Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
NICK
Chloe’s gaze lingered on my face like she was drinking me in, a small smile lifting the corners of her mouth.
“I always knew you’d be a handsome one. It’s good to see you, Nick.
I’m grateful to have this time with you, regardless of what happens after.
Thank you.” She leaned forward and offered me a slender hand.
I stared at it for a long moment. A gardener’s hand, I decided.
Short nails with a brownish stain to the fingertips.
When Mads’ knuckle in my back broke my musing, I clasped my hand around hers and hated the way my heart ate up the touch like a starving man.
“I’m not sure how I feel yet,” I answered honestly. “Just so you know.”
Chloe hummed in understanding, held my gaze a moment longer, then glanced over my shoulder to Mads. “And you must be Madigan. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Mads didn’t hesitate. “And you.” He took her hand and shook it gently.
“And this lush is Teddy.” Chloe smiled at the cat who pricked an ear at the mention of his name.
As did I, remembering another cat called Teddy. A demon who’d terrorised the neighbourhood for three years before disappearing one day when I was about six.
Chloe caught my eye and confirmed my thinking. “This one’s not as feisty as the one we had, but there were too many similarities to ignore. He appeared on my front porch one day about eight years ago and never left. I like to think it wasn’t by chance.”
An uncomfortable thought occurred to me and I asked, “Was Dad responsible for our Teddy going missing?”
Chloe shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. He never said anything, and I knew not to push it. My guess would be yes. Yours too, I think. Please, take a seat.” She waved us to the sofa.
“I’m sorry for not greeting you at the door, but my legs aren’t what they used to be.
Besides, you had a look about you like you might change your mind at any moment and make a run for it. ”
Mads snorted and I shot him a glare, which he ignored.
But he sat close to me on the sofa, his thigh pressed hard against mine, his hand resting on my leg like he knew I needed his touch just to breathe at that point.
And perhaps he was making his own statement as I’d done outside, letting Chloe know she had him to answer to if this didn’t go well.
If Chloe had an opinion on our open affection, she kept it to herself. “Do you mind if we just take a minute before we start, please?” she asked. “It’s been a while.”
I almost smiled. “Sure.”
The small room fell into comfortable silence as Chloe’s achingly familiar grey eyes travelled my face, taking me in, clocking the differences age had made while trying to find the boy hidden inside the grown man.
I knew what she was doing because I was doing the same, grateful for a chance to study this new version of my mother.
Chloe 2.0. Resetting the memory. Updating the file with new information.
Trying to reconcile the two. Trying to remember the woman who’d been my safe refuge for eight years before she simply walked out of my life.
The short silver hair suited her, although the style looked overdue for a cut. It was so different from the thick brown hair she’d sported when I was a child. I remembered how it caught the sun and bounced on her shoulders when she laughed.
And there were other changes. She wasn’t the same stick-thin exhausted woman I’d known, either. This older version had a little more meat on her bones, and it suited her. She looked . . . bedded in, like her life had finally become her own at some point and she’d taken the reins and run with it.
The idea almost made me smile, because in that way we were alike. Both of us were the product of a mean-hearted man who hadn’t given a shit about us. We’d escaped in different ways and changed our paths. Maybe we weren’t so different after all.
She sat stiffly in her chair, her hands trembling slightly in her lap, the only indication she gave that she might be as nervous as me.
She looked every one of her seventy-three years in a way that spoke of the struggles she’d experienced and the marks they’d left on her body and soul.
Worry lines creased her brow above tortoiseshell glasses, and more webbed the corners of her mouth, deep folds cutting up to her nose, the cheeks above heavier than they’d been.
It hadn’t all been sunshine and roses for her after she left.
But there were smile lines there as well, and her eyes no longer carried that constant sharp edge of fear that I’d known so well in my childhood. My mother had found joy at some point in her life. Maybe even love.
Like I had.
The idea felt surprisingly okay.
No one deserved to live a life without love. I rested my hand on the back of Mads’ and remembered how he’d resigned himself to that fate before we’d met. Nothing made me prouder than to have proved him wrong. It was a responsibility I took seriously.
I was still pondering that when I caught sight of a thin white scar running below Chloe’s right jawline.
It threw me back forty-seven years. My father put it there with a fish knife three weeks before Chloe left us.
It had been red the last time I’d seen it, angry, and still healing.
It was barely visible now, if you didn’t know where to look.
But I did. Because I’d been there. And I remembered the blood.
The thought started me cataloguing. The slightly crooked nose.
The small chunk out of her right ear. The scar over her left brow.
The small circular burns on her forearm—only one showed below the cuff of her forest green jersey.
And there were others, hidden by her clothes but indelibly printed on my brain.
All the broken bits she carried from her life before were still there, at least the ones I could see.
The emotional scars dug deeper, I knew. Invisible to the eye and far more brutal.
But they were there in the way she looked at me and in the memories we shared.
It’s why we were there after all. To see what was left between us, if anything.
Is that all there is to this? A venture down a painful memory lane. To what point and at what cost?
I was about to find out.
We both were.
And thank God Mads was there to help pick up the pieces.
“Strange, isn’t it?” Chloe broke the silence first. “Forty-seven years changes a great deal about a person, and yet so much stays the same.”
I huffed, and the words spilled from my tongue without thinking. “You remember the exact number of years then.”
Mads drew a sharp breath and I mentally slapped myself. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t—”
“Don’t be sorry.” Chloe waved dismissively. “God knows, I deserve to bear the brunt of your righteous anger. But yes, I remember every single day of those years without you.”
I said nothing, unsure of what I thought about her answer or if I even believed it. I waited for her to continue. Chloe had driven this meeting, after all, not me.
After a shorter but infinitely more awkward silence than the first, Chloe’s shoulders dropped, her body folding in on itself to reveal the regret and what looked like shame lying just below the surface.
The change was dramatic as she suddenly looked much, much older, and a great deal more vulnerable.
It was another thing we had in common, I supposed.
A thick suit of armour to keep the bad guys out of our head.
“I’m not sure where you want me to start,” she began in a much smaller voice.
“Oh, I think you probably do know,” I argued, trying to keep my tone if not friendly, then at least neutral.
“How about what was going through your head when you drove off that evening. When you left your eight-year-old son with his abusive father and then never contacted him again. What kind of mother does that? Did you even—”
I came to an abrupt stop when Mads squeezed my thigh.
An epic fail on the neutral tone, then.
Chloe’s hands trembled and her grey eyes glistened.
But her cheeks remained dry and her expression seemed oddly blank in contrast to just seconds before.
“Okay,” she said in almost a whisper. “I can see you want to get right to the heart of things.” She drew a long, slow breath and sank deeper in her chair.
“You’ll have to forgive me if I get anything wrong.
My memory isn’t what it used to be. I’ll do my best.”
What the— It was all I could do not to get up and leave right then and there.
Her memory wasn’t what it used to be? What the fuck?
How do you forget walking out on your kid?
If Chloe was as sorry as she claimed, every detail should have been seared into her brain, like it was in mine.
I was stopped from acting on the urge by the pressure of Mads’ hand on my thigh once again.
My gaze shot to his, full of compassion and understanding.
He nodded gently. “Just let her tell her story.”
I held those beautiful green eyes a moment longer, then sighed. I could do this. I turned my attention back to Chloe and waited.
She glanced nervously between us but didn’t apologise for what she’d said. “Age can be cruel,” she explained. “It takes things from you you’d never willingly give up, memories included.”
Even at fifty-five, I already knew that. Get over yourself, dipshit.
I relaxed.