Dirty Sexy Alphas (Twenty Book Box Set) - Hannah Ford Page 0,109

the vibrant green lawn and were standing on the porch, hand in hand, when he knocked on the door. It had a little brass knocker, shaped like a tulip.

The door glided noiselessly open, and then she was standing there, her eyes darting between us as she took in our clasped hands.

Unlike the woman I’d seen at the hospital—or in all black at the funeral--she looked like the woman I remember from my childhood.

And I couldn’t miss the tiniest smirk on her face, watching Landon and I.

“I always did like you,” she said, her voice a little soft, but her words clear.

“Um, thanks, I think.” I grinned as she stepped back, inviting her into the house.

“How do you feel?” Landon asked, as he gave his mother a hug. I wasn’t sure how much they’d talked in the last week, but the air still had the feeling of tension, like there was still too much unsaid between them.

“Fine,” she said, walking slowly across the room. “Not quite myself yet, but getting there.”

She sat down on a brocade couch, an antique I remembered from her old home. Landon and I settled into the two easy chairs arranged across the couch.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in Dallas?” She asked, eyeing me.

I shrugged, studying the portrait on the wall and avoiding her gaze. “It was an internship. It’s over now, though. I’m home for good.”

She nodded, as if pleased by my response.

“You look different.”

I snapped my eyes away from the painting, expecting her to be staring at me, but she wasn’t. She was looking at Landon. He was sitting back in his chair, one ankle resting on his knee.

“Is it the jeans?” he asked, motioning to his pants. “Without the need to--”

“No, it’s not the clothes. It’s you. You look like you might actually stay awhile.”

He tried to laugh, but I could tell the words edged under his skin. “Nothing to rush off to.”

She fell silent, and I had the burning desire to fill in the blanks. To somehow smooth things out between them, patch up the holes that had been made in their relationship. First, by decades of living with Landon’s father. But after that, by his disappearing act and his words at the funeral.

It never occurred to me that it must’ve hurt her, too, when he left and didn’t come back.

But it wasn’t my place to find a way to bridge their differences, and the silence stretched out, turning awkward.

It was his mother who finally spoke again. “You were right, you know. Everything you said at the funeral. You were right.”

The words sounded uncomfortable, like she wasn’t not sure how they’d sound aloud until she spoke them. Landon stared at his mother, as if he didn’t know how to respond.

“I shouldn’t have said those things to you,” Landon said. “Not in front of everyone. Not like that.”

“I know how he was with you,” she said, tears in her voice, in her eyes. “With us. I know that I failed you by staying with him all these years. By allowing the abuse to continue, day after day, year after year. And then to choose him, even in death… I don’t blame you for reacting like that.”

Landon leaned back. “I embarrassed you. I know that.”

“You didn’t embarrass me. It’s embarrassing to have put up with his treatment for so many years. But it’s a hard thing to unpack, you know,” she said, rubbing her face in her hands. “To convince myself that the façade I’d kept up all those years had to come down. I’ve never told anyone who he was. Not even my best friend.”

“I know.”

“She knows now,” she said.

I didn’t know what to think of that—if there was freedom in the truth, or embarrassment. It was probably too complicated to boil down into a single emotion.

“Do you forgive me?” she asked.

“Do you forgive me?” he asked. “I acted like an asshole.”

“Oh Landon, there’s nothing to forgive. I stood up there and dismissed everything you’d been through. Pretended it didn’t even exist. You were right to be upset.”

This time, when the room fell silent, it was with a mood of peace. Of understanding.

“Do you think it’s possible to start over?” she asked. “A blank slate? I don’t want to grow old thinking you hate me for everything that’s happened.”

“Mom, I was never keeping score,” Landon said. “Or maybe I was, but it was about him, not you.”

His mother found me, her eyes drifting over me and lingering on the place my hand rested on