Confessions from the Quilting Circle - Maisey Yates Page 0,85
boyfriend of hers, but also about the accusations that Hannah had thrown around out on the street. It was weird, to acknowledge that there needed to be a shift in her relationship with her daughter. Because when Emma had looked at her and said that she just wanted to protect her mother, Rachel had felt shame. Intense shame.
She was supposed to protect Emma. Emma wasn’t supposed to protect her. And, more importantly, Emma shouldn’t ever feel like she had to. But she did. And she realized that her daughter was carrying a lot more weight on her slender shoulders than Rachel had ever imagined.
It was the same with Anna. The same with her mother, even, and it was hard to acknowledge that because she was still so mad at her mother, but it was true.
She didn’t have a solution for the way things were between them. And she wasn’t even sure if...being conscious of it now, she could have fixed it before it got here.
She had been lost in her own hurt. In the day-to-day doing, and caring for Jacob. Anna had been lost in trying to maintain the appearance that her marriage was okay. Her mother had been lost in this fiction she had created about herself. And Emma... Emma had been hiding herself.
Rachel sighed heavily and made her way upstairs to her daughter’s room. She knocked tentatively.
“Come in,” said a muffled voice.
Rachel walked in and saw that Emma was stretched across her twin bed sideways, her legs hanging off the other side. She had a book in front of her, and her phone next to that.
“Can we talk?”
“Yeah,” Emma said. “Are you mad at me?”
“No. I’m mad at myself.”
“Are you mad at Grandma?”
“A little bit.”
“Yeah,” Emma said. “I can see why you would be.”
“Aunt Anna is furious with her,” Rachel said. “She’s so mad she’s barely talking to me.”
“I can’t blame her,” Emma said.
“Me, neither.”
Rachel hesitated for a moment. “About what Hannah said,” Rachel said. “About me. And about Adam...”
Emma wrinkled her nose. “I didn’t take that seriously,” she said. “That woman is clearly insane. Like...what’s her deal?”
“I don’t know,” Rachel said. She thought it best to hold back that she thought Hannah might be a frigid bitch. That was the kind of thing reserved for her sister, not her daughter.
“Adam is my friend,” Rachel said, something about the words sitting wrong on her tongue. “And I swear to you, nothing... I was faithful to your father. I loved him. I love him still. Nothing will ever... It will never change that. Luke is your first boyfriend, right?”
“Yes,” Emma said, frowning.
“You’ll never forget them,” Rachel said. “Never. Whatever happens after this. You never forget the first time you fall in love.”
Emma’s cheeks went pink. “I didn’t say I was in love with him.”
“Are you?”
“We’ve only been...hanging out for a couple of months.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s just... Those relationships that build who you are... You never move on from those. Your dad shaped me into the woman I am, just like I shaped him. He gave me you. He gave me twenty wonderful years. I will never not love him.”
“That’s—” Emma blinked “—good.”
“You know, people would never ask you to move on,” Rachel said. “They never expect you to get over losing a father because they don’t expect you to replace him. People start asking widows and widowers to move on, though. And I’m not sure that’s the right way to look at it. I’ll love him forever, just like you will.”
“Yeah,” Emma said.
Rachel nodded slowly. “I just wanted to make sure you knew that. That you knew I wasn’t sneaking off and... I wasn’t.”
And yet, something about what Hannah had said had tripped a guilt wire in her heart, and she couldn’t quite let it go. Because she might not have ever touched Adam, or fantasized about him or anything like that, but she had been down at that diner escaping.
Insulating herself. Building a little space that belonged only to her.
It was one reason she couldn’t be mad about Emma and her boyfriend. Because she understood. She understood just not wanting to talk about everything all the time. Not when it played over and over in your mind, and the feelings echoed around your heart all day, every day.
To have a space that was separate from these big, epic changes that were happening in your life was... Sometimes it was the only thing that kept you going. The only thing that kept you breathing.