across her chest. “And he broke up with you because his parents didn’t like your family.”
“It wasn’t entirely that,” she said with a sigh.
God, should she even be telling Maddy about all this? Airing dirty laundry was so not her style. But frankly, she needed to get it off her chest. She’d been carrying this shameful secret from the moment Alex called off the engagement, and it was weighing her down.
“My mother put a lot of strain on my relationship with my ex,” she said. “But I guess I’d been around her antics so long that I was used to her needing to be the center of attention. I was even used to seeing her hit on other men for attention, knowing she didn’t actually want sex from them. She just wanted to feel beautiful.”
Maddy cringed. “Oh God, tell me this isn’t going where I think it’s going.”
“So, one night we were having a little cocktail party at a family friend’s house. My mother had too much to drink and…” Cora shut her eyes for a minute. “She cornered my ex in a hallway and came on to him. She tried to convince him that she ‘knew’ he’d secretly had a thing for her the whole time we’d been together. Then she tried to kiss him.”
“No!” Maddy clamped a hand over her mouth.
“Yep.” Cora swallowed back against the bile that rushed up her throat, like it always did whenever she thought of that night. “The worst thing was, everybody could hear her. The main room was only a few steps away, and they were all staring at me…”
She’d wanted to sink into the floor and die. It had easily been the most humiliating experience of her whole life.
“Alex brushed it off at the time, but a week later he told me he couldn’t do it anymore. He said I was so desperate for my parents’ approval that I let them treat me badly and that I never stood up for myself or made my own decisions. He said I was…weak.”
“Oh, honey.” Maddy pulled Cora in for a big hug, squeezing her hard. “I don’t even know what to say. You poor thing!”
Tears sprang to Cora’s eyes, but she blinked them away, tipping her face up to the ceiling so they wouldn’t fall. She’d shed enough already.
“I was furious that he wanted to punish me for what she did. It’s not like I can control her. And…who else do I have besides my family? My social circle is small because my mother scares people off. I work at my father’s business.”
It sounded so pathetic when she laid it out like that. She had zero control over her life. Zero agency. All because she’d tried for decades to be the glue that held her family together. All because she’d been desperate to recreate that “happy family” scenario that she saw on TV.
“Is that why you came here?” Maddy asked. “To get a break from it all?”
“A much-needed one.” She sucked on the inside of her cheek. “I thought parents were supposed to put their children first.”
Maddy made a snorting noise. “Uh, not in my experience.”
“Sometimes I don’t even understand why people bother having kids if they have no intention of loving them. If you want to worship yourself, get a mirror.”
Since the breakup, she hadn’t talked to anyone about what she was feeling. Instead, she’d bottled it all up and tried to soldier on. Unfortunately, emotions didn’t work like that. You could try to keep them down, but eventually the pressure would become too much. It was like shaking up a bottle of Coke and expecting it not to explode.
Confessing to Maddy was surprisingly cathartic.
“Tell me about it,” Maddy said. “I’ve wondered that, myself.”
“Are your parents the same?”
The other woman laughed. “Well, my mother isn’t going around hitting on anyone’s boyfriend, that’s for sure. But is she overly opinionated and controlling? Yeah. She thinks I should be settled down now and having kids. I’m not even thirty yet, but she acts like I’m an old spinster who’s squandered my youth. What decent man would want to marry someone as old and wrinkled as me?”
It was hilarious, because there wasn’t a damn line in Maddy’s flawless skin.
“But that’s her opinion and I don’t need permission from her or anyone else. I love her, but we’re very different people. It’s taken me a long time to be able to understand why she says the things she does and that I shouldn’t place my worth