Not My Mother by Miranda Smith (lightweight ebook reader .txt) 📕

I look down.

“I think I might have spoken to her, actually.”

“Jamie? She reached out to you?” Mom sits up straighter in her bed. “She should know better. She doesn’t need to get involved with any of this. I never would have made it out of New Hutton without Jamie’s help. She doesn’t deserve punishment for that.”

“I can’t be certain. Earlier this week, when I was visiting you in the hospital, I received a phone call. It was a woman, but she didn’t give me her name. She told me about a storage facility about an hour away from town.”

Mom leans back on the pillow and closes her eyes.

“She told me there were letters there. Letters for me.”

“Have you read them?”

“Yes.”

“So you already knew all of this?”

“I knew everything that was written in the letters, but I wanted to hear you tell it.” I look down again. “I’m guessing Jamie is the only person who would have known about them.”

“Yes. I told her I wrote everything down. I told her where they were in case… well, I suppose in case anything like this ever happened. The fear of punishment has never bothered me. What I feared most was losing you, then losing your respect. I can’t say I’ve acted very respectably, but I had hoped you would at least understand why I made the choices I made.”

“I understand. I do.” I squeeze her hand. It feels like we are on the cusp of full transparency. “There’s something else I need to ask you about. The cancer.”

Mom closes her eyes again and lets out a long sigh. “Who broke first? Carmen or Des?”

“The doctors, actually. It came out when they were telling me about your condition.”

I look around the room, at the bizarre setting for this emotional heart-to-heart. There very well could be a HIPAA violation in there somewhere, but the information is out now, so it doesn’t seem to matter whether I learned about it in the right way or not.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I had a routine screening that didn’t go in my favor, let’s say. That same week, you’d been going on and on about Ava’s party. I just didn’t want to ruin it for you. I thought, let’s have one more celebration before everything starts being about me. Obviously, I couldn’t have predicted any of this would happen.”

None of us could have. Even though I understand, the worry is now there, embedded deeply within me. She’s recovered from her attack, but her life is still at risk.

“How bad is it?”

“Could be better, could be worse. Isn’t that how most cases go?”

“I need you to start being honest with me. I need you to tell me everything that’s going on in your life, regardless of how you think I might react. Whatever it is, I can handle it. Okay?”

She nods. “Okay. I know how capable you are, but even as an adult, I feel this need to protect you. You’ll understand, when Ava is older. All I wanted was to enjoy the time I have left. If I’m lucky, I’ll spend it with my girls.”

She squeezes my hand as a tear rolls down my cheek.

I’m not sure she’ll be that lucky. Even if she receives a small sentence for Bruce Parker’s murder, she is likely to spend the rest of the years she has left in a prison cell. It doesn’t seem fair. After everything she has done for me, hiding away from the world all those years, she still might end up alone.

44 AmeliaThen

She has it all.

That’s what people thought when they looked at Amelia Boone Parker. Sometimes they said it, openly complimented her looks or accomplishments. Sometimes she could tell they were thinking it. She recognized the way eyes would dance around her body, at her expensive shoes, her immaculate ensemble, her delicate string of pearls.

They thought she was perfect. Hell, maybe they were right. But what they didn’t know was that the things Amelia wanted most in this world always eluded her. She had experienced her fair share of loss, but she didn’t feel capable of admitting that to anyone without sounding like a spoiled brat. That’s the difficult part about being a member of the elite—the pool of like-minded peers is small.

From the first time she begged her father to postpone a business trip, and he denied her, she had understood what it felt like to not get her way. It was an icky feeling. Making her feel full and empty all at once. Amelia’s deprivation wasn’t the same as others—she still dined at five-star restaurants and visited illustrious resorts, but her emotional needs always came last. Does it really matter what is dangled in front of your face? Whether it’s a necessity—a warm meal, shelter, a father’s hug—or some frivolous thing? Amelia didn’t think so. She felt as unfortunate as any young child would, being surrounded by a world of luxury where she could never find fulfillment.

When she got married, it wasn’t Amelia’s Big Day… it was the Boone heiress tying the knot. No one wanted to celebrate with Amelia for her sake. They wanted to say they had attended the event. An outsider watching the affair unfold would have assumed she was lucky to marry Bruce Parker, even if he wasn’t her first choice, or second, or third. He possessed the necessary qualifications: good family, handsome smile, decent degree, even if he was wasting it as a teacher at some private school.

It was enough, sure. He was the type of man most of her peers aspired to marry, of course. But to Amelia, like everything else in her glass house of a life, it wasn’t quite right. Wasn’t quite right was not enough to do anything about it, though. Not when you were a Boone. Not when you were a Parker. No, she’d been raised to persevere, march through the difficult times in life with her chin high, her shoulders back. She would arrive