Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter
Thirty-Seven
Ramona woke up still exhausted.
She’d barely slept. After getting home close to midnight, she hadn’t even had the energy to change clothes, much less cry about what had happened on set. She’d passed out fully clothed, but kept waking up with a start, each time thinking the entire fight with Dylan had been a dream, only to feel a pit open in her gut when she realized it wasn’t.
This happened at least three times. By the time she finally dragged herself out of bed around seven, she felt as though she hadn’t slept at all. She’d never been so happy for a day off in her life, for multiple reasons. She couldn’t bear to face Dylan right now, anger and hurt swirling through her in a sick amalgamation. Then there was Noelle’s job offer, her dream come true, but she couldn’t get her brain around it, couldn’t seem to shove Dylan out of the way long enough to be happy , and that just caused her anger and hurt to surge even more.
She needed coffee. Needed something to fill her up instead of all these fucking feelings.
Downstairs, she found Olive standing by the coffee maker, the brew already burbling, and looking down at her phone.
“You’re up early,” Ramona said.
Olive startled, dropping her phone to the tile floor. She bent down to pick it up, her face pale.
“You okay?” Ramona asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m just…” Olive trailed off, tucking her phone into her back pocket. “I didn’t think you’d be up yet on a day off.”
“Couldn’t sleep,” Ramona said, taking a mug out of the cabinet. “What about you? You and Marley have plans today?”
Olive said nothing, and that’s when Ramona noticed her duffel bag on the kitchen table, her last name and softball number from Clover Lake High monogrammed in a curly red script over the cream canvas.
“Are you going somewhere?” Ramona asked.
Olive swallowed, and Ramona’s already unsettled stomach cramped with worry.
“What’s going on, Olive? Tell me right now.”
Olive closed her eyes.
“Ollie,” Ramona said sharply. She sounded like a parent, she knew, but her panic was rising.
Olive sighed, looked down at the floor. “I found her.”
For a second, Ramona just stared at her.
Found her .
Found…her .
The words flitted around her head, trying to land.
And then they did.
Found. Her .
“Where?” Ramona asked, her voice barely a whisper.
“Brooklyn,” Olive said. “She does fashion consulting there.”
Ramona’s breath felt nonexistent, her lungs a vacuum. No sound. No light. No air.
“How long?” she asked. “How long have you known?”
Olive bit her lower lip, then lifted her head to look at Ramona. “Since April.”
Ramona blinked, trying to process the information. It all came together in bits and bursts, the last few months. “That’s who you’ve been texting with? Every time I would walk in the room and you put your phone away?”
Olive didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.
“And now you’re going to see her?” Ramona asked. She couldn’t help the hurt that tumbled through her, colliding with the hurt already there from Dylan, the hurt that had been there for eighteen years, since her mother walked out on her.
Olive looked at her. “She said she sent birthday cards.”
Ramona just stared back.
“For years,” Olive said. “And you never told me or showed them to me.”
“For four years,” Ramona said. “Then they stopped. And I didn’t show you because you were a baby, and by the time you were old enough to even understand what they were, she’d stopped sending them.”
“I still deserved to see them!” Olive said.
“You really want to talk about what we deserved?” Ramona asked, her eyes filling and spilling over. She’d held tears back for so long—all night, eighteen years. But now, as her sister, the most important person in her life, glared at her as though betrayed, she couldn’t stop the tears. Her throat shoved them upward, her eyes pushing them out, finally released.
“She left us,” Ramona said. “Never looked back.”
“She did ,” Olive said. “She’s sent cards and wants to see me and—”
“Did you find her? Or did she find you?”
Olive opened her mouth but snapped it shut again.
“Exactly, Ollie.” Ramona stepped forward, took her sister’s hands. Looked in her lovely brown eyes. “Because we’ve always been here. Right here. She’s always known where to find us.”
Olive shook her head, tears spilling down her own cheeks. “You don’t get it.”
“I do,” Ramona said. “I’m hurt too. I miss her too.”
“But you knew her.” Olive’s voice broke. “You knew her, had pictures with her you remember, and I never got that. All I got was—”
She cut herself off, looked down as she cried, but Ramona heard her words anyway.
All I got was you.
Ramona held Olive’s hands tighter, tears pouring silently now. She tried not to feel hurt, she really did, because she knew, better than anyone, that a sister didn’t replace a mother.
But she’d never had time to really know that, had she? She’d had too many responsibilities, too much to do for Olive or with Olive or for her dad. She’d never slowed down enough to process it, and she felt like it was all hitting her at once now—the emotions themselves and realization that she hadn’t done the emotional work to sort through them.
And Olive deserved that chance, even if it tore Ramona in two.
She squeezed Olive’s hands once more, then let her go.
“Okay,” Ramona said.
Olive sniffed. “Okay?”
“I can’t stop you. You’re eighteen and if…if you want to see her, you should go.”
“Come with me,” Olive said, fresh tears spilling over.
But Ramona couldn’t. She wasn’t ready, couldn’t even begin to fathom seeing her mother right now after so long and zero effort on Rebecca Riley’s part to reach out.
No.
This was one thing she couldn’t help Olive do.
“I can’t, sweetheart,” Ramona said. “I wish I could, but I just can’t.”
Olive nodded, but her tears kept coming.
And then Ramona did what she did best—she took her sister in her arms and held her until she stopped crying.