BooksBarbecue
Back Undone
Chapters (34)
  1. Cover
  2. undone
  3. Dedication
  4. one
  5. two
  6. three
  7. four
  8. five
  9. six
  10. seven
  11. eight
  12. nine
  13. ten
  14. eleven
  15. twelve
  16. thirteen
  17. fourteen
  18. fifteen
  19. sixteen
  20. seventeen
  21. eighteen
  22. nineteen
  23. twenty
  24. twenty-one
  25. twenty-two
  26. twenty-three
  27. twenty-four
  28. twenty-five
  29. twenty-six
  30. twenty-seven
  31. twenty-eight
  32. twenty-nine
  33. thirty
  34. Acknowledgments

I shook my head. Did she really think I didn’t know that? I’d been raised by a woman who transformed herself every time she went out the front door. “He was still married. No matter how imperfect a marriage it was.”

“I knew it was wrong. That’s why I didn’t want to bring you into it.”

“But you did. Don’t you see that, Mom? We’re a package deal.” I tried to keep my voice even. I wanted to stay calm. “When he gave me up, he gave you up too.”

She looked at me, and what I saw in her face wasn’t concern about her love life, but something else. “Serena, I’ll back away. I won’t complicate this. Whatever this is.”

“You couldn’t stay away from him before. What makes you think you can now?”

“Before I was trying to do it for me. Now I’ll be doing it for you.”

I looked into her eyes, and I believed her.

“I want you to understand something, Serena. You don’t owe him anything. You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be, just because you share some of the same biology. It’s not your responsibility to make him a better father. Okay? That’s his burden, not yours.”

I couldn’t help but smile. One less flour sack to carry around sounded damn good to me.

“So, you’re grounded for life, huh?” Shay asked, glancing over at my mom’s car.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think she’d actually stop when I told her I needed to talk to Shay, aka Mini Mart Mugger, aka Internet predator. But she did. Of course, she was also prepared to gun the Jeep Cherokee straight at Shay if he made one wrong move.

“I just wanted to thank you for everything. Especially for telling me about Kori.”

“You know, when you IM’ed me to meet you at the Mini Mart, I almost didn’t go. I didn’t really think meeting Kori in Kismet was any different than meeting her at the motel would’ve been. I’m glad I did. I mean, I wish your friend hadn’t called the cops. But I’m glad you and I became friends.”

“You remember when you wanted to know if there was anything else I planned to do for Kori? There was one thing. When I first told her you had mistaken me for her and IM’ed me, I asked her what she wanted me to tell you if you wrote again.”

“Yeah?”