The Price of Inertia (The Seven Sins #4) - Lily Zante Page 0,134
notice almost an extra ten thousand dollars in my account?”
“It’s for the money you would have earned, had you stayed here. Had you not quit, had none of the bad things happened. The payment is for that, plus a little bonus.”
“I can’t accept it, Ward.”
“I want you to have it.”
When she looks as if she’s about to protest, I push back. “Please, take it. Please. I have more money than I know what to do with. I’m not trying to buy you out, before you accuse me of such a thing. It would just make me happy to know you have it in case you need it.”
“It would make you happy?” she asks.
“It would make me very happy.”
“But it’s too much.”
“You’ve helped me more than you know.”
“I’ve helped you?”
“Rob forced me to come here because he believed it would get me out of a funk—not unlike the one you’re in. I too had lost my mom a few months before.”
“I’m sorry.”
I take a sharp inhale of breath. “I’m not so sure I am. She stopped being the mom I remembered and needed her to be.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“When I visited her on her deathbed, needing for her to tell me that she had been wrong, needing her to confess that she had made a mistake and regretted how she had treated me, do you know what she said?”
Mari shakes her head.
“She told me that if she could have picked between my step father and me, she would always have picked him. Even then, on her deathbed, that’s what she said.” My voice turns shaky thinking about it and I clear my throat, willing myself to stay strong.
“I’m so, so sorry, Ward.”
“Sorry doesn’t fix a thing,” I tell her. I tried so hard to make my mom change. Even though I had left home soon after he died, I would go back and my mom from time to time. But we were never able to get our relationship back. She pined for him. All that time I’d been hoping she would change back to how she used to be, she didn’t. That’s when I resolved never to get close to anyone. I keep all of this to myself. There’s no point in sharing my past with Mari. Not now. “Hearing your own mom say something like that breaks you,” I tell her. Hearing a car pull up outside, I bend down to grab one of my bags.
She looks as if she wants to say something, but the time for saying things has passed. I look at the door in anticipation.
“Do you have to leave now?” she asks, her anxiety making her sound breathless.
“I have a flight to catch and I’m all packed and ready.”
She looks deflated, so much so that I say, “If you wanted to talk, I wish you had come earlier.”
“I only saw the discrepancy in my bank account a few hours ago.”
I hate that we have run out of time. “Will you keep the money? For me?” I very much want her to have it. I don’t want her to struggle. I want only good things for her.
“If you insist.”
“I do.”
“Thank you.”
True to form, a car honks outside and I open the door and hold out my hand, indicating to the driver to wait. I could assume things—about her and me. I could put a stop to all this now. I could tell Mari I can stay and that I want to hear what she has to say, but I have learned that despite what I want, or how I need things to be, it has to come from her.
I could never understand why my mother stopped loving me, why she switched her attention to a monster in a heartbeat and forgot that I ever existed. I now have a fear of this happening again, and I won’t ever allow myself to be hurt like that. “You’re lucky. Your mom wanted you, Mari. She loved you. You can hold on to that kind of love because it stays with you forever.”
The taxi driver honks again. I reach for the other bag and see that Mari has picked up the third one. “You don’t have to do that.”
But she does it anyway and we walk out towards the cab silently. The driver takes my luggage and puts it in the trunk. I shove my hands in my pockets. They are safer there than out, where I run the risk of taking her face and touching her again.