Chapter 161 Not Wasting A Single Day
ELIJAH
“I hated you.” The words came out in a voice I didn’t entirely recognize as my own. Lower than usual, stripped of the management I normally kept in place. “I wished you were dead. I was a teenager lying in bed at night genuinely wishing that something had happened to you so that there was a reason for it. So that it wasn’t just a choice you made and walked away from.”
She had moved from the sofa to the chair closer to mine while I was speaking, not reaching for me. I wasn't ready for that and she knew it. Her face held quiet pain, that of someone who had been carrying an accounting of their own wrongs for a very long time and knew every item on it by heart.
“I know,” she said. “I know. You had every right to.”
“My father needed you. He needed you in the daily, functional sense and you were not there and he collapsed.” I stopped. “I was fifteen years old hiding his bottles and having him beat me for it because he didn’t know what else to do with himself, and you were somewhere I couldn’t reach you, and there was no explanation. Nothing. You just left.”
“I know,” she said again. She didn’t try to mitigate it or redirect it. She just held it.
“You should have left a letter. You should have said something. Even one sentence. I am leaving because I am not safe, I am leaving to protect you. One sentence would have changed everything about those eighteen years.”
She nodded slowly.
“You’re right. I told myself I couldn’t explain in a way that would make sense without putting you in more danger — that knowing about the sisterhood, about the spirit, would make you a target in ways I wasn’t equipped to manage from a distance. But the truth is that I was also ashamed. Deeply ashamed. And shame made me cowardly when you needed me to be brave.” She paused. “That is my failure and I own it completely.”
I looked at the window. I could hear the ordinary sounds of the pack going about its afternoon.
“When my father died,” I said, “where were you?”
“With the sisters. I had gone back to them after leaving. They were the only ones who could help me manage what was happening and eventually remove it entirely. I had nowhere else to go. My family had no framework for what I was dealing with and your father—” She stopped. “Your father would not have let me near him again even if I had tried. I understood that.”
“But you were with them. When I came to them for help.”
“Yes.” Her voice was careful now. “I saw you. I was in the inner rooms during your visits because that was where I was in my process of healing, and I couldn’t come out. I watched what I could from a distance and I asked them to help you in every way they were able to.” She held my gaze. “I watched you become the man sitting across from me right now and I was proud in the most painful way I have ever experienced anything. Because none of it was because of me. All of it was in spite of me.”
I sat with that.
Adriana appeared in the doorway, and looked at me with a question in her eyes. I gave her a slight nod and she came in and sat beside me.
“I think it’s time you met some people,” she said to my mother, and she called for Leo and then for the nurse to bring the twins.
Leo appeared first, appraising this new person with a serious expression. Adriana introduced them and my mother looked at him, warmth filled her eyes at the sight of him. And Leo, apparently satisfied by whatever he had determined in his assessment, shook her hand with great formality.
Then the twins were brought.
My mother looked at both boys and something moved across her face that I watched carefully. She placed her hand on each head in turn, a gesture that seemed partly instinctive and partly deliberate. Her hand on the first boy moved on after a moment. Her hand on the second one stayed.
She looked up at Adriana.
Something passed between them. A look I couldn’t fully read, carrying a meaning that existed slightly outside my access to it. My mother’s earlier words came back to me.
The darkness doesn’t ever rest.
I would ask Adriana about that later. I would need to understand what it meant.
“You have built something remarkable,” my mother said, looking at me. “Your father would not have the words for how proud he is of you. I’m not sure I do either.” She paused. “Treat your wife as your equal, Elijah. She is your crown. If she is diminished, so are you. I learned that too late with your father and I do not want that for you.”
I looked at Adriana beside me.
“I know,” I said. “I figured that out early.”
Adriana squeezed my hand without looking at me, which was her version of a smile when she was trying to keep her composure.
I turned back to my mother.
I was still angry. I knew the anger would be there for a long time. But underneath it, buried under eighteen years of constructed hardness, something else was present too, it recognized her face and remembered, against my will, what it had meant to have her in the room.
I reached over and put my hand briefly on hers.
She looked down at it and then up at me, and she didn’t say anything, because there was nothing adequate to say, and I had learned enough about silence by now to understand when it was the most honest available response.
My father was somewhere in all of this, I felt certain of it. Looking at the people gathered in this room and finding in that view the peace he hadn’t managed to hold onto while he was alive.
I hoped so. I had always hoped so.
Everything I had ever wanted was here, in this room, in this life.
I was not going to waste a single day of it.