I licked my lips, staring down at my lap. “And when you say ‘cooked up’ . . . ”
My mother rolled her eyes, reaching over to pat me briskly on the thigh. “Come now, my love, give your old mum a little credit. The one thing I can’t quite grasp is the why of it. It must be about just deserts for you, of course, after what that Blackmoore git did to you back in school. But what of your accomplices? You and Linden have always been close, but surely it would take more than just the prospect of righting old wrongs against you to get the Avramov girl on board.”
She paused at my dumbfounded stare, patting me on the leg again, like, Welcome to the conversation. One of the crows twitched its head at us, cawing starkly and fixing us with a beady eye, as though it took a special interest in fraught family affairs. I tried to remember what two crows meant as an omen; something transformative and good, from what I recalled. Which, nuts to that.
“You . . . knew?” I managed, feeling like the tectonic plates of reality were being reshuffled under my feet. “About Gareth? Gareth and me?”
“Not the particulars, obviously. But that something had happened between the two of you, something rather significant? Of course I did, how could I not?” She gave a wry laugh into her mug, muffled by the china. “You managed to slip his name into conversation what, several hundred times over dinner that summer, all twinkly eyes and innocence. I’m not so decrepit I can’t still recognize the telltale signs of the hopelessly enamored, you know.”
I sat with that for a moment, stomach bunched up like a dirty rag, utterly at sea.
“But you never said anything,” I finally said. “You never mentioned him, after, you never—”
She shot me a severe look, tinged with hurt and accusation. “Because you didn’t choose to tell me about him, my darling, and you were old enough that it wasn’t right to pry. But it changed you, didn’t it? He changed you. Damaged you, somehow. You were happy here with us, before. And then . . .”
She shook her head, and I realized with yet more noxious twisting of my gut that she was struggling for composure. My mother was not, by definition, a crier; the opposite, if anything, more of a stalwart stoic, devoted to her dignity and the nearly sacred concept of bucking up. But there was no mistaking the glistening in her eyes, the trembling corners of her lips.
As rarely as I’d seen it growing up, I still knew what my mother looked like when she was doing her very utmost not to cry.
“And then you could scarcely wait to get away from here,” she whispered, reaching up to dash angrily at her eyes with her knuckles. I recognized the gesture, the irritable impatience with her own emotions, as yet another thing I’d inherited from her. “Away from us. I thought you simply needed space, at first, that nagging at you would only make it worse. But if I’d had any idea that you wouldn’t come back to us . . .”
“You could have visited,” I whispered, though I knew even as I said it that it was not just a miserable cop-out, but a flat-out lie.
She turned to look at me head-on, wet green eyes glittering like peridot, lifting one hand to rest it against my cheek.
“You know we’d never have done that,” she said, with a terrible, quiet kindness. “Not when you made it so clear that you didn’t want us there. Your father and I . . . No matter how terribly we missed you, we’d never have wanted to foist ourselves on you if the feeling wasn’t mutual.”
I bit my lip, swimming in sticky shame. It was true. They would have come, had I ever invited them with any real sincerity. But I couldn’t have withstood it, their presence in Chicago, their magic radiant and inescapable when mine was dark and guttered and echoing as a long-empty house. They would have reminded me too much of what I’d given up, of what I missed down to my bones every single day I stayed away.
No matter that it was me who’d willingly left it all behind.
“I did miss you, Mom,” I whispered, hanging my head, so beset by misery my body felt like lead. Talia had struck much closer to home than she might have thought that afternoon in the coffee shop, when she wondered how I managed on my own, so far from family. And she hadn’t even known just how often and hard I’d pushed them away from me. “Of course I did. I should have invited you for real. I should’ve . . .”
“And we should have come even if you didn’t. We should have, because discretion be damned, Emmeline Constance, you’re my daughter,” she said, overbright eyes shifting between mine, the corners of her mouth quivering. “My first and only, my absolute beloved. I should never have just let things sit and fester in the first place, I should have asked you before it was far too late . . .”