4. Roman
ROMAN
TWENTY-THREE YEARS OLD
V isiting my mom is never easy.
Not only because I don’t know which version of her I’ll get, but also because whenever I see her, the memories of who she used to be prick at me like a dull knife.
She used to be healthy.
She used to be a woman people looked up to.
She used to be someone who loved me.
Now, she’s none of those things.
Still my mom, though, even if she’d rather forget that fact.
I trudge up the broken concrete pathway leading to the front door of her duplex. A few items of trash are scattered amongst the grass: a napkin here, a bright red chewed-up straw there. I nudge them aside with the toe of my boot before moving forward and remind myself one more time why I’m here.
Why I continue to show up.
For Brooklynn.
My gut tightens the same way it always does when I think of my sister.
Every day I try to find ways to help her but come up short because as much as I want to take care of her myself—get her out of this environment entirely—I don’t have enough money.
There’s never enough.
It’s not even that I don’t make a decent living. My art makes me enough to stay afloat. Or it would, if I didn’t give my mom every spare cent.
The problem is, my mom has a drug abuse problem, so we’re always one bad decision away from my sister not getting the care she needs.
Brooklynn’s been chronically ill for the past four years. We don’t know what’s wrong with her, and no matter how many tests they run or hospital stays she has, nobody can seem to figure it the fuck out.
She has constant medical bills, frequent checkups, and a fear that any random ache and pain could spiral into something worse.
Most recently, she’s been having seizures, and although her doctors can’t find the root cause, they’ve gotten her stable with medication. But I live in a daily panic that they’ll say she needs something like brain surgery, or that she’s developed something we can’t afford to fix.
Medical bills aren’t cheap. And neither are her meds.
Fucking big pharma assholes.
I reach the front door, the aluminum screen corroded with spots of reddish-brown shining through the chipped white paint. I knock twice before it swings open, and I meet the doe eyes of my little sister.
She smiles when she sees me, her brown irises sparkling. She’s the spitting image of our mom—or of how Mom used to look, at least—and every time I see her, it causes a phantom ache to rip open in my chest, reminding me again of how things used to be.
“Hey,” Brooklynn says, bouncing on her toes.
It’s a good day for her.
I grin back. “Shouldn’t you be in class?”
She’s seventeen and in her junior year, and like me, she tends to skip, although I have a sneaking suspicion it’s because nothing in her classes challenges her. Unlike me, she’s never met a textbook she doesn’t like.
“School’s boring.” Brooklynn shrugs. “Besides, my last period is study hall, so I always come home instead.”
She moves to the side and lets me in, and as soon as I hit the small living room, I hear my mom. “What are you doing here?”
The question is blank, monotonous even, but it punches me in the stomach anyway.
I spin around and see all five foot two of my mother standing in the doorway leading to the narrow kitchen. She has one pale hand wrapped around a chipped yellow mug and the other resting on her hip.
“Coming for the pleasure of your company like always, Ma.”
She sniffs and pushes a stray piece of dark brown hair behind her ear. It’s tiring, this back and forth between us, but like everything else, I shove it to the recesses of my brain and pretend like it doesn’t affect me.
No, not pretend. It doesn’t affect me.
It can’t.
If I let it, then I won’t be able to keep showing up, and whether I like it or not, Brooklynn and I are all my mom has in the world.
For the longest time, my mom was all I had in mine.
Now, I don’t even feel like I have that.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Ma says, her voice softening.
The subtle change makes me bristle, because I know what’s coming next.
She moves closer, her grip tightening on her mug. “I’ve been meaning to call you.”
I lift a brow but don’t reply. From the corner of my eye, I see Brooklynn sigh and move to the couch, flipping open a philosophy book.
Probably tuning us out.
Good. I wish she didn’t have to witness it at all.
“Things have been a little difficult lately,” she continues. Her gaze flicks to Brooklynn and then back to me, a tight smile crossing her features. “I got laid off again, and?—”
“You got laid off, again ?” I cut in.
“It wasn’t my fault,” she snaps then draws in a breath, smoothing out her expression like she can will the irritation away. “It doesn’t matter. But if I can’t make rent in two days then…well…”
I grit my teeth until it feels like my molars might break. “There’s an art show tonight. I’ll see what I can do after that.”
“Your art.” She scoffs. “That won’t be enough, and you know it.”
My chest tightens, but I brush the feeling aside. It’s not like she’s ever been supportive. When I was little, I used to dream about the day I’d be able to make her proud. Now, resentment boils my blood whenever I think about that naive little kid.
“Fine, fuck the art,” I say. “I’ll cancel the show.”
Something flickers in her expression. Panic, maybe.
“ No ,” she snaps. “Don’t be ridiculous. We need that money, and you need to show your face there. Do you know what I had to do to get you this show?”
She’s right. She did pull strings; ones left over from her own art days, back when she used to care enough to create. If I try hard enough, I can almost pretend it was about me, and not about padding her pockets or fueling her next high.
“I don’t know what you want me to do,” I say. “There’s nothing I can do.”
She swallows, lifting her chipped coffee mug to her lips before mumbling into it, “You could talk to your father.”
Sighing, I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Not this again.”
“I’m just saying?—”
“He doesn’t give a fuck about us!” I snap, louder than I mean to.
Mom flinches like I’ve slapped her, but I don’t take it back. It’s ugly and rotted, but it’s the truth. She just doesn’t want to see it. She never has.
You’d think the guy has a magical dick with the way she’s still clinging to the fantasy of him after everything he’s done.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I say, quieter. “It’s just, what you’re asking me is—” I shake my head. “I don’t want to go to him. Not when he let us go—let you go so easily. You might not give a shit about yourself, but I still do.”
Her eyes lift to mine, glossy and unreadable. “He had his reasons.”
I let out a dry laugh, but she keeps going, her voice defiant. “And you’re his only son. If you talk to him, he’ll?—”
“He’ll what ?” I interrupt. “Aren’t you tired of this conversation? We’ve been having it for years and it never changes.”
She doesn’t understand. Or maybe she does, and she just doesn’t care. Either way, she just looks at me with that pinched, too-tired expression. “He owes you.”
“I have no interest in being part of his fucked-up legacy or anything that comes along with it.” My voice slices through the air like a blade.
“I haven’t even seen him in four years, and you want me to what, call him up and demand money to help his bastard child, ex-mistress, and the daughter who isn’t even his? The ones who are supposed to be dead ?”
She frowns, her finger jabbing into my chest, the sharp edge of her nail dragging against my shirt. Her eyes narrow, and I brace for it, because I know whatever she’s about to say will hurt.
It’s the drugs, I remind myself. It’s not her.
“I want you to be a man for once in your life and do something to take care of us.”
My eyes sting, a flush of anger burning up my throat.
What does she think I’ve been doing this whole time?
Every scraped-together paycheck, every night I went without to make sure she and Brooklynn didn’t, every stupid, desperate thing I’ve done just to keep the lights on, and the fridge full, and her from falling completely apart.
“What good are you, Roman?” she continues.
“Don’t call me that,” I spit, running a hand through my hair and gripping onto the roots.
She smiles sarcastically. “Well, that’s your real name, whether you like to admit it or not.”
“Not anymore.” I lean in, my voice low and cold. “The man you seem to worship made sure of it.”
Her pupils are blown out, wide and glassy. I stare into them, searching for any trace of the mom I used to know.
My heart thuds in an all too familiar rhythm. “You’re high.”
She sneers and jerks her face to the side. “My back hurts.”
I let out a breath, heavy and bitter, like it’s been trapped in my lungs for years.
“Every time you ask me to go to him,” I say quietly, “another piece of me dies.”
Somewhere deep inside me, I still want him to be something more. Something else.
A father.
I don’t want his money. I don’t want his power. I just want him , and I fucking hate myself for it. My hands curl into fists against my knees, nails biting into my palms until the sting grounds me.
I blink hard. Once. Twice.
Then I exhale through my nose, and shove that feeling back down where it belongs. Buried and forgotten, locked in a corner behind everything I’ve become despite him.
“He didn’t want us, remember? We don’t need him.”
“He does want you. He wouldn’t have given you his last name if he didn’t. The problem is her .”
I should point out the obvious: that it was my father who wiped our old identities from the face of the earth after my mom had us visit when I was fifteen.
She wrapped our car around a tree, and he swooped in right after with his own personal brand of witness protection.
A clean slate, and an easy way to keep the mistakes of his past from smudging his picture-perfect future.
I guess it wasn’t enough that we never lived in his shitty Connecticut town. He wanted to make sure we no longer existed at all.
The “her” my mother spits like a curse is my father’s wife. His dead wife.
Eleanor Montgomery. Or Voltaire if we’re going by maiden names.
And if she were really the issue—if she were who kept me out—then he would have let me in when I showed up after her funeral.
But he didn’t.
Turns out everything I’d been told about Eleanor Montgomery was a lie.
But my mother loves to live in delusion.
My tongue pushes against the inside of my cheek. “Well, I don’t want him , then.”
She lifts her chin. “Even if it could save your sister?”
Guilt wraps around my chest and squeezes.
She sets her mug down and leans in, cupping my face like I’m still that child who’s blind to everything but her love.
“You’re still a Montgomery , Ry,” she says softly. “Whether you like it or not. Maybe it’s time you start to act like one.”