And Marina had been about to push Avery in the same direction she’d been pushed.

“She’s right,” Marina said.

Avery whipped around to stare at her, her mouth open slightly.

“I mean it,” Marina said and squeezed Avery’s hand. “You have a right to be angry and disappointed and you should feel that way for as long as you want to. All I ask is that you don’t let it take over every second of your thought, because you have great things to accomplish, and I don’t want his crap interfering with the awesome life you’re building.”

Halcyon nodded. “That’s it exactly. Get angry. Throw things. I used to go out into the bayou and shoot stuff when I was fed up with my mother. But I learned how to partition her off, for lack of a better expression. That way, my feelings about her didn’t taint everything else.”

“How did you do that?” Avery asked.

“I started by distancing myself from her until I could get healthy,” Halcyon said. “Being around her kept me riled up. I didn’t have time to establish boundaries and learn how to separate who she was from how I needed to be. I had to accept that she was a narcissist. I didn’t do anything to cause it and I couldn’t do anything to change it.”

“How long did you go without speaking?” Avery asked.

“Eight years,” Halcyon said.

“Really?” Marina asked, surprised. She’d known that Halcyon had ceased involvement with Constance for a chunk of time but hadn’t realized it had gone on for that long.

“What made you cut her off?” Avery asked.

Halcyon looked out her back window, a sad expression on her face. “Four days after Danny died, she showed up at my house, asking for money. She was having a stressful week and needed to take a trip to Mexico to recharge. She got angry when I refused to give her any. Not that I had any to give. I’d just buried my husband the day before. She hadn’t even come to the funeral.”

“Oh my God,” Avery said. “That’s awful.”

Marina felt tears well up and she struggled not to break down in front of Avery. She’d known, of course, that Constance hadn’t been at the funeral, but Halcyon had never told her why or what had happened after. No wonder she’d restructured her life to exclude her mother.

“It was awful,” Halcyon agreed. “But it also made it very clear to me that I would never matter to Constance. It was something I had to accept in order to let it go. Does that make sense?”

Avery nodded. “But you see her now.”

“Yes, but it’s very surface-level,” Halcyon said. “She blows into town three or four times a year and we have lunch, then she heads back to New Orleans, and we return to our regularly scheduled lives.”

“If she’s not capable of caring for other people, why does she come see you?” Avery asked.

“Honestly? I think it’s because she doesn’t want to look bad to her friends when they ask if she’s seen her daughter lately,” Halcyon said. “Appearance is very important to Constance. Maybe the only thing that’s important. She might be an unfeeling bitch but she doesn’t want to appear that way. At least, not to other people.”