“I’ll be here when it’s all over, I promise. I’m not going anywhere,” I tell him, repeating the same words he’s said to me the last few weeks.

Cole pulls me back down in bed and holds me close, both of us lost in our own thoughts. I never allowed Garrett or Parker to look into things after I got out of the hospital. I didn’t care about anything at that point. I just wanted to be left alone with my misery. They argued with me every day for a week, only stopping when they saw that they were just making things worse. The more we fought about it and the more I relived everything that had happened, the deeper I fell into a hole of depression. As soon as Cole goes to talk to his mother, I’m going straight to Garrett and Parker to tell them I’m finally ready for their help. If Vivien tries to poison Cole with more lies, I’ll be prepared this time.

I’M WAITING IN my father’s office when I hear the front door open and my mother speaking in a low, murmured voice to Martha. I’m sure she’s telling my mother that I’m here and that I refused to leave until I spoke with her. I guarantee she’s informing her that, for the first time in her employment, I raised my voice. I assume when I hear my mother’s gasp that Martha’s relaying my choice words over her suggestion that I go back to the guesthouse and wait for her to send my mother over when she arrived home.

As I hear the squeak of shoes against the marble floor as she makes her way down the hall, I wonder what’s going through her head, about what kinds of lies she’s trying to conjure up before she opens the door and stands in front of me. She can’t ignore me any longer. I’m not leaving until I get every bit of the truth from her, once and for all.

I left my crutches back in my bedroom, not wanting anything to make me appear weak when I face her. The pacing I’ve done while I waited hasn’t done my knee any favors and it throbs like a bitch, but I refuse to sit down. The squeaking shoe sound abruptly stops when she steps onto the plush carpeting in the office. I don’t turn around and I hear her take a shaky breath as she walks by and turns to stand in front of me.

Her appearance throws me for a loop and I momentarily forget about my reasons for coming here. Her usual slicked back, severe hairstyle looks like it went through a wind tunnel. There are messy pieces sticking up all over the place and I watch as she brings a shaking hand up to her head to try and smooth some of the wayward pieces back and tuck them behind her ears. While she’s busy with that, I look her up and down and my shock grows tenfold. Her normal daily uniform of a perfectly pressed three-piece suit has been replaced with a pair of black yoga pants, tennis shoes without shoelaces in them and a plain white tee shirt that looks like it’s two sizes too big for her. She looks like she escaped from a mental institution and I have to cover up an inappropriate laugh with a cough. She looks crazy and I feel crazy. What the fuck is going on?

“I’m sorry. Let me just start this off with an apology, okay?” she finally speaks.

She stops trying to fix her hair and wrings her hands together nervously in front of her.

“What exactly are you apologizing for? I want to hear you say it. I want to hear you admit what you did.”

Olivia never came right out and said it, but it didn’t take a genius to read between the lines. My mother got her fired from her job and she did something to make Olivia lose the baby. Even if it was just the stress of being fired, it was enough. Olivia has every right to be pissed at what my mother did to her.

“You’ve spoken to Olivia then?” she asks.

I roll my eyes and scoff at her. “Of course I’ve spoken to her. I love her, how many times do I have to tell you that before it sinks in? Did you really think she wouldn’t tell me everything? Did you really think she’d keep something like this from me?”

I don’t mention the fact that she didn’t tell me everything. I don’t want my mother to think for one second that Olivia was doing anything to protect her. I want her to know that, despite the threats she obviously made, nothing could scare Olivia away from me for good. Olivia had her reasons for withholding the truth about how fucked up my family really is, and I can’t blame her for that. The blame lies solely with the woman standing in front of me, not looking quite as regal and commanding as she always used to.

“Oh, Cole. I was afraid this would happen. I knew if you two got back together she would turn you against us.”

“Are you fucking kidding me with this? Olivia did NOTHING wrong. You ruined everything. YOU,” I shout, pointing directly at her. “You just couldn’t handle the fact that I fell in love with someone you didn’t approve of. That didn’t give you any fucking right to play God with her life and the life of my child!”

My mother winces when I mention the baby. Her grandchild. Her fucking grandchild! I could maybe understand her need to push Olivia out of my life. I could never forgive it, but I could understand. This was a baby, though. An innocent child, her own flesh and blood, and her actions started a chain of events that took that child away from all of us. She deserves every bit of my hatred.

“I was wrong to give her that check, I know that now, believe me. It was stupid and I overreacted. You have to believe me when I tell you that I honestly never thought she’d actually cash it and do what she did. It was just a gesture. A stupid, selfish act that I thought would prove to her how different she is from us and force her to move on and start a new life. It was meant to disgust her, not for her to take seriously.”