Colin #2
I’m on her heels, and Chloe’s on mine as we continue into the next room and stand over the countertop. “You’re hot.” Exceptionally hot, and her apartment is absolutely freezing. She always used to be so cold, always wanted the fire going or the heater on blast. Sometimes both.
“My meds burn me up,” she explains, moving around the kitchen carefully. Her arm has mostly healed since the fall she had awhile back. It was the catalyst that brought us here, but her treatments are supposed to help strengthen her bones and promote new bone growth.
Still, she moves gingerly, ensuring her steps are even and purposeful, hoping to prevent another fall. She’s otherwise healthy; or she’s supposed to be.
She was only sixty-seven when she got her diagnosis, and the doctor assured us both that her treatment would help.
She takes an oral pill every day, and when it was just her and I still living in her home, I’d give her monthly shots as well.
They never made her like this. Shaky. Skinny as a rail.
Demeanor slightly…dull. Bright and alert my ass.
“Since when?” They never made her warm before, and I recognized all the medications listed in her file a minute ago.
She moves from the cupboard to the sink, and as much as I want to jump in and take over what she’s doing, that always irritates her. She doesn’t want to feel like her independence is slipping away from her, and I’d never want to take it.
After filling three glasses of water and sliding two across the counter to me and Chloe, my mother leans against the counter, her bony fingers slack against the surface.
“Enough about me, Colin,” she chastises.
“I haven’t seen you in weeks, and you show up with a girlfriend?
That’s way more interesting than my internal temperature.
” Her eyes sparkle as she eyes Chloe, and she waves us to follow back in the direction of the couch, which we do.
I help her back to seated, then settle with Chloe onto the oversized loveseat next to it.
“The Baby Widow,” my mother sings, her eyes glued to Chloe, lips pulled into what appears to be a mischievous smile.
I cringe inwardly when she says it, the title the local newspaper gave her when they first started plastering her face on the front page—after I’d been less than subtle about my suspicions of her.
But when I glance at Chloe, she doesn’t appear offended. She has a small smile on her face, and she crosses one leg over the other. “How’s your mother?” my mom asks, and the question catches me so off guard that I physically recoil, the words feeling like a slap across my cheek.
“Mom—” I start, but Chloe interrupts me with a soft hand on my knee.
“We’re allowed to talk about her, Colin,” Chloe says gently. That statement slaps me across the other cheek, crimson, hot embarrassment flushing through me.
My mother’s question is a valid one, I guess. Caroline has been in prison for two years, it’d be the kind thing to do to ask how someone’s doing. But she’s a murderer. Why would my mother care?
“She’s well,” Chloe says, turning her attention back to my mom. “We trade letters every few weeks. We just won her an appeal, and we’re hoping that goes through smoothly.”
I straighten, though the news of the appeal isn’t a surprise to me.
I’d seen it in the newspaper and on TV. Heard rumblings about it throughout the department.
The reminder that I put Chloe’s mother in prison is a heavy one, a piece of baggage that feels like it may be too complex for us to unpack together if…
this turns into something real. Do I want that?
Especially if she was involved in her stepfather’s deaths in some way?
My mother tuts, leaning back into the sofa. She absently runs her finger up the length of her forearm, massaging the spot near her elbow that gave her the most pain before. “Good for her,” she says. “I hope she wins.”
Well, I guess today is just my day for lashings. She makes the comment like her son wasn’t the one who put her in prison, and is she…insinuating she thinks it might have been a mistake?
I tighten my jaw, leaning back against the cushion behind me. I want to jump in, defend myself, but this doesn’t seem like the time.
“Those men were horrible,” she continues, and Chloe nods slowly beside me, rolling her lips between her teeth. Her words from last night pummel through me.
They were bad men, Colin. And if you would have continued your investigation into them instead of taking an easy arrest, you’d have known that.
I wanted to do more digging. Investigating.
That’s the job, for Christ’s sake. I wasn’t sold on which one of them had been guilty.
I wasn’t convinced either of them had done it over the other—or both, perhaps.
But when Caroline confessed, my captain told me to back off, eventually threatening to kick me out of the department if I didn’t.
And then there was the video footage that put Chloe out of the house at the time of her third stepdad’s murder. That should have been the end of the line for me, but I hadn’t been able to quiet the nagging voice in the back of my mind that it was a setup of some sort…
Just before I’m about to jump into the conversation that’s giving me fucking whiplash and ask my mother how she could possibly know those men were horrible, she continues, “I could see it in their eyes,” further sinking me into my pit of confusion and shame.
And just like that, the conversation is behind us.
“You’re not here against your will now, are you, Chloe?
” My mother is joking, her gaze bouncing between the two of us and the ghost of a smile tracing her mouth.
“I know my son has been quite attached to the idea of you…in jail, on the front page of the paper, in handcuffs.” My mother gives me a wink that makes my face heat like an embarrassed teenager.
Gross, Mom. “Well, it seems he’s just attached to the idea of you, Chloe.
He hasn’t threatened your life to be here today? ”
I scoff, stretching an arm behind Chloe as she giggles.
“Would you quit? She’s fine,” I say, but I find myself glancing at Chloe anyway for confirmation, her posture loose despite the nerves she’d had leading up to this introduction.
“She’s in danger, I brought her with to…
” The words die on my tongue, because although my initial goal was to bring her with to protect her, it feels like that goal flew out the window somewhere between Sunset and Devil’s Peak.
“Ahh.” My mom lifts her hand to her own cheekbone, gently touching the pads of her fingertips to the spot Chloe has the remnants of a bruise on her face. “Is that the danger you mention? Someone put hands on you?”
Chloe mimics my mother’s actions, tracing a finger from her temple toward her nose. “Occupational hazard,” Chloe jokes, and then she’s leaning forward, changing the subject.
“How are you?” she asks my mom, reaching across the space and into my mother’s lap to grab her hand. “The girls at the front desk said you’re not eating. That you’re missing your activities.”
My focus snaps to where Chloe’s thumb is rubbing against my mother’s knuckles, the touch and movement so intimate, I’m utterly dumbfounded at the interaction between the two.
They’re talking like they’re old friends, like they know each other.
And as confusing as it is, it also sets ablaze a warmth in my chest that speeds throughout my entire body, effectively incinerating every last trace of suspicion in my blood.
My hand instinctively finds its way to Chloe’s back, the gratitude I feel toward her right now overpowering any other feeling that might attempt to invade my skin.
Not even my mother’s own children act this gently with her, this concerned. They don’t even show up. And here Chloe is, the woman I’ve made sure had zero peace after I put her mother in jail, seeming truly anguished about my mother’s current state.
Yeah. I’m a piece of shit.