The Treble With Men (Scorned Women's Society #2) - Piper Sheldon Page 0,102

would be because we loved each other fully. And for more than a decade, it didn’t happen. Until it did. We were quite old and set in our ways, but we wanted that child to have everything, for you to have everything.”

“We were so set on being different from our parents and letting you be your own person and … well, we did our best,” Dad said sadly.

“That’s all anybody can do,” I said automatically. Were they saying this because they knew I had messed everything up?

They shook their heads in unison. “You don’t understand. We wanted you to have everything. We love you so much it terrified us.”

My head shot up. They’d never seemed afraid of anything.

My dad’s eyes watered. “When I met your mother, I felt an earth-shifting love. Literally, turned-my-life-upside-down sort of love. I would have done anything to be with her.”

My heart constricted in my chest. I knew this. I couldn’t quite breathe because I’d had a taste of that, and I’d lost it.

My dad gripped my mom’s hand and reached across the table and gestured for mine. I placed it in his. “Listen. When you were born, the love your mother and I felt for you made our love feel like …”

“Suddenly, after all these years of having a printed postcard of a Degas or Monet, suddenly we had the actually original art hanging on the wall,” my mom tried. “We loved you on a level that we never imagined possible. It was literally terrifying. We knew the stakes. Every choice and action, everything we said to you. You were this little wide-eyed miracle that came into our lives that made us feel wholly inadequate for the first time.”

“What?” I said.

“You cannot understand how terrifying it was. I swear. At age five you carried your tiny cello around everywhere with you. You were always wanting to be with the adults, and you were so wise for your age. We were in awe of you. You knew who you were and what you wanted from the beginning. It was awesome in the truest sense of the word. We were filled with awe of you.”

“I had no idea.” My throat constricted. “I’d always thought, I dunno, like you didn’t want to be around me.”

Dad squeezed my hand. “Sweetie, no. You were a miracle, but we were terrified of screwing you up, and then you seemed so perfect. Juilliard acceptance at seventeen. We were the proudest parents.”

Were.

“But we never felt like we had anything to do with it.” Mom shrugged.

“It was surreal,” Dad added.

“You came out of me as this perfect, fully-formed adult, I swear. We joked about it all the time. We were always so set on letting you be you and not pushing ourselves on you. We knew we would be oddball parents, so much older and more eccentric than the rest. We wanted you to be whoever you were going to be. We can see now that you put so much pressure on yourself to be perfect.”

Dad frowned and said, “Let me be clear about something. We never, ever, stopped being proud of you. Even now. I’m thinking we need to communicate better.”

Mom nodded. “I love you. We are so proud of you. You’re amazing to be around. But sometimes it feels like you feel the need to be something you’re not around us and that’s heartbreaking.”

“After you came back from camp, we could tell that poor girl’s death changed you. You were so distant,” Dad said.

I swallowed down a lump that formed. They had seen the change in me but hadn’t understood why. I couldn’t talk about it. I was so ashamed.

Mom said, “When you fell in with that bad boy, in a weird way, we were relieved. At least at first. We were like, ‘Okay, she’s living a little, getting some world experience.’ But we couldn’t have seen what happened coming. As soon as we saw you go too far, we freaked out.”

“It’s possible we overreacted,” Dad said.

Mom rocked her head back and forth as though weighing his words. “I don’t think so. Well, regardless, you were changed. You were so afraid to do anything. You had scared yourself straight. You didn’t go back to being the girl with big dreams, you became somebody else entirely. When you first got out of rehab, you seemed so ashamed. We should have emphasized that none of that mattered. We should have made sure you knew you were still loved. But you checked out,” Mom said.