Chapter 25
25
AURORA
Mom: It’s been three weeks since your last check in, Aura. I’ve lost track of the number of unanswered texts I’ve sent.
Mom: I’ll call the police and report you missing if I have to.
Me: How would you know that it isn’t my kidnapper texting you proof of life?
I send the text off before grabbing my coffee from the barista with a grimaced smile and sitting back at the table I chose when I walked in. It would have been ideal not to be dealing with my mother right now as I wait for Wanda to arrive, but what’s a bit more stress when I’m already hanging by a thread?
After waiting nearly a full week for Wanda to get back to Cherry Peak, a text came through last night that nearly sent me into an early grave. It was only a time and a place with a sign-off of her name, but it was enough.
Tomorrow, five @ the bakery. -Wanda
Sleep didn’t come easily after that. Or at all, if you don’t count the seventeen minutes I got before my alarm went off. I feel like a zombie, and I look like one too. First impressions usually matter, but in this case, I hardly think less obvious under-eye circles or a power suit instead of jeans and a tee would do much for me.
My phone starts vibrating in my hand, and when I read the word “Mom” on the screen, I tense up tight. Nine weeks is the longest we’ve ever gone without seeing one another, and three is the longest we’ve gone without speaking, but the nausea I feel at the thought of talking about what happened before I left has kept me from reaching out. It’s unfair, and I’m being stubborn, but I can’t help it this time. This isn’t a situation where I can just turn my feelings off and pretend like nothing’s wrong.
Something is very, very wrong.
With a swallow, I send the call to voicemail. It makes me feel like a fucking child to do it, but when a woman suddenly appears at the edge of my table with slightly narrowed eyes, I drop the thought as if it were nothing.
“Aurora, right?” she asks, not waiting for my answer before yanking the chair opposite of me out from beneath the table and sitting. “You look exactly like you do in your Facebook profile photo. That doesn’t happen often.”
I blink, trying to catch up. “Thank you?”
“I don’t know if it was a compliment just yet.”
“Right. Well, you look like yours as well. I preferred the blonde hair, though,” I return, snapping slightly.
It was an old photo that said it hadn’t been updated in three years. I was expecting to meet a blonde woman today, not one with brown hair and a green money piece in the front. The brunette colour pales her a bit, but something tells me she doesn’t give a shit about that.
She dumps her purse on the table and twirls the green chunk around her finger. “I recently learned that colouring my hair like this pisses off my father. ”
My father. I focus on not grating my teeth at the purposeful wording.
“Clearly, that’s never been a problem for me. I had two-toned hair in college. One side teal, the other pink.”
Running her gaze over my scalp and the lack of dark roots, she says, “And now you’ve gone back to natural blonde.”
“Do blondes run in the family?” I can’t help but ask.
“If you’re wanting to know if Riley has natural blond hair, the answer is yes. But he hates it and dyes it as black as his heart every couple of months. Has for longer than I’ve been alive.”
“Riley?”
Wanda huffs a breath, staring at me as though she truly has no idea why I’m here. “Lee Rose is truly Riley Rose. Lee is a ridiculous stage name he snagged years ago. That’s something you should know.”
I wrap my hands around my coffee cup and inhale, nodding to try and clear my head. Wanda’s guardedness was expected , I remind myself. I shouldn’t take it personally.
Unless I should. If it’s me she has a problem with, then this just got a whole lot more fucking awkward.
“In my mother’s letters, the ones that brought me here, she never called him by anything other than Lee. Everything was addressed to Lee Rose. But they were real. I have one with me if you want to see it for yourself.”
“How do I know you didn’t write it yourself?”
“You’ll know when you read it.”
It feels wrong to reach into my bag and pull out the neatly folded, yellowing letter from where I tucked it this morning. This letter is one of the most personal I read and downright heartbreaking. The tear marks are real, and the pain etched in every indent of my mother’s pen only serves as further proof.
“How many of these letters were there?” Wanda asks, eyeing the letter I pull free from the interior pocket.
“Too many to count. Stacks of them, most still sealed and stamped with a return-to-sender order. The few I opened were all I needed to see. That and the photos.”
“And they were what led you here, then?”
“Yes.”
After setting the letter on the table beside my coffee cup, I retrieve the small photo I brought along with it. I avoid glancing at the grainy image of my mom and Lee, hating the way the simple picture makes me want to scream and cry until my voice is gone and my eyes are dry.
Wanda doesn’t have the same issue. She slaps a hand across the table and tugs them both toward her with no hesitation. Opening up the letter first, she starts to read.
One line after another, her gaze drags along the paper. Her hazel eyes darken, anger bleeding into them. I lift my cup to my lips and take a long swig, pretending my hands aren’t shaking.
“Were they all like this?” she asks, her tone dropping some of its previous aggression.
“Like what?”
Her eyes dart above the paper, meeting mine. “Painful. Raw.”
“To an extent, yes. Some were angry, some were tired. But more than anything, they were sad. She was scared and alone, and Riley was nowhere to be found. So, she stopped reaching out. She stopped trying to get a response from him and took to raising me on her own instead. I only remember asking about my father a couple of times when I was younger, but she told me she didn’t know who he was. Eventually, I stopped caring.”
She sets the letter back on the table and pinches the small photo between her fingers. Her throat jumps before she flips it over and reads the date scrawled on the back.
“This was years before I was born.”
I nod. “Me too.”
“I haven’t seen him wear this jacket in years. He used to say he won it playing poker, but I never believed him,” she whispers.
“Maybe he did. ”
“He hates poker.”
I roll my lips, unsure what to say to that. Did my mom get him that jacket? If she did, why did he keep it for so long after they parted, as if he had any right to?
“I didn’t mean to hurt you with this. It wasn’t my plan to bring this up to everyone and cause problems. I just want answers,” I admit, feeling that weight on my chest again, pressing down further and further despite how desperately I try to shove it off.
Wanda slides the photo and letter across the table, glaring at them like she’s hoping to light them ablaze with her eyes. When she glances up again, some of that anger dies.
“And you thought I could give you them,” she notes.
“I have so many blanks in the story. My mom doesn’t want to talk about the details. It hurts her, and the last thing I want to do is make her pain worse. But I deserve answers, and I was hoping I could get them elsewhere first before tearing open her past with demands and my hurt in addition to hers. When she told me about you, I took that information and ran. It wasn’t much either. Just your name and that you were from Cherry Peak.
“I’m not a spontaneous person, Wanda. Change scares me. Actually, it terrifies me. But I came here anyway, thinking you’d be where the internet told me you were. Except I didn’t find you at the small-town hair salon I expected, and I didn’t know what to do next until I met the Steeles. Eliza’s helped me with a couple of my questions, and now so has Johnny by putting me in touch with you. Calling and asking you to come back here was never my plan, and I’m sorry if I’ve ruined whatever it is you’ve been doing. I just want to know my family history. I want to know why . . .”
I blink up at the ceiling, ashamed of the tears filling my eyes. They’re not mine to shed. They’re my mom’s, and Wanda’s, for driving her back to a place she clearly doesn’t want to be. I’m inserting myself into this town, and I feel so completely out of place. An outsider digging around in history that shouldn’t be mine to dig around in. But it is. I hate it, but it’s mine more than anyone knows.
I widen my eyes at Wanda when she reaches across the table and takes my hands in hers. She doesn’t smile at me, but it isn’t necessary. The slight squeeze she gives me is enough.
“You have every right to know the answers to all of your questions, Aurora. I’m sorry for being so cold toward you. My family has never been . . . warm to each other, let alone outsiders that we’re quite honestly scared of. I’ll be honest and say that I expected you to be here for something entirely different. Maybe a chunk of the fame our father has built first and foremost. But also, if you were telling the truth, then you’d be just another roadblock between me and him. That was never fair of me. It came from a place of insecurity and hurt that I’ve never been able to grasp his attention.”
“I don’t blame you for being guarded. Even still, I haven’t offered you much proof.”
“I don’t need more proof. I can see it in your eyes. The pain and desire for answers. Plus, you seem to have a good idea already of the man Riley is. If you truly were just here for the fame, you wouldn’t care about that at all.”
I laugh lightly, jerking my head in agreement. “It’s that bad?”
Her features harden, tongue sweeping along the inside of her lip. “I spent a year trying to get his attention. I left Cherry Peak, flew to where I knew he was, and was met by the same shit that I’d always seen at home. He’s busy, too busy for a family, let alone a daughter. And now that he’s got two? I don’t know what’s going to happen, Aurora. I can’t make you any promises that he’ll even care to learn he’s had a second daughter all this time.
“And I don’t say that to hurt you. That’s just me speaking from experience. I can count on one hand the number of my birthdays he’s attended or Christmas mornings, for fuck’s sake. He didn’t show up to my high school graduation, and he’s never paid any mind to a single one of the degrees I’ve gotten or businesses I’ve started from the ground up since in an attempt to make him proud of me. Riley Rose should never have been given the title of anyone’s father. Thank fucking God there are only two of us to witness the disappointed he is.”
“Fuck,” I whisper.
Wanda sits back in her chair and meets my stare head-on. “Welcome to the family, Aurora. For your sake, I hope you’re only here for a short while.”