Until We Fly (Beautifully Broken 4)

But I kiss her back and don’t say a word.

“Let’s go back to shore,” I finally tell her when we break for air. “I hate this fucking buoy.”

She laughs and we swim for shore. I chase her and grab her foot, she laughs and twists in the water. It’s as if I’m free now. Free from the constraining hate, free from the bitterness, free from all of it.

But then we reach the shore and reality awaits.

Todd waits.

My mother waits.

She’s come out of the house now and stands disapprovingly on the shore with the attorney, watching Nora and I frolic in the water.

“I’m glad you’re taking this so seriously,” she says icily, looking down her nose at us.

Nora’s head snaps back and before I can stop her, she stalks over to my mother and stares down at her.

“You have no right,” Nora snaps, each word a pellet of ice. “You have no right to even be here. You have no right to hate Brand. You have no right to him at all. You don’t have the right. You forfeited any rights to him years ago. If he gives you anything at all, it will be a miracle, because you don’t deserve it.”

I grab her elbow and pull her away. “Come on,” I tell her firmly. “She’s not worth it.”

“Does your girlfriend know that you killed your sister?” my mother calls from behind us. The words stab me in the back and I stop, frozen in place, before I turn.

“She knows everything.”

With that, I start to walk away again, but my mother just can’t help herself. She has to keep prodding.

“Everything?”

The meaning of that one word is clear. Crystal fucking clear.

Everything. By everything, she of course means that my entire life is a lie. Everything I am, everything I’ve become… is a lie. In her eyes, anyway. Because she believes me to be a monster.

I’m frozen.

Completely still.

And Bethany Killian is as foreign to me as a stranger. She laughs.

“I didn’t think so.”

She spins on her heel and starts to walk back into the house, and anger wells up in me, red and hot, a fury that I haven’t felt in years. It’s so fierce that it clouds my vision, it’s everything I have bottled up inside of me….all the anger that I’ve been carrying with me for so many years.

It explodes within me like a volcano.

“Mom?” The word is as foreign to me as she is.

She stops, and turns halfway around. She doesn’t answer, but she looks at me.

“Go pack a bag. You have five minutes.”

Now she speaks. “What?”

“You heard me. Go pack a bag.”

She takes a step. “I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to. Go. Pack. A. Bag. Take anything you want from the house. It will be the last time you’re inside.”