Chapter 46
It hadn’t been three full days that Jenna had been home, trying to care for her mother. Mostly she demanded her mom let her do it as Julie kept insisting she was fine and that she could cook something for them. But she’d known it would go this way.
“No mom! They just let you home from surgery!” Still her mom insisted on walking around and not asking Jenna to bring her things.
It had been three nights she'd been back in the old bed, but she was actually sleeping finally. Even as she realized that the high school Jenna who painted this room was long gone, she was seeing that the Jenna who’d left Texas just a few weeks ago was also now long gone.
She’d learned too much to go back and she wasn’t sure how to tell her mother when the woman still saw her child as a child.
The good news was that they had a schedule for chemo. As per Annelise’s prediction, the going wouldn’t be easy, but the doctors said they expected a good outcome. Jenna held faith in that and hoped to develop her own divining skills.
She’d called her cousin, thanking her for whatever support she offered and asking what to do to hone her divination.
She needed to know more about her mother’s situation and what she’d be facing.
But she’d gotten Story answering the phone instead.
She was a bit cagey about why Annelise wasn’t answering.
“Unfortunately,” Story told her, “it’s difficult to divine for something a person has strong feelings about. Emotions have to be pure for that kind of magic.”
Jenna could admit hers were beyond muddled. She switched topics. “I felt something in the evening at the hospital. Right before my mother came out of surgery. It was from you?”
Again, Story was cagey about the whole affair, making Jenna wonder if maybe more than they were willing to talk about had gone down.
When she pressed, her new grandmother only replied, “I’ll tell you the whole story when you get back to the Hollow.
Let me know when you can come back? If not, Annelise or both of us will come to Texas to see you. ”
She’d smiled at that, with her whole soul.
The Lockhearts wouldn’t put the burden on her alone to maintain the relationship.
Jenna couldn’t recall when she’d ever felt more welcome anywhere than she had at Belle Hollow.
Even the other families just immediately treated her like she was a Lockheart. And she loved it.
“I’ll be back, soon,” she assured her grandmother.
Jenna calculated she had about three more months of leave, which had seemed fairly long when she set it up. While she'd never expected things to go down in Belle Hollow the way they had, it now seemed short. Too short.
She had a new family in another place, a cousin and a grandmother and a whole new world she needed and wanted to learn about.
Her mother saw that she was getting squirrelly about being back in Texas, and already Julie was making plans to move her best friend into the house. She’d announced, “Candace will need your room.”
A subtle hint to head back out.
“One more week,” Jenna bartered with her mother.
She would get to go to the first round of chemo and maybe renegotiate the timing if needed, though she doubted her mother would stand for that kind of thing.
Julie appreciated Jenna and appreciated the support but wanted to do things her own way.
She seemed to have issues with her daughter seeing her this way.
Honestly, the way she often thought of Jenna—still as the teenager who had painted her room a moody dark blue and tried to rebel—she probably felt more comfortable with Candice here.
When her mother fell asleep in front of the TV, Jenna headed up to her room.
She closed the door just in case—not that her mother was going to climb the stairs without Jenna hearing it—but still.
With a deep breath for courage, she dialed the number and waited, heart pounding, as the phone rang three times.
It was caller ID, or maybe it was something more, but the voice sounded curious. “Who is this?”
She took a deep breath. “My name is Jenna Brooks. I’m adopted. My mother—my birth mother—was named Monica, and I’m looking for Teagan Lockheart.”