Page 99 of Guarding My Love

“I’m not going to hash this out with you again,” her mother said. “You only know one side of it. You were fifteen years old and don’t understand it.”

“I understand what I need to know,” she said. “Why did you call?”

“I just found out Amanda had another child,” her mother said. “The least you could have done was tell me that. I feel like a fool that I had to find out at a charity event.”

“It’s not my job to tell you what is going on in Amanda’s life. If she wanted you to be part of her life, she would have let you in. She would have been in communication with you.”

“You mean like you’ve been?” her mother asked.

“The phone works both ways, Mom. Your treatment of your daughters is hard to ignore.”

“Don’t start to act like your sister,” her mother said. “You never used to be that way.”

“I know the truth. That is all I need to know,” she said. “I’m acting the way I feel I should be for me. What I need to do to protect myself.”

“You’re being dramatic,” her mother said. “Stop it, right now.”

“Mom,” she said. “I’m going to hang up. I don’t need this in my life.”

“Don’t,” her mother said. “I’m sorry. What is going on in your life? I thought things were wonderful with Landon. The last boyfriend before him, he wasn’t right for you. He was too old.”

Her mother barely knew about her relationships and most of the time she found it out through social media searches and then put her own spin on them for her country club friends.

“Landon and I haven’t been together for almost a year,” she said. “I left him.”

She wasn’t sure why she was explaining that other than she didn’t want her mother spreading false news.

“Why would you do that? He seemed like such a nice man. Just what you need in your life.”

“You don’t know what I need in my life,” she said. “You never did.”

“You need someone to take care of you,” her mother said. “You need constant praise and validation and always did. That is why you struggled so much as an adult. I gave it to you, but your father didn’t. When you left for college you started to rebel and that was your downfall.”

Charlotte hated the truth of her mother’s words.

Her mother did give her validation and she needed it as a child. But it was the wrong kind.

When she went to college, she started to see all the things she could do on her own if she put her mind to it.

Years of dating the wrong men had her falling into the role of needing to be cared for.

Not anymore.

She was doing a darn good job of taking care of her life now.

“My downfall in your eyes is what pushed me to be who I am today. Mom, I’m hanging up.”

She didn’t give her mother a chance to say another word and tossed her phone on the counter.

It wasn’t worth arguing and getting worked up.

“Marco, do you want to go for a walk to the beach?”

Marco stretched under her desk where he’d been sleeping. The clock on her computer said it was two and she’d been working since four this morning when she had to get on a video call for a client overseas.

She missed lunch but found she wasn’t hungry either.

What she needed was time and space to figure her life out.

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