When Dan finally felt like he could trust his voice, he asked, “How are you, Mom?”
Farrah let out a sigh before answering, walking two mugs to the table and taking her seat. “I’m okay,” she said at last. “I made a new friend.”
“Yeah?” Dan felt a twinge of guilt that this news surprised him—a painful reminder of how alone she was.
“Yes. I met her at my grief support group.” There was a brief pause as she took a bite of a cookie. “Her husband was an asshole too,” she said, offering the tiniest hint of a smile before she covered her mouth with her mug.
Dan choked on a sip of tea, coughing and spluttering until Farrah smacked him on the back.
“Holy shit, Mom. Is this what a therapist would call a breakthrough?” Farrah had all but petitioned for his dad’s sainthood the past year.
She let out a rusty chuckle and shot him a mock chiding glance. “What? He was. Don’t pretend you forgot.”
“I’m definitely not the one who forgot.”
She blinked at Dan before looking away, taking a few sips of tea while her mind lingered somewhere else.
“I know,” she finally said, resting her mug on the table as she watched the steam rise from it. “I loved him, though—I still do. I love the man he was beneath that.”
“Yeah?” Dan frowned. “Who was that?”
“A man who wanted to heal. To serve. He was always so passionate about it. I fell in love with how much he loved his work. It felt special to be part of his world.”
Dan didn’t know what to say. He’d been detached from his father’s career, his research, his practice—it was a thing Dan was jealous of as a child and resentful of as an adult.
But he understood what his mom meant. He thought of Harper. Her ability and passion. It was impossible not to love the healing she held in her hands.
“When he was dying,” his mother continued, pushing through the wall that separated them, “I felt like the world was losing that man. Not the one we endured—not the bully at home—but the doctor who helped people. The one who traveled the world with his tools, who lectured at universities, who won humanitarian awards—that’s who I mourn, Daniyal.”
She looked at him with such intensity in her green eyes, Dan had to look away.
“Well, I’m glad the world got the best of him,” he said at last, taking a sip of his tea.
“I’m not.”
Dan’s eyes snapped back to her.
She took a shaky breath. “You deserved the best of him. We, his family, deserved the best of him, no?”
Dan wasn’t sure what to say, and they stayed silent for a few minutes.
“I’ve been putting my needs before yours,” she said, breaking the silence. Dan made a noise of protest, but she held up her hand to silence him.
“I have. I don’t know if I can forgive myself for it. Growing up, I was always told exactly what to do, who to be. I hated it. But before I knew it, I found myself married to a man who told me the same things. He told me not to specialize. He told me the hours to work. He told me where to be, what to do. I convinced myself that it was his way of caring for me. Caring for us as a family. And I certainly wasn’t the first woman to accept that her husband’s career should come first. I won’t be the last either.”
She blinked, turning her head to look out the window as she gathered her words. “I always promised myself that if I were to be a mother, my children would decide life for themselves. But after a lifetime of someone else dictating your actions, you lose faith in your ability to do anything on your own. When he died, it was the first time I was the only person in charge of myself, and it terrified me. I thought I would lose everything he’d worked for if I didn’t have someone to lead me. So I placed that burden on you.”
She wiped a stray tear from her cheek, then turned back to look at him. “Grief does scary things to people,” she said in a whisper. “It’s so powerful, it can change you, rewire everything you thought you knew. And I had so much grief. So much. I looked at the things that had been broken when your father died. Our family was a mess; he and I resented each other for so many things. I looked at these fractured pieces and some voice in my head told me, if I had listened better, been the wife he had expected, the type of mother he had told me to be, we wouldn’t be so broken.”
Dan was left speechless by the weight of everything she was unpacking.
After a few moments, she spoke again. “Daniyal, I want you to listen to me. I will never be able to tell you he was proud of you. I will never be able to make you believe he loved you, even though I think he did. Something in you—your spirit, your joy, I don’t know—it threatened him. It scared him to see those things in you because they were things he couldn’t find in himself.”