Page 39 of Pieces into Place
So why did she still feel like she was on the outside of it all looking in?
As a tear fell from her eyes, there was a knock at the door as it slightly opened. Blake assumed it was Alexis, and yet wasn’t surprised when Vera poked her head around the cracked door. She smiled sweetly at Blake, but Blake could still see the concern in her eyes.
“Everything okay, sweetie?”
“Yeah,” Blake lied, although she didn’t know why. Shaking her head, Blake lowered her gaze from Vera’s. “No.”
“Oh, honey.” Vera hurried over beside her, sitting next to her on the bed as she put an arm around Blake’s shoulders.
Blake wasn’t sure why she did it, but she wrapped her arms around Vera’s waist as she buried her face in her chest. Her tears came without warning and with an intensitythat surprised Blake. Through it all, Vera held Blake tightly, as if she was the only thing keeping Blake from falling apart completely. And at that moment, she very well might have been.
“It’s okay, Blake. I’m here.” Vera kissed her head. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Understand what, honey?”
“Why you love me so much?” Blake sat up slightly, pulling out of Vera’s embrace. But Vera kept her hand on Blake’s knee, comforting Blake more than she probably knew. “You didn’t know me until five years ago.”
“No. But I’ve knownofyou since the very first day I met your mom.” Tenderly, Vera tucked Blake’s hair behind her ear as she spoke. “I don’t think you know that story, do you?”
Blake shook her head.
“Well, Mom came into my office with Mason. She’d just moved here and didn’t have anyone to watch Mason. And you know your sister. She doesn’t have a filter. So when she blurted out that her daddy took her sister, I watched the pain on Isla’s face grow. That nearly destroyed her, honey. Losing you…” Vera shook her head. “That pain was so fresh, even almost a year later by the time I met her.”
Vera paused for a moment, seemingly to let Blake process what she said before continuing.
“I knew before I ever started to date Isla that her pain over losing you would stay with her forever. How could it not? You were her baby.Areher baby. I never for a second hesitated helping her carry the burden of your absence in our lives. We thought about you all the time. Every birthday, every holiday, every day. Blake, you were always on our mind. I didn’t birth you, but you’re still my daughter. Just like Harper isyourdaughter.”
For the first time in the last five years, Blake realized her and Vera’s similarities. They had each fallen in love with not only a woman, but their child as well. Blake had taken on all of Alexis’s pain from her past, just like Vera had with Isla. That realization sent shivers down Blake’s spine as she looked at Vera.
“I… I never thought about it that way before. I’ve always seen Harper as mine, and now I see why you always saw me as yours.”
“Always, Blake.” Vera framed her cheeks with her hands. “Always. When people asked how many kids we had, we always said five. You were never far from our minds. Never. And when you showed up here five years ago, you completed our family in ways we had only dreamed about before.”
“I guess I’ve just always struggled with feeling like an outsider. You all had lives and families without me. And that really hurt.” Blake wiped the tears from her cheeks as Vera put her hands on her thigh. “I know it’s not fair for me to say that.”
“Honey, it’scompletelyfair and valid that you say that.”
“Really?”
“Really. But just because we had a family didn’t mean we were trying to forget you. That’s why your pictures are all over the house and why all your siblings knew about you. Ellie used to ask about you a lot when she was younger.”
“She did?”
“Mhmm,” Vera nodded. “She had a picture of you by her bed for the longest time. She’d tell us that her sister was watching over her.”
Blake let out a sob just picturing her baby sister doing that. A sister who, at the time, had never met Blake.
“Ellie, Brayden, and Evie all knew about you. They all loved you. Mom never kept her pain hidden from them. They knew how much losing you hurt her. How much ithurt me. We triedso hardto find you, Blake. And when we did, we started sending letters. When they kept going unanswered, we assumed you didn’t want to contact us.”
“That’s not true,” Blake defended with anger in her voice that wasn’t meant for Vera. “I didn’t know about them.”
“I know, honey. We know that now. But at the time, we thought the same thing you did about us. Or about your mom, at least. That she didn’t want to be in your life.”
“That’s what Dad always told me. I never,” her voice hitched in her throat, “thought to question it. And I was so young when he took me. I didn’t know Mom’s maiden name, so I never could find her when I searched online. She didn’t use Calloway beyond the marriage certificate and our birth certificates.”
“I know. She changed her last name after the divorce. Mason’s too.”
