past eight years with her mother. Worked a job selling knock-off perfumes at a mall down her block. No partner, no kids, no family. Had a cat named Luar. She seemed to have gone through a really dark time. She died of an overdose eighteen months ago.”
My biological mother was dead.
I should feel devastated. I should feel free. I should feel, period. I poked my lower lip, tugging at it, not sure how to react.
Val was still my biological mother.
Also, the woman who gave me up.
The woman who’d screwed me over.
The woman who’d wanted to use me as a pawn.
But also the woman who named her cat Luar—moonlight in Portuguese.
Val wore many hats in my life. All of them had painted her in an ugly way. People were wrong. I wasn’t Saint Luna. I was capable of hating, too. I just didn’t know it until now. Somehow, I stood up. Edie rose to her feet after me.
“You have a mother,” she stressed, slapping her palm over her chest. “You have me, Luna. You’ll always have me.”
“I know.” I smiled.
“Speak more.” Her expression softened.
“I try. I’ve been trying my whole life. It’s just that…when the words come out, they do it of their own accord.”
“Don’t you get it?” She held my arms, giving them a gentle shake.
She had a goofy, lopsided grin—one I’d catch on Dad when he looked at her lovingly. She’d always had the courage to look at me and not through me.
“You’re free now. Free to speak. Free to talk. Free to be someone else, not the person she made you when she walked away.”
“I know,” I whispered.
But did I? What if this didn’t free me? What if I was destined to speak in random bursts?
We both shifted from foot to foot. There was a major elephant in the room, and we needed to address it.
“Your dad needs to—”
“I’ll tell him,” I cut her off.
Yes. I knew what I had to do, what I was capable of doing. Val was no longer here to remind me my words didn’t matter, that my voice held no weight. Edie was right. It was time to shed the dead skin of the person I was, and to become someone else.
The person Knight needed.
The person Dad, Edie, and Racer deserved.
I was going to talk to Dad.
With words.
“Come in.”
Dad looked up from the paperwork on his office desk, still clad in his suit. He shuffled some papers around for the sake of doing something with his hands, flashing me a tired smile. There was something pathologically wary about his expression when he looked at me nowadays. Love dipped in misery, wrapped in a bitter crust of pity.
Not disappointment, though. Never disappointment.
I closed the door behind me, moseying to the camel-colored leather armchair in front of him. I sank into it, the weight of what I was about to do pulling me down. Without breaking eye contact, my nails dug into the tender flesh of my palms until they pierced through my skin. I breathed through the pain.
I could do it. I’d done it with Knight. With Edie. At a party full of complete strangers.
But somehow, this was different.
My father had been tricked by Val. She got pregnant on purpose. He hadn’t wanted me. Yet he had been forced to raise me on his own for the first few years of my life. And it hadn’t been easy, with my lack of communication. They’d called him The Mute because he didn’t speak much, but his daughter truly crushed him with misery over her lack of words.
“Is everything okay?” He furrowed his brows, seeming to realize the atmosphere in the room had shifted. Maybe that I’d shifted, too.
I used to be dependent. Small. Scared. The last few months had changed me. And I was still evolving, changing like clay—spinning through tiny changes that made small, yet significant differences in my life. Each dent shaped me.
I opened my mouth.
He dropped his pen.
My lips moved.
His eyes widened.
I smiled.
He listened.
“Not everything,” I whispered, aware of the way my lips molded around the words.
Sadness laced in my victory. The only reason I was able to speak was because my birth mother had died. There was no reconciliation possible. I’d lost something permanently—but gained something else.
I reached for his hand across the desk, clutching it with shaky fingers. Free at last. The pen he’d been holding a second ago bled ink onto his new leather planner. I only noticed because everything was illuminated, like I was on ecstasy or something.
“I