if the years had taken pieces off of her, reducing her to something much less than she’d been. Roundness becoming hollows. The color had leached from her hair, all of the rich black faded into a tarnished silver. Her brown skin had the look of rawhide about it, her lips like wrinkled paper. A smile would tear them, Rebecca was almost certain.
But the other woman didn’t smile anyway. Perhaps it was for the best.
“Can I help you?” she asked, her voice as thin and fragile as the rest of her.
“I think so. I’m looking for Jessica Bear.”
The older woman looked at her, her brown eyes cold, flatter than Rebecca remembered. “If you’re going to serve me papers, I’m not going to take them.”
“I’m not here to serve you papers,” Rebecca said, her heart twisting gently. “I just wanted to see you.” Wind whipped across the porch, blowing through brittle coastal grass making a sound a lot like broken glass. “I’m Rebecca.”
What little color was in her mother’s face drained away, but the hard, stoic expression remained. “If you’re here for money, I don’t have any of that anymore either. I would think that was pretty obvious.”
From the perspective of the child, Nathan West had given Jessica enough money to make a new start. As an adult, Rebecca could better understand how all of that could drain away in seventeen years. Though, the situation was a bit more dire than she had expected it to be.
“I’m not here for money either. I really did just want to see you.”
“Why?”
If Rebecca knew the answer to that, she would give it. But, she wasn’t sure she possessed anything quite like deep insight at the moment.
“Just to see you,” she said.
“Well,” Jessica said, “you can come in if you like.”
She moved away from the door, granting them admittance into a threadbare room that smelled like old smoke and firewood.
Her mother lit a cigarette and took a seat on the green couch in the corner. Rebecca opted to stay standing. Gage stood behind her, a wall of strength that she was grateful for since she felt at the moment she didn’t have much of her own.
She looked around at the fake wood paneling that seemed to close in around them, and the heavy curtains covering each window as a rebellion against any kind of light.
Rebecca didn’t know what to say. There was too much to say, and really, not enough to say. She didn’t want to yell at her mother. Not now. Not because she felt sorry for her, not because life had clearly turned out nothing like she had imagined it would when she had run away from her children, from her bleak life, with the money that she had been meant to use to care for them. No, she didn’t feel sorry for her because of that. That, in Rebecca’s estimation was nothing short of karma.
She just wasn’t angry. And she couldn’t hate her.
Standing there, looking at the woman who seemed so reduced, so dry, Rebecca couldn’t feel much regret that she had gone. And she couldn’t feel at fault either.
Jessica Bear was immovable. As immovable now as ever. Stubborn. Tragic. Rebecca couldn’t have made her leave any more than she could have made her stay.
“You doing all right?” Rebecca found herself asking, a question that her own mother hadn’t bothered to pose.
But, she wasn’t really Rebecca’s mother. Not in any way that mattered. She had given birth to her, but Jonathan was the one who had stayed. He was the one who cared. Then there was Lane, and there was Alison and Cassie, Finn—who had been gallant, even while he was being a little bit of a cad.
There was Gage.
There were people in her life who mattered, who deserved to have more of her than this woman. This woman who had occupied so much of Rebecca’s soul for so long.
Whose abandonment had dictated Rebecca’s every action and emotion. For too long. For far too long. She didn’t deserve it. And Rebecca was tired of giving it to her.
There was no angry outburst, no grand reckoning that would ever restore what was gone. There was only moving forward.
Realizing that the monsters were only monsters in her head.
“I don’t need charity,” her mother responded, “if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I run a store on Main Street, in Copper Ridge,” Rebecca found herself saying. “Jonathan owns a construction company. He does very well for himself.”
The words seemed to bounce off of her mother, like rain against