All because of her wildly possessive mother.
Jeannie.
She was a normally sullen woman who avoided eye contact with Adam or me unless we dared to speak to Holland in her presence. In that event, she’d hawk us, watching us unblinkingly, waiting to hiss like a feral cat the second she heard either of us utter something she didn’t want her daughter to know about—even if it was just an invitation to a movie or a game.
She was like that with about everyone, and as a result, Holland’s dad left her upbringing entirely to his wife—just the way she preferred. Besides, he had ?
??his” kid in Adam, who’d also given up on bonding with Holland long before I ever met him. Because she was her mother’s. Anything regarding Holland was brought to her mom first. That was always understood.
At least in the sense that it was a rule that was followed.
In terms of actual understanding and relating, I’d never gotten it. Nor did I get how Holland had survived that woman without getting completely fucked up in the head. Jeannie had clearly done a number on Adam. The anger that lived in him was undoubtedly to do with her, but he’d at least had his close relationship with his father.
Holland, however, didn’t.
Her mother had made sure she was her daughter’s “only lifeline,” as Adam would say, and now that I thought about it, I realized how the soft spot had started. Holland had been stuck being raised by the cruelest fucking psychopath she knew.
And I could relate well to that feeling.
“What are you thinking about right now?”
Her voice was soft but her question pulled me right out of my thoughts. I blinked, studying her face for a moment before replying honestly.
“You.”
“Huh.” Her eyebrows quirked up and I could see her trying not to smile as wide as she was. “And what about me?”
I held my gaze on her for a little longer.
“You turned out pretty damned good,” I said.
She laughed before feigning a thoughtful frown. “Yeah. All things considered, right?” she said as she ran a box of raspberries under the sink. “God, you have no idea how glad I am that you know about my mom. I spent a whole drunken night explaining her to Mia during one of our first girls’ nights in, and she gets it, but she doesn’t… really get it, you know? She didn’t see firsthand just how crazy my mom was. All. The frickin’. Time.”
“Yeah,” I muttered, suddenly hit with a montage of all the times I’d heard Jeannie Maxwell yelling in her bedroom at her husband and sometimes Holland. “The hell happened to her, really?”
The question had blurted out before I could think twice about it, but it didn’t seem to faze Holland in the least. She didn’t even look up as she sprinkled berries onto the plates.
“Well. You know the story they tell.”
“‘Adam was a bad kid,’” I repeated, having heard the line several times from both Adam and his dad to explain Jeannie’s ways.
Judging from the wry smirk on Holland’s lips, she found it just as absurd and confounding as I had.
“Yep. Five words to sum up why I had to sacrifice all sense of normalcy as a kid,” she snorted, briefly disappearing behind the counter as she bent over to grab something out of one of the paper grocery bags. “And… all of my friends by junior year of high school,” she grunted distractedly before coming up with an enormous jug of maple syrup in her hand.
She was explaining now about why she had to buy that size. Something about it being the only thing available, but I wasn’t quite processing, because my mind had yet to move on from the topic she had just been talking about.
That whole thing that had happened to her in high school.
Having stayed so often at her house, I’d picked up on a lot about Holland over the years. Her family dynamics. Her day-to-day life. All her little personality quirks and habits, both good and bad. I had most of Holland Maxwell’s puzzle pieces.
But this had always been one of the ones I’d been missing.
Something happened to her during her junior year. I knew that. I knew that things got tough at school, because her dad asked Adam to come home to visit more often. To call here and there. He said vaguely that there was trouble with friends. But Adam never asked what exactly happened, and I’d never thought it was my business to bring it up if he didn’t. Beyond everything else going on in my own life, I was in my last year of law school, and I’d told myself it was better off if I didn’t know or get invested.
The advice probably still held true today. The wise thing to do right now would be to refrain from feeding my curiosity.
But I couldn’t be bothered with that this morning.