Tangled Up In You (Rogue #1)

Chapter 98

98

GAVIN

A fter several false starts and draining half of her tea, Bernadette finally said, “What you have to know is that I wasn’t right after the accident. I was healing on the outside but I was broken on the inside.”

“Weren’t we all?” Gavin replied, but not with anger.

“I know. I know what I did. But I didn’t plan it. I left hospital that day because I had to see your sister. I had to see her for myself. And when I did, after I convinced the nurse to take me to that awful morgue for a viewing, I almost lost my mind.”

Gavin looked at his mother, envisioning the trauma she had endured. The accident had flipped their car three times, leaving her with a broken collarbone and a concussion. It had also knocked his two-year-old sister out of her car seat restraints and killed her upon impact. Gavin had walked away without so much as a bruise. His father was home with his older brother, Ian, who had taken ill. Because it was raining hard that morning, Bernadette had decided to drive Gavin to school. She’d taken his little sister along for the ride, hoping to lessen her contact with the flu germs in the house.

“You don’t have children yet,” she continued. “But when you do, you’ll know there is nothing that can drive you to madness like losing one of your babies.”

He didn’t correct her on the loss he had experienced, because though he knew his suffering was real, it still didn’t compare to losing a child of two years of age. Instead he said, “Okay, I get going away for a period. But you decided to lose all of your children.”

“I wasn’t rational. Lord knows I’m not claiming my thinking was on. It wasn’t.” She finished off her tea like a shot. “I had to be away from everything that reminded me of the pain—and the guilt. I would not have been able to live through your father’s careful acceptance of what I had done.”

“What you had done? What do you mean?”

“Well, I’m the reason Nora is dead, aren’t I?”

“It was slick with rain that day,” he said. “That lorry ran into us. I knew as much on the day and I was only seven.”

“It got so twisted in my head, you see. I was convinced that I had somehow been to blame. And?—”

“Because of your whiskey habit?”

She turned her face away as abruptly as if he had physically slapped her.

“Were you drunk that morning?” he asked when she didn’t speak for a lengthy moment.

“No.” She shook her head violently, with childlike gracelessness.

“I remember now.” He twisted his wedding ring to the left, then to the right and back to the middle again. “I can’t believe I blocked it out all these years. But now I remember your need for it throughout the day.”

“It’s medicinal.” She looked at him with imploring eyes. “I have a nervous condition and a nip here and there is what helps me function. I’m not a drunk, Gavin. You have to believe me.”

He not only didn’t believe her, but her issues made him realize his own dependence problems had a hereditary basis. Still, it wasn’t why he had come here.

“Just keep telling me what happened.”

She nodded eagerly, clearly grateful to drop the topic of her drinking. “I, em, I think it’s called ‘survivor’s guilt.’ I couldn’t fathom the part I had in losing your sister. And then it spiraled into a real breakdown as I was overcome with thinking that I’d do more harm than good to you boys if I came back. I know it makes no sense. I know that now. But back then, I feared somehow my other children would be next.”

“This idea can’t have lasted all these years. At some point you must have thought to return.”

“Aye, I did. So many times. But I had abandoned you all. I didn’t know what you’d do if I just showed up.”

That logic struck Gavin as terribly cruel. “You should have fucking tried,” he said.

“I did,” she said quickly. “I did come back once.”