Chapter 62 Amelia Blue
The snow flickers around us as we stumble between the trees, along the path and up the stairs to Edward’s cottage.
I feel drunk, my feet unsteady. I lean on Edward, counting on him to get me where we’re going.
My heart taps wildly in my chest. There’s no discernible rhythm, no steady hum.
I feel like someone who is very, very sick.
For most of my life, weak was my mother’s insatiable hunger and her inability to curb it. It was other patients in treatment with me, the ones who gave in to the therapy and got better. Weak was crying over the pictures of me on the internet, the so-called friends who sold me out.
Tonight, all at once, weak is the inability to put one foot in front of the other without someone else supporting me.
“Come on,” Edward coaxes, guiding me toward the sliding glass door.
I don’t want to step into the warmth of Edward’s room. It feels like a trap, a cage.
Oh god, they killed her. I can’t catch my breath.
This place. It—they—him—Andrew Rush killed my mother.
The best care money can buy, that’s what Evelyn said, what Callie said, what Mom echoed, the trill in her voice, the way she made everything sound like a song. It used to annoy me—couldn’t she ever simply talk?
I’m shaking, but I manage to hold myself upright so I can back away from the door.
“Amelia?” Edward holds his arm out to me, but I shake my head.
The cause of death listed on the death certificate was exposure. We believed she’d passed out on the beach and slept through her own death, too careless to save her own life.
But she wasn’t careless. We were. We didn’t insist on a toxicology report, ask for a more thorough investigation into what had happened. We didn’t question that Georgia would be cavalier with her life, so we were cavalier with her death.
We should’ve been suspicious the instant her suitcase arrived without a spiral notebook inside.
I look down at the wide cedar planks below, slippery with snow, then at the floor-to-ceiling windows in front of me, flakes clinging to the frame. If I were in California, I’d think I was trying to stand during an earthquake but it’s me setting everything off-kilter, not the ground beneath my feet.
The snow turns to ice in my hair and sticks to my leggings like dust. I’m crying so hard I can’t stop.
All this time, I thought her death didn’t matter. Months before she died, I’d already made up my mind never to speak to her again, so what difference did it make whether she was alive or dead? I hated her. I knew that I hated her.
Suddenly (there it is, the word my professor told me never to use), I know why I destroyed the tattoo beneath my breast, why I slashed my mother’s initials into nothing but scar tissue.
Deep down, I had already decided to name my child after Georgia, imbuing them with all the history my mother gave me when she named me.
I always loved my mother.