Confessions from the Quilting Circle - Maisey Yates Page 0,34
I didn’t think we could talk about it.” Her daughter never, ever talked to her like this and the words felt like a stark slap down the line. “I tried to talk about it. You were weird. You basically acted like I was doing meth when I told you that I went to get a doughnut. So we’ll talk about it later.”
“Emma...”
“Talk to Aunt Anna.”
Emma hung up the phone, and Rachel suddenly had an out-of-body experience, where she saw herself storming into J’s Diner and turning over a table in the middle of her daughter’s work shift.
Her daughter, who was seventeen and not seven.
So maybe she needed to get a handle on her reactions. But, honestly, at this point in life she didn’t have a whole lot of perspective on what emotions were even supposed to be.
She bit back a scowl. And she stormed straight down to the Shoreman’s Cabin, with murder on her mind.
Anna’s car was there, so she knew her sister was around. She might be up at the Captain’s House, but Rachel would find her.
Luckily, Anna was home. She jerked open the door, looking comically like Emma in that moment. Sullen and defiant.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Did you tell my daughter to go ahead and take the job without talking to me?”
Anna lifted a shoulder. “She did talk to you. You freaked out.”
“Funny. She said the same thing.”
“Because it’s true.”
“Adam didn’t ask her. He asked me. If he’d come to her directly—”
“You would’ve handled it exactly the same. Because you didn’t want her to take the job. You want to have her close to you, and I understand that, Rachel, I do. But if you try to control her too much you’re either going to lose her now, or she’s going to have a complete freak-out in twenty years.”
“What makes you say that?”
Anna huffed and pressed her hand to her chest. “The voice of freak-out experience.”
Rachel stared down her sister, her heart thundering. She felt like she was standing in the doorway of a room she wasn’t ready to enter.
One that might challenge what she thought about Anna. About herself and her own feelings toward her sister, and she wasn’t ready.
She didn’t want to be challenged.
“I’m not ready to have this conversation,” Rachel said.
“I know you’re not. I figure that was why you hadn’t asked me about it. But we’re kind of in it, anyway.”
“Did you do it?” Rachel braced herself for whatever the answer might be.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know why you think you’re qualified to give my daughter advice.”
“Really? That’s all you can ask me?”
“My husband is dead!” she yelled. “He’s dead. I would give anything...”
What, to have him back?
No, she couldn’t have him back. That stopped her cold.
In the endless suffering that he’d been in, in his weakened state, where he was just so tired. Living life as a caretaker, and not as a lover. No, she didn’t want him back as he was. She wanted him whole. Because if he could have been healthy for their whole marriage... And Anna had that.
She’d had it. Easy. She had thrown it away, and for what?
“I would never have done that,” Rachel said. “You threw it all away for sex? I haven’t had sex in years, Anna, just so you know. And I would never... I would never.”
Anna’s face was drained of color, the dark circles under her eyes pronounced. “There’s a big difference between can’t have sex and won’t have sex, Rachel. A big difference. And how it makes you feel... It’s just different.”
Her sister was getting at something, at a deeper issue, and Rachel wasn’t dense enough to miss that. But she was angry enough to choose to. Because Anna had taken this moment, the hardest time in her life, and made it about her.
She’d advised her daughter to take a job somewhere else. She couldn’t have waited to end her marriage, even a few more months.
Her pain. Her own pain was so big she couldn’t see around it, and right now she didn’t want to. She’d taken care of other people all this time and worried about them, and right now, looking at her younger sister, she chose to just let all that poison flow right out of her.
“Our marriage vows were the same,” Rachel said. “The same as everyone’s. And it doesn’t matter if you have more sickness than health, it’s still the same promise. It doesn’t matter if things are hard, it’s still the same. That much I know.”