Open Your Heart (Kings Grove #4) - Delancey Stewart Page 0,63
a bit. I swiveled in my seat to watch him as he spoke, not wanting to miss anything since I’d waited so long to hear this. “You mother’s family lived a few houses away from mine. Your mom and her sister were my best friends when we were little. Then, as we got older, things changed.”
“Mom has a sister?” I’d never heard my mother talk about a sister. Shock slid through me, cold and slick.
“Had. Yes. Allene.” Dad glanced over at me then, and then went on. “She and I were the same age. Your mom was a couple years younger. And you know, in those years, when you’re in school, it feels like it matters a lot, those couple years.”
I nodded, remembering that from my own life.
“I was always in love with Allene.
“What?” If I was shocked to learn that my mother had a sister, I was far more surprised to hear that my father had loved her.
He smiled, obviously remembering this strange aunt I’d never heard of before now, but he shook his head sadly. “We were together in high school, boyfriend and girlfriend. God, I loved her…”
“And…?” I prodded him to move on. I needed answers.
“She was in a car accident our junior year. She didn’t survive.”
A hand shot to my mouth. “Oh God. Dad…”
“Yeah.” He swallowed. “And my senior year, your mother and I spent a lot of time together. Consoling one another. Missing her felt less painful together, I guess. And one thing kind of led to another, eventually that morphed into something else.”
I shook my head slowly back and forth. It was amazing that I’d never heard this until now. “Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this?”
He gave me a serious look then, and I sensed something shift in the air. “Things changed as your mom and I were together. I stayed in town for college, she finished high school, and it just seemed like we were supposed to stay together. To get married. So we did. Your mother told me she’d always loved me, even when we were little.”
“But you loved her sister.”
“I did. And you mother never forgave me for it. I guess she thought she could overlook it at first. She’d loved me all those years, she’d said, been jealous of her sister, of the fact I loved her instead. But once Allene was gone, she thought it meant we were supposed to be together. I think it was a mistake we made out of circumstance. And things just happened fast. When I got the job up in Kings Grove and we moved, she got pregnant with you. And after you were born, things got worse.”
“What do you mean?” I didn’t like to think that my arrival had made anything worse. I had been an infant—innocent, vulnerable.
“Your mother used you as a weapon. She’d begun to mistrust me, letting her jealousy for what I’d had with Allene make her believe things that weren’t true. She accused me of cheating. Often. I was constantly having to try to prove to her that I was faithful, that I was committed to her and to you.”
“Were you? Even though you’d loved her sister?”
He looked at me and then swung his gaze back to the road, quiet. Finally he said, “I might not have loved your mom the same way, but I did love her. And once you were born… We were a family. I wasn’t going to break that if I could help it. But she made it impossible.”
“What do you mean?”
“I couldn’t live with her suspicion and her anger over something I couldn’t change. I begged her to understand that loving Allene didn’t change what we had—didn’t change our love for you, for each other. But she couldn’t get past it, and the longer we were together, the more she talked about Allene and about how I could never love her—or you—the way she needed me to.”
He took a deep breath, then went on. “I told her I thought we should separate.” He let that sift around us for a minute before continuing. “And even though she was miserable with me, I guess she’d convinced herself that we were supposed to be together, that this was just how things were with married people. She thought what we had was normal, and I couldn’t convince her that we both deserved something more. She told me if I left her that I’d never see you again.”