Chapter 11 #2
“Understandably,” Zoe replied with some heat in her voice. Lindsay sounded incredibly callous toward her daughter. What kind of mother walked away from her own child like that?
“I kind of understood it,” Dan said on a sigh.
“Lindsay was always very career-driven. Her mother never had a career, and her dad left them high and dry when Lindsay was fifteen, so they really struggled financially. It had a huge impact on her, and I think she organized her life so that kind of thing could never happen to her.”
“And instead it happened to you,” Zoe replied without thinking, and Dan turned to stare at her, his mouth opening in surprise, his wineglass half-raised to his lips.
“Well…” he began, sounding like he was trying to hide how much he didn’t like that conclusion.
“Sorry,” Zoe said quickly. “I didn’t mean that as a criticism or insult, like you don’t have a career or a job or…” She trailed off, afraid she was making it worse.
“That’s fair,” Dan told her quickly. “Truth is, I didn’t have a job, for a few years.
Lindsay was the bigger earner, and so I stayed home with Sophie when she was little, did freelance graphic design, very much on the side.
When Sophie went to school, I was really hoping to concentrate on making it bigger.
But I wasn’t expecting to be relegated to the sidelines as much as I was. ”
Zoe nodded in sympathy. “No parent should do that to another,” she said. “Parenting is a joint responsibility. Always.”
“Yeah, that’s how I thought about it,” he agreed. “The year Sophie was living with Lindsay… that hurt a lot. My visits were cut to every other weekend, and I started to feel like a seriously spare part. Not great, as a dad.”
“No,” Zoe said quietly. She knew her own father sometimes worried he had become a spare part, or worse, a liability, with his illness.
He’d gotten sick when she’d been just eighteen, her mother ten years earlier.
She could barely remember when her parents had been healthy and whole, and she hadn’t felt this desperate, dragging sense of responsibility for them, a huge part of her life even as she pretended it wasn’t.
“Anyway,” Dan resumed, straightening a little on the sofa as he gave her a frank but also challenging look. “I’ve just bared my soul. What about you? What was it that got you in a funk tonight?”
Zoe took another sip of wine, mainly to stall for time.
She appreciated how honest and vulnerable Dan had been, but that didn’t mean she wanted to return the favor.
Her personal life had been so very private for so very long, and the thought of opening it up to a near-stranger’s scrutiny was frankly terrifying.
“It’s okay,” Dan said quietly, “if you don’t want to say.”
His eyes were soft with sympathy, his mouth quirked in that small smile that was so appealing, and everything about him was open and friendly.
Zoe knew she’d already messed up one relationship tonight, as she recalled how hurt Jenna had looked when she’d basically turned her out of the house. She didn’t want to do it a second time.
“Sorry,” she told Dan. “I tend to be pretty private.” Which was a serious understatement. She swallowed hard and then forced herself to continue. “Starr’s Fall might be a small town, but the truth is… hardly anyone knows what’s really going on in my life.”
Dan cocked his head, his gray gaze seeming friendly, even caring… or was she being fanciful? Was she just desperate to want someone interested in her life? The thought was mortifying. “And why is that?” he asked gently, and Zoe had to look away.
“Because I keep it that way,” she admitted painfully. “For… for my parents’ sake.”
He frowned, not understanding. “Your parents…”
“At least, I thought that it was for my parents’ sake,” Zoe continued, her fingers tensing on the fragile stem of her wineglass.
She didn’t know why she was being so honest, only that she felt the need to.
“But tonight,” she told Dan, “something happened that made me wonder if… if it was really for my own.” It hurt to say it out loud. To admit it.
Dan nodded slowly, accepting without judging, or so she hoped. “So, what about your parents has made you be so private?” he asked quietly.
Zoe gazed down at her glass. She felt almost near tears, which was seriously alarming, and yet at the same time she wanted to tell him.
To tell someone, anyone, but especially Dan Bryson because he really was so kind, and he had the nicest eyes and smile of any man she’d ever met.
That counted for quite a lot, she discovered.
“Because they’re sick,” she blurted, feeling the acidic roil of betrayal in her stomach as soon as she said the words.
Her parents were private people, too, and Zoe knew they wouldn’t like being talked about in this way.
“Really sick,” she continued, knowing she had to explain it all, if she was going to explain anything.
“My mom was diagnosed with MS—multiple sclerosis, a chronic auto-immune disease—when I was eight.” She paused, gathered her composure, and then continued the potted version of her childhood.
“It got progressively worse—really bad when I was Sophie’s age, which made me act out a fair amount, and steadily since then, so she’s now housebound with some serious mobility issues, among other things.
My dad retired from teaching at a local college when he was only in his forties, to be her fulltime carer. ”
The words were coming faster and faster, tumbling over each other in a desperate rush to get it all out as quickly as she could, and then be done with it.
As if it ever worked that way. “But then when he was fifty,” she continued shakily, “and I was eighteen, at college, he was diagnosed with MDS. That’s myelodysplastic syndrome, which most people haven’t heard of, but it’s kind of like a pre-leukemia.
It means he always has low blood cell counts and gets tired and out of breath super quickly.
Plus he bruises and bleeds easily, and he needs blood transfusions every few months.
It’s manageable, if only just, but one day it could tip over into something serious.
Terminal.” She blinked rapidly; stating the obvious felt awful.
“Clearly, in that state, he couldn’t take care of my mom by himself. ”
“So what happened?” Dan asked when Zoe had lapsed into silence, too emotional to explain anything more.
She sneaked a peek at Dan and saw he was looking at her with so much empathy it nearly had her howling.
She looked away quickly, focused on the middle distance, and blinked again to clear the tears.
“So, I took care of them,” she said simply. “I still do. Except hardly anyone knows about it, or maybe they just don’t remember.”