“There’s so much I want to say to you,” she said. “I can’t shake the feeling we’ve met before. Probably just the guilt.” She gave me a weak smile.
“I used to live with the Crownes,” I said.
Her eyebrows raised, and I saw she was making the same realization as I was.
“I see it now. You and the youngest…” The tray she was holding shook. She set the tea down next to a stack of magazines, and I saw what was beside them: a bound, red-leather book with a burned tree design. The last time I’d seen it I was handing it to Gemma, for whatever reason I didn’t want to think about.
Now my mom’s diary—her diary—was beating between us.
She must have noticed me eyeing it, because she said, “You probably don’t remember, but I gave this to you.”
“I’ve kept it with me for twenty-three years.” Silence engulfed us. When I dreamed of meeting my mom, it was beautiful and rosy, with no place for anger and rejection.
In reality, all I could feel were my scars breaking open.
“Why the fuck do you have it?” I couldn’t look her in the eyes.
“I…I was looking for you. I only recently learned you never went to a family, Theo,” she explained. “I’ve been looking and looking for you, but everyone who was there when I left you at the station was either dead or a dead end. I got desperate. This was my last hope.”
She caressed the leather front. “I got the diary… I didn’t get you. They wouldn’t even tell me how they got it, or where they got it.”
I ground my jaw, fighting the urge to stand up and leave, but at least I found my mother’s eyes. Pale like mine.
“But you found me anyway. You followed my map.”
Abigail would say it was fate. In her romantic, starry-eyed view of life, she would look at all these coincidences and say it was fate. I got rid of my mom’s diary. I’d chucked it,
assuming I’d cut it and that part out of my life.
It led me back to her.
“Why did you leave me?” My pain came rushing out in a jagged yell. “You abandoned me. You just let me go. Now you’re saying you wanted to be found?”
Her brows caved. “I thought I was giving you a better life.”
I looked around at her mansion, her beautiful things and apparently perfect marriage to one of the most powerful people in Crowne Point.
I scoffed.
“More like you were burying a dirty fucking secret.”
“I didn’t used to live like this. I was fifteen and poor, with strict conservative parents who promised you would go to a better family if I just let you go. I believed them. Anyone was better than me. I can’t erase what I did. I can’t take back those years—”
“Would you do it again?”
Say no. Say you regret everything you did to me.
“Yes.”
I stood up.
“Have you ever done something awful for the right reasons?” she asked my back.
“No,” I lied.
“Well… good. If you had grown up in the house I did, with the parents I had, you would’ve.”
I spun around. “You should’ve stayed. You should’ve kept me.”