Chapter 122 Goodbye and Forgiveness
ADRIANA
The woman looked familiar.
I was certain I had seen her somewhere before, but I couldn’t place it. The memory kept slipping just out of reach, and that gap between recognition and certainty was quietly maddening.
What I could see clearly was that I seemed to be the only person in the room who wasn’t immediately destabilized by her presence. Hazel, Aiden, and Elijah had all gone rigid within the same breath.
“Can I come in?” Her voice was barely audible. It carried no weight, no expectation.
She sounded like someone who had used up most of what they had simply getting to the door.
She was ill. That was obvious before she said a single word. The pallor of her skin, the way her clothes hung from her frame like they belonged to someone larger, the faint tremor in her hands that she was clearly trying to hold still. This was not recent. Whatever was happening in her body had been happening for a long time.
I could smell it too. Something underneath the more ordinary scents of travel and exhaustion.
Elijah was looking at her with an expression I had never seen him look at anyone with. Not pure anger, though anger was certainly present. There was something more violent underneath it, something that had been waiting in a particular room inside him for years and had just heard a knock at the door.
I kept turning her face over in my mind. I knew her from somewhere and it was going to bother me until I landed on it.
“How dare you.” Elijah’s voice was low and absolutely without warmth. “After everything. You have the audacity to stand here and ask to come in.”
“I know what I did. I’m not here to argue about it or explain it away. There is nothing I could say.”
“You’re correct about that. Nothing will ever fix you leaving.”
Something about his words finally unlocked the memory hidden in my brain.
The photograph! She’s the woman in the photograph tucked beneath Leo’s pillow. The one he had hidden away with such care and written on in that small, deliberate hand.
Miss you, mom.
The blonde woman in the picture holding a boy who had his father’s face entirely.
This was Leo’s mother. This was Jane.
I looked at her again with completely different eyes and something complicated moved through me that I couldn’t quickly name. She had left him when he was at his most fragile — sick, grieving, nonverbal, a child with no anchor left — and she had gone without looking back. And Leo had kept her photograph under his pillow and written those words to it in the dark.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel about her standing here. I wasn’t sure it was my feeling to have.
“I know I made a terrible mistake.” Her voice remained even, which surprised me. “I’m not here pretending otherwise and I’m not here trying to step back into his life as though nothing happened. I came because I don’t have much time left and I wanted a chance to make things right before that time runs out.”
Elijah had either not heard the second half of that or his anger was still too loud for it to reach him properly.
“Do you have any idea what he went through? His father died and you were everything he had left. You were the only thing standing between him and complete isolation. And you packed your bag and you left while your child was sick and couldn’t speak and you never came back.” The muscle in his jaw moved. “Do you know Leo is still nonverbal? He stopped talking after you left and he never started again. He blames himself for Liam’s death. He has carried that alone. And now after all of this time you want to walk in here and make things right?”
Hazel stepped up beside him and placed a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t look at her but something in his posture shifted, barely, just enough.
“Let her in,” Hazel said quietly. And then she turned to Jane. “Come inside.”
Jane stepped over the threshold. As she passed me she made brief eye contact. I held her gaze and didn’t look away. She looked down first.
Hazel guided her to the sofa. She sat carefully. She looked around the room slowly, taking stock of it.
Elijah remained standing. Aiden was unusually quiet beside me. I thought about Leo upstairs with his toy train and felt a slow dread beginning to form about how this evening was going to go.
“You said you don’t have much time.” Hazel sat across from her. “What does that mean exactly?”
Jane’s expression shifted. She looked down at her hands for a moment, and I could see that this was the part she had been steeling herself to say out loud.
“I have cancer. It has spread further than treatment can address. I chose not to take medication.” She said it plainly, without self-pity, which somehow made it worse. “I have a few weeks.”
The quiet that followed was immediate and total.
Elijah laughed, it didn’t have any warmth in it.
“You’re dying. After everything you put him through, after leaving him the way you did, now you’re going to die and make him an orphan. You’ve dismantled that boy piece by piece and now you want to come here and finish it.”
“Elijah.” My voice came out low and firm and I was faintly surprised by the steadiness of it. He looked at me. “She’s dying. Let her speak.”
Something in his expression shifted fractionally. He didn’t say anything further but he didn’t keep going either.
“How long do you have?” I asked, turning back to Jane.
“A few weeks.”
A chill moved through me. I thought about Leo, the photograph under the pillow, and what it was going to do to him to learn that his mother had come back and then learn everything else.
“I came only to ask for his forgiveness,” Jane said. “To say goodbye. If he can’t forgive me, I will accept that. I only wanted the chance to ask.”
I heard small footsteps on the stairs behind me and felt the shift in the room before I even turned around.
I already knew who it was.