blood soak through his clothing. Knowing that their life forces were fundamentally comingled. Did she know? Did she know, even a little bit, how he felt?
He imagined it wasn’t fair that she’d been conscious for his confession when he’d been his most vulnerable with her. Of course, he’d told her again what he knew about her parents and when he’d found out. She’d listened and she’d cried. But the anger she’d felt toward him for keeping it a secret was clearly gone. He wanted to ask her why it had meant so much to her on the night they fought but didn’t seem to matter to her now.
That fight had nearly cost him everything.
He’d never told her the other stuff he said. About loving her. How much easier would it be to think that she had somehow heard everything and took it all inside? That she just knew what was in his head and his heart?
“Ben?”
“Hmm.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“Who?”
“My mother.”
He lifted his head and met her gaze. “I do.”
“I think I want to go see her.”
“Really? Even knowing what you know?”
“She was an addict. An addict who wanted to keep her addiction and her daughter. My father was an addict, too. In his own way he still wanted to try to do right by me. Yes, they both shit the bed when it came to being parents, but I can’t claim that they didn’t care about me. Didn’t love me. Each in their own mixed-up way.”
“This is important to you?”
Anna glanced at the baby, the smile she wore practically making her glow from the inside. The light and energy that was Anna was back and even brighter than before. “Yes. I think...I think I need that last piece. Then it will all make sense.”
“Okay. In a few weeks when you’re up for it, I’ll take you to her. She works at a snack shop in one of the Big Foods stores.”
“She’s clean?”
“Yes. She served fifteen of her eighteen-year sentence. Got sober in prison and was able to get the job through a charitable organization that finds jobs for the formerly incarcerated.”
Her eyes narrowed. “And you knew all of this for years?”
“I did.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Ben thought of the easy answer, that he hadn’t wanted to tell her something so awful about her past. But there was more. “I was afraid. I thought if I told you what I had done—looking for them in the first place, even though you never asked me to—that you would know.”
“Know what?”
He took a deep breath. The crazy thing was he actually found himself wanting to say it out loud. He didn’t want her to just know it. He wanted to say it and know that she heard it. Awake this time.
“That I was obsessed with you. That I thought about you all the time. That I needed every piece of you. Your work, your life, your past and your present. In my head I couldn’t reason why, but now it all makes so much sense. I didn’t know what love was and yet it was right there. The whole time. Staring me in the face. That boyfriend you thought you dumped five years ago... What was his name? The one who had the nerve to borrow money from me for your date?”
“You mean Kevin?”
“He was going to dump you first. Because I arranged it. I told him if he ever even so much as looked at you again, bad things would happen to him and he could be assured of that because of my background in black ops. At the time I told myself I was only doing it for your own good. He wasn’t nearly good enough for you and I was simply helping out a friend who was mixed up with the wrong person.”
“Like I said, baby girl. Daddy is a nutcase.”
Ben could see she was smiling as she said that. Another fight avoided then. “I told myself a lot of things when it came to you. But the truth is I was lying. Lying about everything. There were times I told myself I hated you for turning me into this irrational creature. I would think about letting you go, cutting all ties so I could go back to my normal life. Then I would laugh at myself because I knew it would never happen. I would never let you go.”
He watched as she literally had to work to close her jaw. Then he saw the confusion in her