She was watching me, I could see that in my periphery. I would not give her eye contact. I couldn’t.

“It’s hard to believe that you loved us and wanted the best for us when my first memory is hunger, my second is constantly being cold, and the third is what crying in an empty house sounds like,” I remarked dryly.

“I was a child, Nora.” My mother’s voice was tight with shame. “I’m not going to pretend anything I did was right, but I was uneducated with no role models of my own, and my only advantage was my looks. And being able to talk men into anything.”

“Shame you couldn’t talk my brother out of killing himself with a drug addiction,” I said to the lake.

My mother sighed dramatically. I was used to those sighs. They came when she’d decided I was being too needy, too dramatic, too much for her. Which was pretty much always, in her books.

“I know you hate me.”

I didn’t correct her.

“Ansel knew, he understood that I made mistakes but that I loved you underneath it all.”

His name was a blade, through every inch of me. “He was a fucking marvel,” I hissed. “He loved you because love was all he had inside him. He wasn’t capable of hating you, resenting you, blaming you like you deserved.”

“I know,” my mother replied in a small voice. “I know, and nothing will ever bring my boy back.”

There was pain in her tone. Agony. A kind that she couldn’t mask. A kind that was real.

The worst thing was not finding out your mother was a complete monster.

It was finding out that she wasn’t a complete monster.

That she was human. That the world had hurt her. And that instead of growing, changing, learning, she’d hurt us. Not because she was evil. Oh, that would’ve been so much cleaner. If she was just wrong. If I could write her off entirely.

But now I couldn’t. I felt empathy for this woman. The woman who had let us go hungry, cold. The woman who had picked me apart like a vulture, finding the loose, fragile parts and tearing them from me.

“It’s too late,” I exhaled a heavy breath. “For amends. For any kind of relationship between us.” I turned to regard the apartment, the windows illuminating all of the people inside. The furniture, the art, all expensive, all impressive… to certain kinds of people, at least.

Rowan was there, cutting a dark shape amongst all of the country club assholes. He was standing close to the sliding doors leading out here. His eyes were on me and my mother, gaze hard and posture rigid. He was ready, poised to run out here, protect me from anything he could.

I tried to give him a reassuring smile, but I wasn’t physically capable of such things.

“You did it.” I turned back to my mother. “You got the life you always wanted. All you needed to do was sacrifice your son. Steal away our childhood. Now, you’ve got the money, the things, the husband. But you don’t have children. One is gone from this world, and I may as well be dead to you because you’re dead to me.”