Follow Me Always (Follow Me 3)

“You hit your head really hard, Skye. You had a concussion.”

“Mario. He was young,” I say. “Dark hair. Really good-looking.”

“Yes, he was.”

The images become clearer, and Mario’s isn’t the only face.

I also see…

My mother. My mother as a young and beautiful woman.

My mouth opens, but words don’t come. For there are no words. No words to describe the image that is now so perfectly clear in my mind I could have photographed it myself.

Mario.

My mother.

In bed.

In my parents’ bed.

She nods, tears welling in her eyes. “You remember.”

I nod slowly.

“You were so upset you ran off. You broke one of the china plates, and then you ran.”

I shake my head. “No. I remember the plate, but…I was chasing a praying mantis.”

“You probably did chase a praying mantis. You loved all animals, even bugs.” She laughs. “You were a little tomboy for a while, at home in dirty jeans and a T-shirt. The few times I tried to put you in pink frilly things, you ran outside as soon as you could and got them all covered in mud.”

“The power of pink,” I murmur.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just that…I don’t hate pink anymore. I mean, I don’t think I ever did. I just…”

“You just fought. You fought me on everything. You’re so much like your father.”

“I am?”

She opens her mouth to reply, but I stop her with a gesture.

“Don’t get off topic. What the hell were you and Mario doing in bed?”

She shakes her head. “Exactly what you think we were doing.”

Anger rises from my gut—the kind of anger that takes over your whole body. “All this time, I thought Dad had an affair.”

“No. I did.”

I stand, my hands curling into fists. “How could you?”

My mother drops back down onto the soft grass. “Skye, sit down. Please.”

Reluctantly, I sit back down on the ground, but only because I’m not leaving until she tells me every detail of why she thought it was okay to do this to my father.

“Dad is a good man,” I say.

“He is.”

I work hard not to yell at her. “So why? Why the fuck did you do it?”

She doesn’t scold me for my language. Good. I’m twenty-fucking-four years old, and I can speak how I want.

“There are things you don’t know. Relationships aren’t always what they seem.”

“Of course there are things I don’t know. I was seven fucking years old, for God’s sake!”

She winces at the profanity this time. “Your father and I… We didn’t always see eye to eye on how to raise you.”

“So what? Do you think you’re the only two people who ever disagreed about a kid?”

“It was more than that. He wanted more children,” she says. Then, after a pause, “I didn’t.”

“And that’s a good reason to fuck another guy? I’m not buying it, Mom.”

“That wasn’t the reason. I’m just giving you examples of what we disagreed on.”

I turn my head, unable to look at her for a moment. Her daisies are blooming. My mother’s favorite flower. And right now all I want to do is pluck every petal off every flower and grind them into the soil. “Fast forward to the part where you end up in bed with Mario. And why the hell I didn’t remember it until now.”

“After you caught us, I asked Mario to leave. It wasn’t worth losing the respect of my child.”

“But it was worth losing the respect of your husband?”

She buries her head in her hands, then, and a sob escapes her throat.

Does she seriously think I’m going to offer her comfort? So it was seventeen years ago. So what? To me, it’s brand-new information, as if it happened yesterday.

She finally looks up, one tear streaking down her cheek. “Why are you pushing this? Why couldn’t you leave it in the past? Why do you bring this up and let it affect what we all have now?”

I stiffen.

Déjà fucking vu.

Braden said almost the identical words to me after Betsy told me about him and Addie and I went storming into his office.

What the hell?

No. I reject the thought. This isn’t my problem. This is my mother’s.

“What happened? When did Dad come back?”

“He came back that day. I called him.”

“Because of me.”

“Yes, but he didn’t move back in then. After Mario left, Dad needed a little more time to deal with things. I understood, of course.”

“The crying,” I say. “You cried a lot.”

She nods. “I screwed up, and I knew it. I felt sorry for myself, and I missed your father.”

“Did you apologize to him?”

“More times than I can count,” she says.

“And…is he…?”

“It took some time, but he forgave me. We became close again, and in a way, I think I love him more because of it.”

I can’t help a scoff. “What? In what world does that make sense?”

“I can’t make you understand everything when I still don’t understand myself. Suffice it to say I grew up.”