I didn’t come here to save May DuPree.

I came to save myself.

Maybe not “once and for all,” because trauma doesn’t work that way. There may not ever be a “for all” to my healing. It may always be that the smell of pressed hair sets me off. There may always be days here and there when I can’t shake the sadness, the uncertainty that comes from being abandoned and betrayed. I may see trace amounts of this in my life forever, like a bloodstain on the floor that shows pale pink, but is never again spotless.

Oh, the blood of Jesus that washed us white as snow.

The line from one of MiMi’s hymns we used to sing on Sundays when no church would have us rises up to meet my pain. She rises up to meet my pain, like she always did. Head on. Fearlessly. With wisdom. Compassion. Unconditional love. The things she taught me got me this far. She was the first to lay bandages on my wounds. Today, I close them.

“I thought I needed your words, Mama,” I say, my voice hushed. “But my friend says the words that help me more may be the ones I say to you, so here goes.”

I reach in my purse for the journal I used to write the trauma narrative Marsha guided me through. The last page I flip to is where I begin.

“You had your chance,” I read the first line in a strong voice that doesn’t waver. “You had your chance to love me unconditionally, but you chose to change me. You had your chance to protect me as a mother should, but you chose to betray me for the man who split me in two. I was a little girl before Ron raped me, and after that day, I knew things I shouldn’t know. Had questions it wasn’t time for me to ask. He stole my innocence.”

The shock of that pain fills the room like floodwaters, rising all around me and over my head. I hold my breath. I gasp for air. The panic batters me in waves, but I draw air into my lungs by little sips at a time until I can take deep breaths. Like it has so many times before, this pain tries to drown me.

But it can’t. I won’t let it.

“He stole my innocence,” I pick up where I left off, my voice trembling and fainter, but still loud enough for me to hear—for her to hear if she can. “And instead of punishing him, instead of seeking justice for me, you chose him. And I’ve asked why almost every day since. Oh, I may not have said it aloud, but every time I doubted myself, thought I wasn’t pretty enough, light enough, needed to be different, needed to be more, I was asking why you did it. Trying to get to the bottom of what was so wrong with me.”

My spine straightens and I push against the weight of old pain and faded nightmares. I square my shoulders, finding the strength to toss them off like a cloak. “But you know what?” I ask rhetorically, because I already know the answer. “There ain’t a damn thing wrong with me. The problem was with you. The sin was his, and the shame, the guilt, the dirt

I carried around for years, that was his, too. That was yours, and I refuse to keep it.”

I shake my head, tears streaming over my cheeks, into the corners of my mouth, collecting at the base of my throat.

“The only good thing you ever did for me was give me away,” I say, stroking my gris-gris ring. “I didn’t come here to see my mother before she died, because my mother is already gone. MiMi was the best mother I could have asked for. Anything good about me finds its way back to her, and anything that’s not, she taught me how to accept or change.”

I fold the letter because I’ve memorized the last line. It is the truth that I came into this room knowing, and I’ll leave this room having said my piece.

“I came here not to blame you for giving me to her,” I tell May DuPree, “but to thank you for giving her to me.”

The hospital room door opens, and Aunt Pris rushes in with a jewelry box.

“I just brought the whole thing,” she says, handing it to me. “In case you get a . . . a vibe from one piece instead of another.”

“A vibe?” I ask, lifting one brow.

“I don’t know.” She shrugs elegant shoulders. “Whatever you and MiMi do, just do it. Just save her.”

“I can’t.” I shake my head and pass the box back. “I don’t know how to save anyone.”

“No, you can.” She clutches my hands between hers, desperation making her grip painful. “You have to. MiMi said you were the strongest.”

“What? When?”

“Always,” Aunt Pris says impatiently. “Even when you were a little girl, five, six years old, she said you were the strongest of us all. She said all the power we didn’t want passed on to you.”

“What? I . . .” I falter and process that. “Well, I can’t save a dying woman.”

“You have to,” Aunt Pris says, tears turning her dark eyes even more luminous. “They say she may not have much time.”

And like her words were an invitation, death comes. It’s not some cloaked figure that only I see holding a scythe. Not a dark angel or a creature with horns and a tail. It’s the sudden cold and the goosebumps that spring up on my arms.

MiMi said we miss most of what’s happening in the world because we can’t see it—that we miss the important things relying only on the evidence of our eyes.

Like when death enters the room.

Tags: Kennedy Ryan Hoops Romance
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