Chapter 17 Eliana #2
We pull up to Mom’s building, a three-story walk-up that’s seen better decades. The security door doesn’t even close properly, perpetually propped open with a brick. Graffiti covers most of the mailboxes. At least half a dozen windows are boarded up.
“Wait here,” I tell him.
“Eliana—”
“Please. Just give me five minutes.”
He nods, but I can see he’s not happy about it. I hurry inside before he can change his mind.
The stairwell smells like it always does—mildew and old cooking and something vaguely chemical and upsetting that I’ve never been able to identify. Mom’s on the second floor, apartment 2B. When I get there, the door is cracked open.
My heart rate spikes. “Mom?”
I push inside to find her on the couch, surrounded by open wine bottles and tear-stained tissues. She’s wearing the same ratty bathrobe she’s had since I was twelve, and her face is blotchy from crying.
“Baby!” She pops up when she sees me, then lists sideways and knocks over a pile of magazines. Definitely drunk. “You came! I thought you’d abandoned me like everyone else.”
“Mom, your door was open. Anyone could have—”
“What’s the point of locking it? There’s nothing left to steal. He took everything.”
“Who took everything?”
“Derek! That bastard! Three months we were together, and he just… just left. No warning, no explanation. Just gone when I woke up this morning.”
Derek? Derek who? I’ve never even met Derek.
Hadn’t known he existed until this moment.
Truth is, I stopped bothering with all her Dereks a long time ago.
He’s just the latest in a long line of men who drift through my mother’s life, promise her the moon, and inevitably leave things worse than they found them.
I go into autopilot. The routine is as familiar as breathing. Get her water. Find aspirin. Listen to the same circular story about how men are trash, how she gave him everything, how she’ll never love again.
Until next week, of course, when there’s a new one, because Dereks are an infinite resource. In twenty-seven years, the world has never run out of them.
“Let’s get you to bed, Mom,” I say when she’s starting to wind down.
“I don’t want to go to bed. I want to talk to my daughter who never visits anymore.”
“I was here two weeks ago.”
“Hardly! You used to stay longer. You used to care.”
I guide her toward the bedroom, trying not to engage with the guilt trip. That’s when I spot something on the kitchen counter. A red-bordered envelope. I’ve seen that enough times to recognize it on sight.
An eviction notice.
“Mom,” I ask, “what’s this?”
She waves it off. “That idiot landlord. He’s being completely unreasonable.”
I pick it up and scan. “It says you’re three months behind on rent.”
“That’s not my fault! Derek was supposed to help, but then he left, and my hours got cut at the store, and—”
“Mom.” I sink into a kitchen chair, suddenly exhausted. “I just sent you eight hundred dollars.”
“And that barely covered anything! You don’t know what it’s like, trying to survive on nothing while your daughter lives it up in her fancy downtown apartment.”
“My apartment is a studio the size of your kitchen.”
“At least you have an apartment! Your own mother is about to be on the streets, and you’re lecturing me about money?” She starts crying again, those manipulative tears I know so well. “I sacrificed everything for you. And this is how you repay me?”
The speech is a knife between my ribs, same as always. Repetition doesn’t make it any less effective. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been supporting her financially since I got my first real job. I’ve paid her rent more times than I can count, but is that enough?
No. It’s never enough. It will never, ever be enough.
“How much?” I hear myself ask, voice flat.
She’s suddenly sober and serious. “Twelve hundred.”
“I’ll transfer it tomorrow.”
“You’re an angel, baby. The best daughter anyone could ask for.” She hugs me, reeking of cheap wine. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
I get her into bed, make sure she has water and aspirin on the nightstand, double-check that the stove is off.
When I finally leave, making sure to lock the door behind me, I find Bastian leaning against the wall in the dim hallway.
Fuck.
He must have come up when I took too long. Must have heard everything.
Shame burns through me like acid. Bastian Hale, who built an empire from nothing, who never lets anyone take advantage of him, just witnessed me fold like a house of cards.
We walk to the car without saying a word. Once inside, I stare at my hands in my lap, unable to look at him.
“I’m sorry you had to—”
“Eliana.” His voice is rough, almost angry. He shifts to face me, and I feel rather than see his hand come up.
For a second there, I think he might touch my face, offer the comfort I desperately need but can’t possibly ask for.
It hovers, that hand—millimeters from my cheek, near enough that I feel the heat radiating from his palm. His fingers curl and I realize he’s fighting himself, waging war against whatever impulse brought his hand up in the first place.
The almost-touch is worse than actual touch would be. It’s Schrodinger’s intimacy: both happening and not-happening simultaneously. My face tilts toward his palm without permission from my brain. A stupid evolutionary response to warmth and nearness.
Big man touch face. Me let big man.
Then his hand drops. It falls like a stone back to his lap, and the loss of contact I never actually stings like a motherfucker.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” I finally say.
He shakes his head. “Don’t apologize for her choices.”
“She’s my mother. I can’t just—” I stop, realizing I’m about to defend the indefensible. Again.
He nods. “How much does she need this time?”
“Twelve hundred. For rent and ‘utilities.’ Though I’m sure at least half of it will go to wine and whatever new Derek she meets next week.”
“And you’re going to give it to her.”
We both know the answer. “What choice do I have? She’s my mother. She’s—”
“She’s drowning,” he cuts in. “And she’s pulling you under with her.”
I cringe, if only because it’s so obviously, painfully true, and hearing it from him makes me want to scream or cry or both.
We drive home. The radio stays off. When we pull up outside my apartment, the full circle this night has taken is complete, though it feels nothing like it did an hour ago. I want to say thank you, but we did that already, and saying it now feels as repetitive as it does useless.
So I just get out. I’m halfway gone when his voice stops me. “Eliana.”
I turn back, one foot on the curb, one still in his pristine car—a perfect metaphor for my split life.
His eyes finally meet mine. “It won’t be enough. Not for her. It’ll never be enough.”
“I know,” I whisper.
It might be the first time I’ve ever admitted it out loud.
I close the door and walk to my building without looking back. But I can feel him watching. I can sense his car idling there until I’m safely inside.
In my apartment, I sink onto my bed fully clothed. The taste of oysters has gone sour in my mouth. The memory of Bastian’s hands coaching mine feels like it happened to someone else. Someone whose mother didn’t love them wrong and screw them up in all the worst ways.
Someone not like me.