Page 91 of The Sun and the Moon
Chapter Forty-One
Cadence
Blood whooshes past my eardrums. Pounding, pounding, pounding from my rapidly beating broken heart. I can’t stay here another second. Not in this room with all the secrets swirling around. I whirl on my heels and bolt for the door. I mumble something to Sydney, something likeI need space, but I’m not even sure how much I say out loud.
She doesn’t follow me. She lets me go.
Even with her secret mixed in with the rest, I find myself hoping she isn’t letting me go forever.
I get to the end of the row of doors, about to turn the corner into the courtyard near our room, when I hear my name. I don’t stop walking. Moira doesn’t stop following. The crunch of my boots on the cobblestone, grinding the bits of gravel into the stone, is echoed seconds later by the clack of her sandals following.
“Cadence, wait.” Final and firm. I shouldn’t turn, but I do.
She’s standing alone at the entrance to the courtyard. Her hands hang loose at her sides; her hair catches the breeze. Her eyes are lighter than mine, her freckles, too. She is my mother, there’sno denying it, not even if I have this round nose and soft chin and Cupid’s-bow lips that I can’t see in her.
“His name was on the deed. He wasn’t some deadbeat, was he?” She let me believe he was. That searching for him was futile, not worth it.
“Depends on your definition,” she says. “He made a choice, and that choice meant he didn’t matter to your story.” She doesn’t step closer, but I do. Not as a concession, more as a threat.
“What gives you the right to decide that, Mom?” I know she likes the name, but it’s a flaming arrow on my tongue.
“That,” she says, nodding her head toward me. “Mom. That’s what gave me the right back then.”
“When I was a kid and I asked you about him? When I was a teenager? Left for college? What gave you the right then when I was a full-grown adult?”
“I knew how he would react to you finding him. He didn’t want a relationship—with either of us.” This, at least, looks painful for her to admit. “I wasn’t going to give you his name for you to find him and have him”—her voice cracks—“turn you away. I couldn’t do that to you.” She clenches her jaw, blinking. Tears hover at the edges of her lower lids. “I convinced him to let me keep Kismet by promising I wouldn’t sue him for child support.”
A thought burrows its way up from the depths of my subconscious, not tapping, not whispering, just appearing like a wild creature on the forest floor.
It’s fucked-up, but she really did do this for me.
Kismet.
Was mine. Always.
Full of secret hideouts, surrounded by trees that becameshelter, animals who became friends. For all the ways she used it for herself, she let me have it, too.
“You can’t sell the house, Mom.”
“You left the house.”
“But that doesn’t mean I don’t still love it.” Our eyes lock, and she knows, even though I can’t bring myself to say it.
I don’t just mean the house.
“It’s the only way I can see to get everything Rick and I need,” she says. “Everything is different now with the business, with the world. I can’t make this work anymore. What I do, the way I do it, it’s ending, and I can’t stop it.”
“You refuse to adapt. That’s what would get you what you need.” Her jaw is set, just like her mind. Just like her plan. “Lola has relied on that house, that job, since her mother bailed on her. You can’t do that to her—at least not without telling her.”
“She’ll understand. You know she has her own fool’s journey to go on when she’s ready.”
“Youcryptically claimed she’d know when the time was right to go searching for Lou. That doesn’t mean you get to decide that for her—”
“I know you don’t see it, but this way everyone gets what they need.”
I blink. Even as she’s grappling with her plan going awry, she can’t just say it. She can’t admit it’s wrong that she’s manipulated us. She pulled me back here from thousands of miles away, and she engineered a love story for me to walk right into.
I let it happen because I wanted it.
