Page 100 of Between Never and Forever
Could you ship me my Yamaha?
The black one that’s in the corner of my music room at my house.
Mabes
Sure. What for?
I sit on the question for a minute, contemplating if I should lie. Mabel knows everything about everything. That’s why it hurt so bad when she started to hate me. I keep fucking up the most important relationships.
I decide to go with the truth.
Levi is here.
It’s a long story, but I’m going to teach his daughter how to play.
You good?
A smile curves my lips. She asked not even a second later. She’s concerned for me. She cares.
For now. I’ll let you know if that changes.
24
Sharon putsa thick manilla envelope on the counter and I curl my lip at the familiar cursive scrawled across it in black marker.
They just don’t fucking quit. I don’t even have to open it to know what’s in it, so I pick it up, walk it to the trashcan in the corner, and drop it in.
“At this point I bet this could classify as harassment,” Sharon says idly as I stare daggers at the envelope. If I were the dramatic sort, I would light it on fire and dance on the fucking ashes.
“They’ll give up eventually.”
I feel Sharon’s eyes on me as I speak, but I don’t look at her. She doesn’t believe my words any more than I do. I try to act unbothered, but she and I both know that I’ll be making a call to Clark Jessop, my lawyer, later just to double check that everything is still good. I have nothing to worry about. Just for the peace of mind.
“It’s been over two years,” Sharon states, and I nod.
Two years and five months. Just a few months before the hurricane hit.
That day is cataloged in my brain as both a blessing and a curse. Brynn was devastated and terrified, but also relieved, and she was far too young to have to grapple with such heavy things. Watching Julianna die slowly, withering away to nothing before my eyes, was impossibly difficult to handle. But watching Brynnlee watch it was worse.
Saying goodbye to your mom is hard at any age, but at five, Brynn had a more advanced understanding of mortality than most adults ever will. She will never have a memory of Julianna where she wasn’t sick. Even the good times were tainted, jagged and dangerous around the edges. Brynnlee will never know what her mother looked like healthy without the help of photos from the years before her birth. She will never remember a time with her mother that wasn’t shadowed by doctors’ appointments, and monitors, and the ever-present promise of death. I know she’ll never heal from that. She’s already grown around it. It’s part of her. It always will be.
My relationship with Jules’s parents was never a good one, but once she died and everything came to light, it was beyond saving. That’s fine with me. I expected it. I remind myself of that every time another of these fucking envelopes comes in the mail. But for Brynn’s sake, I wish it could have played out differently.
“You think Brynn misses them,” Sharon asks, and I glance at her out of the corner of my eye.
“She says she doesn’t,” I tell her honestly.
Sharon doesn’t respond. She just continues staring at the envelope in the trashcan with a frown.
I know what she’s thinking. Sharon loves Brynn as if she were her own granddaughter. I think part of Sharon even wishes she was. She’s done more for Brynn in the last two years than any of the others have since Brynn was born, but Sharon struggles with the guilt. She thinks that she’s not enough. She still worries that it’s wrong for her to be this close to us.
I struggle with it, too, honestly, but I’ll continue to struggle with it if it means Brynn can have another person in her life who loves her. She deserves that and more.
“The Larks are not good people, Sharon,” I say clearly. “Their love is conditional. It always has been. It doesn’t matter what they try to throw at her, the bribes or false promises or smoke shows, Brynn will never fall for it. She’s a smart kid.”
She nods and sighs, then brings her attention to my face.
“And the threats?”
