Chapter 44
Chapter Forty-Four
brUNO
I’d know her knock anywhere—three quick, two slow. The puzzle is that she’s here at my hotel room when she’s supposed to be at practice. I go and fling the door open.
She smiles uncertainly at me. “Hi!”
“Did they cancel practice or something?”
“I left early. I needed to talk to you.”
She seems serious. I don’t like it. “Is something wrong?”
She gives me a quick kiss. “You going to let me in?”
I step back. She comes in and drops her bag on the chair by the window, and for a moment, she just stands there and looks at the view.
My blood races. Something is definitely wrong. My mind keeps going back to our joke about my being raised by wolves. It doesn’t seem so funny suddenly.
She turns around. “I’ve been hinting at you,” she says. “About your mother. About looking harder at what you think you know.”
I fold my arms. “What I think I know?”
“Yes, what you think you know. Because you’ve never heard her side of it.”
I shake my head. “This is not up for discussion.”
“That is the problem. Why isn’t it up for discussion? Why don’t you want to find out what happened?”
“I know what happened.”
“Well, from where I’m standing, you loved your mother completely. You felt that love. And then something shook your picture of her, and you closed the file. You accepted a version and stopped.” A beat. “I need to know you won’t do that to me.”
“I would never do that to you.”
“You did it to her.”
“That was different.”
“How?”
“She did something obviously horrendous.”
“But you don’t know why. You filled in a story for her that makes her a monster.”
“It’s not a story, it’s a conclusion drawn from the facts. And why does it matter? It’s the past. I care about the future.”
“I do, too.” She holds my gaze.
“So what’s the problem?”
“Because she’s your mother, the most important, most formative female relationship you ever had or ever will have, and I need to know that this isn’t what you do. You presumed total betrayal without having the facts. Without even wanting to know the facts. That can’t be what you do.”
“Is this a pop psychology thing? Because that’s what it’s sounding like to me.”
She lifts her chin. “Maybe it is,” she says. “But it’s important to me. It’s important to me that you’re curious to know her side.”
I suck in a deep breath. “There is almost nothing I want to do less than reach out to that woman.”
“I know.”
“She might not even be alive.”
“I know.”
I gaze out at the row of pale stone townhouses across the street, standing shoulder to shoulder, their windows dark and self-contained.
Everything inside me recoils at the idea of speaking to my mother. It’s so much easier to keep that file shut.
Of all things to ask me for, why this?
But it’s important to her. She’s not asking me to exonerate my mother. She’s asking me to prove I can look harder.
There’s a long silence. I lock every muscle in place, willing myself into stillness so she won’t see the war raging underneath—a war I don’t even understand. So much of my life is built on what my mother did. If I start pulling at those threads, I don’t know what comes apart.
So I’m shocked by the words that come out of my own mouth. “I’ll call Sadie.”