Scars of Yesterday (Sons of Templar MC #8) - Anne Malcom Page 0,39

this, at least. And a good mother—also before all this.

Yes, maybe I deserved something else. But I’d never get it. Something in my bones told me that. I’d had it, one shot at love, happiness and everything else that comes with a happy marriage.. Maybe I’d had too much. That was it. We’d had too much. My allotted happiness had been depleted, all used up. Whatever love I was meant to have in my lifetime had been stretched too thin over the years, and it was now gone.

“You come to take me back again?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Depends on if you wanna go,” he said. “Not gonna force you to do anything. You need this.”

I raised a brow at him. “I need to sit in a shithole motel drinking vodka all day while someone else looks after my kids?”

“You need to grieve,” he said, raking a tatted hand through his hair. “Hate that word. Always fucking hated that word. I avoided it for years. Thought that violence and pain was the way to treat my loss. To get over it. But it only prolonged it. Made me more fucked up. There’s no right way to deal with this shit. You’re facin’ it, that’s all that matters. I’ll stay with you for as long as you need.”

He would. Gage was a man of few words, and the ones he used he meant. He would sit here all day. All night.

We had a morbid connection, him and I. We had death between us. Darkness. He had a duty to Ranger. One he’d take seriously for the rest of his life.

Beyond that, he was my friend.

One who didn’t expect words, didn’t expect anything from me.

So I just sat there with my vodka, my friend and my grief.

Chapter 4

I’d just finished cleaning the house top to bottom. That’s what I did on Saturdays. Every Saturday. Though I’d made it a point to make sure I was the exact opposite of my mother in almost every way, I had picked up a few habits from her that had served to be valuable. Like the fact that she’d told me I should always carry tampons, moisturize twice a day, always take off makeup before bed, make my bed as soon as you got out of it, and keep a tidy house for a tidy mind.

Though tidy was a bit of a stretch with two kids, especially Jack who loved to explore and trek mud through the house after aforementioned exploring.

I settled for clean in the early days, accepting that tidy was a pipe dream. Now that they were a little older and slightly more well behaved—freakishly more since their father died—they actually listened when I told them not to draw on walls with lipstick or trek mud in from the backyard.

Routines and keeping busy were essential for me to stay sane. To prevent a repeat of the twenty-four hours I’d spent at a shitty motel drinking vodka, being a bad mother.

As expected, neither Amy or Brock had mentioned the fact that I’d dropped my kids off and disappeared for a day, coming back sunburned and likely looking like hell. Of course they hadn’t. That’s what happened with true friends. They let you have your complete break from reality, didn’t hold it against you, didn’t ask questions and didn’t look at you any different after.

I felt different now. Not better, but different. Did people ever really feel better after a complete breakdown? After hitting bottom? No. But there had been a release of pressure. I’d let go of something. The film covering my vision that had allowed me to pretend that I was somehow going to be able to handle life without any kind of dramatic event, that film was gone. I had needed something. And a twenty-four-hour bender at a crappy motel wasn’t nearly as dramatic as I could’ve gone.

Turns out that after hitting rock bottom, there was a lot of climbing to do. And I’d been climbing since I’d returned, peeling my fucking fingernails off trying to get up out of this well of grief.

Two kids who needed school drop-offs and pickups, rides to games, playdates, help with homework, distracting trips to the beach, who needed to be fed, cleaned and clothed—yeah that helped a lot. I found myself barely having a moment to actually think about what the fuck I was going to do with my life.

Like continuing to feed and clothe the kids, for example. Ranger had made good money when the club