Chapter 4
Emmaline
By the time I made it home, my feet felt like they’d been replaced with bricks.
I kicked off my shoes in the entry and stood there, letting the air conditioner whisper over the sweat at my neck.
The scents of lemon oil and old wood lingered, the way they always had after Gran did a big clean.
I hadn’t changed much—couldn’t bring myself to.
The crocheted throw still hung over the back of the sofa.
The little blue glass hen still guarded nothing on the kitchen windowsill.
The neat little block letters of her handwriting peeked out from the taped recipe card on the cabinet: add vanilla last.
I poured a glass of sweet tea from the pitcher painted with daisies in the fridge and leaned back against the counter.
It had been a long week, but a good one.
So many people had come through the bakery, laughing, telling stories, doling out hugs and congratulations and welcome backs.
Every night I’d come home to this house that was too quiet and too full at the same time, like she’d just stepped into the garden and might walk back in, complaining about how I stacked the mixing bowls.
I was dead on my feet and halfway to convincing myself I could sleep through supper when someone banged on the front door. Three sharp, insistent hits like a collector looking for payment.
I didn’t even have to look. My shoulders climbed to my ears as I braced for what was coming.
“Emmaline! Open up. I see your car out here.”
I set the tea down and wiped my palms on my jeans, taking three slow, deep breaths before I moved to unlatch the door.
Marla Maddox swept in on a gust of humidity and perfume. Bleach-blonde gone brassy at the roots, lipstick a shade too young, sunglasses pushed on top of her head like a tiara, she looked me up and down and gave a smile I didn’t buy for a second.
“There she is.” She cooed it like she’d discovered me after an exhaustive search. “My hardworking girl. I heard you reopened the bakery.” She made a little show of peering past me into the living room. “Didn’t even invite your own mother to see.”
“Hello to you, too.” I kept my voice light. “How’d you hear?”
“Karen.” Her mouth curled, pleased with itself. “She said the whole town’s making a fuss. Thought I’d come lend a hand. You know,” she gestured vaguely, “be here for you.”
There it was. Sweet for half a sentence, knife for the rest.
“I’m managing fine.” I worked to stay flat and emotionless. She’d see any expression of feeling as a weakness to exploit, and I was so beyond willing to deal with that. “What do you need, Mom?”
Her expression flickered—the smallest crack—then hardened. “Well, isn’t that a way to greet me.” She pressed a hand to her chest. “I’ve been gone a few months, and my own daughter can’t be bothered to offer me a glass of water in my mother’s house.”
I stepped back because the script was older than I was, and I’d rehearsed it too many times. Southern etiquette dictated a beverage be offered, no matter how much I might’ve wanted to boot her out with a shotgun. “Do you want some tea?”
She swept past me without answering, eyes skating over everything as if she was inventorying the contents of the house. “Hm. Still the same. Mama never did like change. I suppose you left it like this for her.” She turned, lashes fluttering. “Or is it just to keep me out?”
Resisting the urge to bristle or point out that she wasn’t making any sense at all, I didn’t even raise my voice. “It’s her home. I’m trying to honor that.”
“Oh, please.” She laughed, brittle. “You think I can’t see what you’re doing?
You and her, always acting you’re better than me.
Lock me out, talk about me to the whole town like I’m some kind of—” She broke off, swallowing down the rising hysterical note.
“I came because I need a little help. That’s what family does. ”
There it was again. The truth tucked inside a lie. “What happened?”
She tossed her hair like she’d been waiting to be asked.
“Nothing dramatic. Just time for a change. Devon and I—he’s been…
difficult. He asked me to give him some space.
” She smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle in her blouse.
“I thought I’d come home for a bit. Reset.
Be with you. Help at the bakery, if you’ll let me. ”
Devon. I searched the mental carousel of names.
I’d never met him. Not surprising. She’d been through more boyfriends in my lifetime than I could name.
None of them had stuck around longer than my father, and he’d only stayed long enough to knock her up twice, first with me, then with my little brother three years later.
But I didn’t need to know what had happened between her and her flavor of the month to understand what this was.
“You want to stay here.”
“This is my mama’s house.” The hurt rushed in like floodwater. “You think because she took you in and taught you to bake you get to slam the door in my face? I am your mother.”
I wrapped my fingers around the edge of the counter until the wood bit into my skin.
“You left before the flood. You came back for one day when the roads reopened, and when Gran told you we didn’t have a spare bed for anybody not willing to work, you called me a selfish little girl and disappeared again.
” Because somehow Marla not getting her way was always my fault.
“That’s not fair.” She blinked hard, eyes shining with the crocodile tears she’d always been so adept at wielding like a bludgeon. “You know what it’s like out there? I did everything I could for you. You have no idea what I’ve sacrificed—”
I held up a hand. “I know exactly what you’ve sacrificed. You sacrificed being here.”
She reeled like I’d slapped her. Then she went for the tender place.
“You always were cold.” Though the words were soft, they slid between my ribs like a well-placed knife. “Even as a little thing.”
Don’t react. Don’t react. Don’t react.
But my heart began to thud as my temper stirred.
I was cold. Heartless. All because she’d weaponized emotion against me my entire life.
I’d learned early to walk on eggshells, lest I set her off, and even that hadn’t been enough.
She’d rage or cry or lash out without provocation.
And that didn’t begin to cover how she behaved when her antics didn’t result in her getting her way.
The only consistent thing about her behavior was that I was always her favorite target.
“You think running that bakery makes you a good person? All those people fawning over you because you can make a cake?” She leaned in, and I smelled the menthol in her gum. “Are you telling them about your brother while they lick frosting off their fingers? Telling them how you abandoned him?”
My mouth went dry, even as I stood my ground. “I abandoned him? What about you? You left, Mom. You weren’t here for anything.”
“I wasn’t welcome,” she snapped. The tears came then, big and glossy, perfectly formed.
“I came today because I thought maybe you’d want your mother.
That you were tired and lonely in this big old house without Mama, and you’d be grateful.
But no, you’d rather let me sleep in my car than lift a finger.
” She touched her temple like she felt faint.
“One day I’ll be gone, and you’ll wish you’d been kinder. But by then it’ll be too late.”
The speech hit all of her usual marks. It would have landed when I was nineteen. It still would have stung last year.
Today, I was just tired.
“The spare room is full of boxes from the bakery repairs.” I sent up a mental prayer of thanks that I hadn’t gotten around to moving any of them, so it wasn’t an outright lie. “Even if it weren’t, this isn’t a good idea.”
Her mouth twisted. “Because you’re ashamed of me.”
“Because it isn’t healthy.” I kept my voice even. “You can go to Aunt Karen’s. Or I can pay for a motel for a week.” I really couldn’t afford to after everything else, but my sanity was worth a little more debt.
She stiffened. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you make me a charity case in this town. I am your mother, Emmaline. You should want me here.”
I set the tea glass in the sink and looked down at my flour-cracked hands, at the minor burn on my wrist from yesterday’s cinnamon rolls. All the work, all the years, all the ways I had bent myself around other people’s storms.
“No,” I said quietly. “I want peace.”
She stared, stunned into silence for a breath.
Then she laughed, high and ugly. “Peace? With that last name? With a brother in prison and a mother who can’t so much as knock on the door without you turning into a little ice queen?
” She took a step toward me, trapping me against the counter so I couldn’t escape.
Story of my life with her.
“You’ll be sorry,” she said. “When I’m gone for good, you’ll be the one crying at my grave.”
Somewhere outside, a car took the turn too fast, tires hissing on hot pavement.
Beyond done with her, I walked to the front door and opened it. The heat shouldered in, along with the sound of bees buzzing from bloom to bloom on the crape myrtle at the corner of the house.
She didn’t move. For a long second, I thought she’d throw herself at the couch and dare me to drag her out. Then she made a sound like a wounded thing and swept past me instead, nearly clipping my shoulder with her purse. On the porch, she turned, eyes bright with fury.
“I don’t know what I did to deserve such a hateful daughter.”
Ignoring that last jab, I said, “I hope you find someplace safe tonight.”
Her mouth flattened. She stalked down the steps, digging for her keys, and missed the way my hand shook as I reached for the doorframe to steady myself.
I stood where I was, watching her get into her beat-up Chevy and peel out of the driveway in a spray of gravel.
Then I simply dropped my brow to the wood, closing my eyes until the dizziness passed.
A headache bloomed behind my eyes, the kind that always followed in her wake.
I pulled a breath in through my nose, out through my mouth, the way the therapist in Asheville taught me for exactly this kind of moment.
Everything in me was raw and wrung out, making the exhaustion I’d felt before her arrival look like a vacation.
Marla had been a problem all my life. I didn’t know exactly what was broken in her to make her like this.
My therapist had told me she displayed all the traits of borderline personality disorder.
I’d read some books on the subject, and yeah, that tracked.
But no matter what it got called, the end result was the same.
She thought the world owed her everything. She was always the victim, and emotional manipulation was her favorite game.
When Gran was around, it was better. She could shut down my mother’s behavior better than anyone else. But with her missing and my brother in prison, it had been a long, long time since I’d had any backup.
I was considering the wisdom of a medicinal glass of the moonshine I knew Gran hid in the back of her closet when I heard the sound of tires on gravel.
My eyes flew open, my body braced for a fight if it was Marla come back.
But it was a police SUV coming down the drive, and Bodie Gibson was behind the wheel.
For one wild second, I thought about bolting the door and pretending I wasn’t home.
I didn’t have it in me to spar with him today.
Not after my confrontation with my mother.
But I wasn’t fast enough, and he definitely saw me as he parked in front of the house.
So, I started rehearsing excuses that would get him to leave.
He got out slowly, like his boots were made of lead. No easy grin. No polite nod. Just a face I used to know better than my own, carved down to something stripped and solemn.
All the practiced refusals died on my tongue.
I clutched the doorframe tighter, my palm gone slick. “What’s wrong?”