feel cold as a piece of snow falling from the sky. And it hurt. Edith’s harsh words that came after also bit at me, causing me to burrow closer to Mom.
“I remember when I painted those butterflies,” Mom whispered, and I noticed her gaze was turned up to the top of my wall, where there were two butterflies. “Do you know what kind of butterflies those are?”
I sniffed, glancing up at the red and black painted butterfly. “A monarch?”
“A Vanessa atalanta.” Mom pressed her lips to the crown of my head. “A red admiral. My favorite kind of butterfly. I guess you can guess why your middle name is Vanessa, hmm?”
Mom never told me that before. The breath I tried to drag into my lungs clogged in my throat, tears tipping down my cheeks, and there was no holding them back. No holding back the tears, no holding back the emotion that was suffocating me, and no holding back on my words.
“Scott cheated on me,” I told her with a stuffed voice, clinging tighter so she couldn’t pull away. I didn’t want her to see my face, all splotchy swollen from tears, no doubt. “Edith knew. Walsh knew. No one told me until it blew up in my face.”
Her hand moved in circles on my back. “And I bet you’re mad at them.”
“Of course I am!” I pulled back then, forcing her hand to fall. She was blurry as I looked at her. “At Edith especially. It’s girl code. I don’t get how she’d keep that from me. I’d never do that to her.”
A little line formed between Mom’s eyebrows. “Do you think maybe she just didn’t know how to tell you?”
“Even if it was like that, she could’ve found a way.” Heck, anything would’ve been better than pretending it wasn’t happening.
“What would you have done if the roles were reversed?”
It was a fair question, but hearing Mom say it made me want to shrug away from it. To ignore the question. I tried to think about how Edith acted before our breakup. She kept encouraging me to break up with him. Before I thought it was just because she thought I could do better, now I realized. She knew he was a gross cheater and wanted me to get as far away as I could.
My gaze fell to my desk, to the scattered papers. Edith tried to get me to break up with him. She encouraged me to dump him because she knew. And even though she couldn’t tell me for whatever reason, she’d still been looking out for me. That was her way of telling me without telling me.
I leaned back in my chair, hearing it squeak underneath me. “I’m…selfish,” I all but whispered, my blood icy under my skin.
Mom passed her hand across my hair, voice worried. “What makes you say that?”
Oh, how could I explain the whole situation? I’d been hiding so many things from her that I wasn’t even sure where to start.
“Walsh and I broke up.” It was the closest thing to what happened, even though it wasn’t necessarily the truth. And Edith—were we even friends anymore? The whole “look in the mirror” thing. Was that her way of severing ties? I’d been such a horrible best friend—a horrible person in general. “I’m too self-focused, Mom.”
I deserved this pain, this pinching in my legs and chest and arms and throat, all over my body.
Mom pulled my body to her again, and this time, her arms were cobra-constricting tight, trying to squeeze the pain out of me. I tried to imagine that I was an orange, the juice spilling from my insides from being squeezed.
“You know, it’s always been hard for me to let your father be your father. To not try to control every aspect of our relationship. Down to even him eating my leftover spaghetti. Your grandparents were like that,” she said quietly. “Dr. Lively and I had a session about learned behaviors. She said that my desire to control the situation came from my younger years.” Her hand smoothed up and down my back, a lulling sensation. “It’s hard to let others in when it’s been only you for so long.”
Though the words were promising, tears filled my eyes. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve only ever had to focus on you. It’s like you said—you never asked for space. But when you’re only focused on you for so long, it’s hard to switch over when more people come into your life.” Mom framed