Chapter 84 #2
I hated to leave her face and her warm hands, but I had no choice.
I didn’t even realize until I was halfway down the stairs that I had left Layla in my own apartment, not hers.
I knew she wouldn’t do anything and that with the way our elevator was set up, it was all but impossible for someone to rob me, but still.
I hailed an Uber, rode to the hospital in silence, and rushed up to the intensive care unit where Morgan said he was. I found them in a room about four doors down the hallway.
I stared, looking at the body of Edwin Hunt, lying on a hospital bed. Morgan was by his side, sobbing. Mom was standing near the door, her arms crossed. Morgan saw me, rose, and embraced me in a hug. I patted him a couple of times on the back and rubbed his shoulder as he sat down.
I didn’t have any words in that moment, but none were really needed.
I could obviously never understand what Morgan was feeling, not just because I had no relationship with Edwin, but because I didn’t know what it was like to lose a family member.
Unlike with my biological father, whom I still avoided even after his death, I vowed to be more present, if only for Morgan’s sake.
I then went over to Mom and hugged her. She motioned for me to follow her outside the room. She didn’t say a word until the door to Edwin’s room had latched shut.
“How are you feeling, Chance?”
I was never a great liar in the first place, but given that Melanie had divorced Edwin and shown no regrets at all, I didn’t see any reason to even mollify my words.
“I’m here for Morgan and that’s it,” I said. “As far as Edwin… I don’t really feel anything. Sorrow for him, maybe, but not like sorrow he’s gone. More like sorrow that he could’ve been a great man to me, and he chose not to be.”
Mom nodded and sighed. She leaned against the window to the room, noticeably making it so if any sound somehow did penetrate through the window, Morgan was unlikely to hear it.
“I’m not sure how to feel myself,” she said. “This is a strange day.”
A question crossed my mind that felt almost disturbing to ask, definitely disturbing to even consider. But the more I thought about how Edwin and Melanie had interacted, the more I considered what their relationship was like, the more I couldn’t help but wonder…
“Did you ever love him, Mom?”
The fact that there was a long silence after the question was painful. It wasn’t painful for me, but I felt so bad for Melanie. Even if the answer to my question was yes, that she was taking so long to answer told me that she had to go way back in time to find a point when she liked him.
“I don’t know, Chance,” she said quietly.
That might be the saddest part in all of this. For all of the money in the world, for all of the business accomplishments, the story of Edwin will be a complete lack of love.
“He charmed me when we first met, but we were so young,” she said. “I thought I loved him. But I was too young to know what love was. By the time I figured it out, we were already married…”
Her voice trailed off. I wrapped my arm around her, to which she smiled, cooed, and rubbed my back.
“I’m quite alright, dear,” she said. “It’s sad that I spent so long with a man I currently don’t love, but there’s no going back to that now. I can only focus on the time that I have now and move forward.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re taking it rather well.”
Mom shrugged.
“My heart aches for both of you,” she said, nodding toward Morgan in the room. “I know this doesn’t mean as much to you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t worry about you.”
“You got—”
“Just let me do it as a Mom,” she said reassuringly.
I smiled and did so, wrapping my arm around her.
“He was a man who never knew what really mattered,” Mom said.
“His last few days were spent with Morgan sporadically checking on him. No one else really cared, though. When all you do is have interest in money, you attract the kind of people who are only interested in money. And those kind of people will gladly get rid of you if it means they have an opportunity to get more money. Chance… you two are so young and have so many opportunities ahead of you. Just remember what you chase, you attract.”
I didn’t think I had heard the moral stated so well, but it was definitely something I’d been thinking of the previous couple of weeks.
Standing there, seeing my mother happy to be free from a loveless marriage and Edwin Hunt gone, I swore I would not make the same mistake as him. I had a chance to have something that, at best, he had only had for a fleetingly short period of time. I had a chance to have love with Layla.
I didn’t need to see much else to wait on. I didn’t need to know anything else.
Well, there was one thing I needed to wait on, but it had nothing to do with her.
For the sake of Morgan and my mother, I couldn’t focus on anything but those two until the funeral had concluded.
Even if my relationship with Edwin could best be described as “rough,” my relationship with Morgan and Mom was “loving.”
I would get to Layla, but life had thrown one more curveball at me. If Layla was meant to be, she would understand.