Page 114 of Liars and Liaisons

I don’t feel bad about it.

Any remorse I might have had once, any ounce of forgiveness yielded for the sake of giving it out, is gone. Dried up like water in a vast, relentless desert.

Forgiveness might be a gift, but not everyone deserves it.

Ultimately, the gift is to yourself—and that isn’t one you have to give out if you don’t want.

My mother’s downstairs with everyone else, having tagged along after Grayson carried me out of the James estate. She’d been ragged with worry, and it felt like some sort of fever dream, coming out and seeing her standing by Kal. The secret I’d been harboring for years in the flesh, and she didn’t even seem to mind it.

Evidently, he stayed by her side during the entire thing. He claims it was to keep her from being stupid and running inside, and that it went against every facet of his being not to run in to save me.

I’m just glad to know she wasn’t alone.

I felt a small kernel of relief pop in the pit of my stomach when she told me my father was safe and sound, visiting Greece. For real this time. Evidently, when he made his last payment to the Persicos, he decided he needed to get his shit together and took off for a private rehab facility close to his extended family.

When I asked how they intended to pay for it, she said someone reached out to anonymously sponsor him just this evening, when we were en route to Alistair’s home. I have an idea about who that may have been, but I’ll let him tell me if he ever does.

Regardless, I won’t reject his help. Not this time.

And as for my father… better late than never, I suppose.

I can’t be mad at him completely for the disaster he turned my life into. Not when it brought me Grayson James.

Laurel’s lying on the bed with my mother in my old room when I hop out of the shower. I wrap a purple towel around my head and stop in the doorway, waiting for her to speak as she rubs slow circles on the dog’s head.

Her dark hair spills down her shoulders, and I feel a little pinprick of regret as I note the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes, the laugh lines that weren’t there when I was nineteen. She’s aged so much, and yet somehow, she is the exact same woman I grew up loving and modeling myself after.

I wonder how different I look at her. If she still sees the little sunflower she spent two decades nurturing or if something rotten exists in its place instead.

She holds out a hand to me, and my stomach flips as I approach the bed, taking it and letting her drag me to her side. I settle in with my head on her chest, just below her neck, and she tucks me beneath her chin. Her fingers are warm as they begin circles on my shoulder, slow and sure, as if she’s simply checking to make sure I’m still here.

“I should’ve known this is where you’d end up,” she says after a while.

Laurel watches us with his big brown eyes, and I reach out with one finger, stroking down the soft fur of his snout.

“In a mayor’s house after being attacked and almost burned alive?”

She pinches me. “Stop it. It’s not nice to joke like that. I’m just happy I don’t have to go through what my poor sister did last year with Lucian…”

A pang shoots through my heart at the thought of my cousin’s death. The devastation Cora experienced with the loss of her brother.

How distraught she would’ve been if she’d had to bury me too.

“You know, once, a very long time ago, I fell in love with a man who begged me not to.”

My brows arch, and I pull back just enough to look up at her as she speaks.

“He told me he would break my heart, and because I was a silly little eighteen-year-old, I thought his self-awareness was sexy.”

I cringe. “I really hope you’re not talking about Dad.”

“Of course I am. I’ve never loved anyone else.” She laughs softly, gazing up at the ceiling as she continues stroking my arm. “It didn’t take long for me to realize that he wasn’t kidding though—about loving him being the most painful thing I’d ever do. Early on, it became clear he had a gambling problem. He’d work through the week, and back then, he was just doing construction and didn’t own the body shop, so his body was quickly deteriorating, and his mind… well, he was stressed with a new wife to care for and no familial support since he’d come to the States by himself as a child. So, after work on Fridays, he’d head for the riverboat at the state border and blow whatever money he’d made that week.”

My chest aches. I didn’t really known it’d been going on that long.

“Anyway, it got to the point where we were swimming in debt, on the verge of losing the little house we rented, and I turned to God. The church.” She pauses, as if waiting for my response, but I don’t give one. “I know that seems silly to you and that you never cared for any of that… you found your religion in the dirt, my mama used to say. But anyway, I started praying for some kind of shift in your father, that he’d overcome the addiction, and even if we couldn’t be well-off, I just wanted to bestable. I wanted to be able to breathe.”

I know the feeling.

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