her about my experience with healing and how it had gone wrong, and she just said, “I don’t pretend to understand Leggy’s logic, and that isn’t the first time I’ve said that today, but she didn’t teach you for a reason. I can’t blame her. Don’t try to heal again, child. No good comes from it, even if your intentions are pure.”
When I told her about the fact that I’d just swum in trials that would take me on a path to competing in the Olympics, a small smile played around her lips.
“What’s so amusing?” I inquired, not offended, just curious. At the moment, I was feeling too battered by my past to be offended about my future.
“Your father would never have allowed that, you know.” She tapped her chin. “Funny, too, that someday you might be rich enough to fight for your mother’s early release.”
My eyes widened. “I thought they stopped parole.”
“Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. Money talks, doesn’t it?”
THEA
Those words resonated with me in ways I didn’t think Lavinia understood.
Money did talk.
I knew that.
Linden had said something similar to me on the day he’d taken me from the hospital and brought me back to the Ramsdens’ home.
Money.
I needed it.
A lot of it.
On the taxi ride back, all I could think about was my momma, how she was locked up for protecting me, for defending herself, the injustice of it, and I wanted to scream.
The journey to the hotel couldn’t have been more different than the journey to Blanche Settlement.
The gnawing ache in my soul had been filled with a savage fierceness that left me burning with a need to do something.
Anything.
To help my mother.
Who wasn’t dead.
I stared blankly ahead at the road, not seeing anything, not seeing the city as it rolled by or the hotel as we approached it. It all passed in a blur as I processed how much I’d lost.
Nanny had obviously believed she was doing right by me, but had she?
I’d thought I was alone.
I wasn’t.
Momma lived. She breathed. We were alive together.
God, I wanted to see her. I wanted to visit her so badly. Maybe another kid might be ashamed of their mother’s crime. Might be ashamed she was in prison. But me? I was proud. I hated that she was in there, but hell, she was in there because she was protecting me. Defending herself.
Saving us.
I couldn’t help but liken her marriage to my father—never Papa again—like the prison she was in now.
Was her current situation an improvement?
The notion made me feel sick to my stomach, but a fire burned in my gut. A fire that threatened to overtake me to the point where I was shaking when the cab pulled up at the hotel.
“Ma’am?”
I jerked to awareness when the cabbie’s irritation made itself known to me.
“S-Sorry?” I asked.
“You’re here. This is your hotel, ain’t it?”
I blinked again, looked at the building, and it felt like fucking fate that, as I glanced out of the window, in a purgatory that was forged in my parents’ past, he was there.
His eyes connected with mine, and that link. God help me. It triggered an inferno that I wasn’t able to cope with.
I shook my head, broke the union because I didn’t have time for that anymore. Didn’t have energy to waste on a man who could never be mine.
I paid my fare and clambered out of the taxi.
My limbs felt sluggish, and it had nothing to do with the intense workout I’d had earlier on. Eight races today on the back of four yesterday. The days had been intense in the run-up to the trials, and things were only going to get crazier as I began my path to Olympic glory.
But the fatigue I was feeling had nothing to do with my training. It was from my soul.
When I was standing on the sidewalk, I sucked in a breath and forced myself into action. I didn’t look at him, just walked past him like he didn’t exist, but he wasn’t so kind as to pretend we weren’t walking on the same planet.
He grabbed my arm. “Thea?”
I dragged my arm from his hold and spat, “Don’t call me that.”
He jerked back like I’d slapped him, and God, I wanted to. But then I really would be no better than my father, would I?
Was that kind of violence in my blood? Or was it just because I needed him so fucking much that he inspired it in me?