Page 1 of Before Forever

1

MELODY

The passing minutes felt like hours as I sat impatiently in the freakishly quiet lobby of the Jenkins Law Firm. Aside from the clock ticking loudly in the background, the only other sounds were from my phone that buzzed periodically in my hands. Messages from work were pouring in, demanding my attention.

Finally, a door opened and a stuffy-looking tall, slender guy in a suit appeared. I was grateful for the distraction from my thoughts and eager to get this over with.

The receptionist shot to her feet as he entered and nodded towards me, “Mr. Jenkins will see you now, Ms. Hart.”

With a quick handshake and official introduction, Mr. Jenkins led me into his office. He then motioned for me to sit in the chair across from his desk.

“Thanks for coming across town to meet with me this afternoon, Ms. Hart.”

I smiled politely, but he hadn’t given me much choice. He said it was an important matter regarding my mother’s Will. The best I could do was take a long lunch, and even that seemed to be pushing it at the office.

For as much as I was struggling to get back into a good groove at work, I knew this was the last thing to check off the list. I found that to be both incredibly depressing and relieving all at once. Of course, I’d never be ready to let my mother go. But I was more than prepared to put the past couple of months behind me.

“I don’t want to take up too much of your time. So, let’s get right to it, shall we?”

“Sure. What’s this all about?” I asked in a daze. “You said something about Mom’s Will? But the insurance covered all of the funeral costs. I didn’t think there was much of anything left to her name. She rented an apartment here.”

He spread a folder out on the desk and started flipping through it, spouting off legal jargon as he went. I found it hard to focus. My mind started drifting, as it did a lot these days, and the next thing I knew, I was reliving the nightmare of the past month all over again.

My brain had formed a new habit of torturing me with a relentless replay of everything I was trying so hard to quickly move on from.

I thought this would be the year that my boyfriend, Evan, proposed to me. The timing was right. We had been together for five years. We had both graduated and settled into our careers with good jobs and impressive salaries. And with our six-year anniversary approaching, I was on a time crunch. All of my girlfriends told me no self-respecting woman stays with a man longer than six years without a ring on her finger. So I naively assumed that my year would be spent bonding with my mother over wedding planning and dress shopping.

Instead, her final days were filled with late-night phone calls and visits from me with lots of wine, tissues, and sobbing.

She didn’t know it was her last few weeks alive. No one did. But I think we could all agree her time would have been better spent sampling wedding cakes rather than hearing me lament about the stick-thin model Evan was cheating on me with. A model from an agency my own firm represented, no less. The memory still made my stomach twist up into horrible knots.

I wrung my hands in my lap as Mr. Jenkin’s voice suddenly cut back through the horrible memories. “It looks like a nice place. A lake house with a mountain view, a private dock, three bedrooms, and three baths. Over three-thousand square feet. Its last appraisal a few years back valued it at 600k, and you can only imagine how that figure has likely sky-rocketed since then.”

My brow furrowed. I knew I zoned out for a minute, but I could not for the life of me figure out why the stuffy lawyer was going on about mountain views and housing prices.

“The deed will be in your name, so you have every right to sell it if you choose to do so. Fair warning, though, it does seem like it will need quite a bit of repairs before it could be put on the market.”

“Sell it?” I asked cluelessly, still not understanding exactly what he was saying or why this mattered to me.

“I’m not familiar with Silver Point, but it looks nice from the photos,” he added, finally flipping the folder shut and sliding it over to me. “See for yourself.”

I reached for the folder and started turning the pages, my mind clouded with fog. Slowly, it began to register with me. Of course, the lake house in Silver Point. My mom mentioned it every so often after I left for college. I didn’t know why she had wanted to buy an old shack so far away down south, out in the middle of nowhere.

Now, the faint memories of her telling me about the place stung in my heart. I didn’t remember them as much as I should have. I listened to her about as well as I had been listening to Mr. Jenkins rattle on about her lake house. I stayed so wrapped up in my own life under the notion that we had plenty of time to make up for it at some point.

She had bought the place thinking it could be a family home…for all of us. A place for her to take me, my future husband (then assumed to be Ethan), and her grandkids for summer vacations. A place to make memories and then, one day, pass down through the generations.

But just as I barely listened to all of her hopes and dreams for the property, her visions of a happy family retreating from the busy outside world together, I never made the time to go there with her. It was alwaysWork’s really busy right now, but maybe next week…next month…maybe next year.Now my months and years with her were up, and I hadn’t given her the one small, simple thing she had wanted so badly from me…For me to slow down and just spend time with her, to get away from it all and be present.

Maybe I thought once Ethan and I were officially engaged, things would be different somehow. Now that Ethan and I were split, it seemed like such a silly thing to put my relationship with my own mother on hold for. And worse, there was no going back. I had no shot at redemption, no way to make up for wasted time on either front.

I could feel hot tears starting to rise, but I fought them off and held myself together as Mr. Jenkins continued while sliding another folder across his desk.

“I recommend taking a weekend to go out there and assess the property. As for our time here today, this is everything you’ll need to sign. I’ll go through it all with you. Once we’re finished, everything will be in your name, and you’re free to go.”

He towered behind my chair as we went through every page and paragraph. He would rattle off an explanation about this line or that, then point to where I had to sign. I was certain I needed to be paying more attention, or listening to every detail so I didn’t scribble my name down in agreement to sell my soul or to bury myself in some kind of horrible deal that would drain my bank accounts somehow.

But I was too close to breaking down, and at that moment, I could not keep my tears at bay and also pay attention. I could only do one or the other, so the pride and stubbornness I got from my mother won over and kept me focused on the not crying part.

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