked straight up. “I know there’s history with you two, but sometimes history makes the sex that much hotter.”

The woman wasn’t wrong.

“It wasn’t makeup sex,” I corrected. “It was hate sex.”

There was a long silence. I stared straight ahead so I didn’t have to see my mother’s knowing gaze. “Well, even if it was hate sex, it looks to have done you a world of good.”

I pursed my lips, unwilling to agree with her. Out loud, at least.

My mother reached over to squeeze my shoulder. “I’m so glad you’re home, Bunny,” she said, using my childhood nickname because I’d been born in the Year of the Rabbit.

I stared at the house after she parked the truck. It still hurt to look at it. But for the first time, I wasn’t seeing it as a prison. I was seeing it as a fresh start.

I looked at my mother. “I’m glad too,” I whispered.

Her eyes swam with tears. “And I’m so glad you got laid good,” she added.

I barked out a sound between a sob and a laugh.

“I’m predicting Brody Adams will be sitting at our dining room table come Christmas?” She rubbed her temples with a grin.

“Absolutely not,” I balked. “I’ll never be seeing Brody Adams again.”

ChapterFourteen

WILLOW

“Okay,so not only have you gone full radio silence on me, but you’ve also been living out a Hallmark holiday movie and not fucking telling me,” my best friend accused.

I’d just returned her calls for the first time since I arrived home. Despite her being the only one who stuck with me when I was persona non grata in L.A., despite her showing that she was a real friend. Or maybe because of it.

In addition to telling her I was alive and well, I’d told her about my Thanksgiving adventure—if that’s what you could call it.

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