Chapter Twenty-Seven

“What the hell is this?” she shrieked. She actually shrieked. My mother and I both flinched and took full steps back. Kat rarely got angry, but when she did…she burned.

She stomped toward my mother, the hand with the papers outstretched. “You were in the hospital? When I thought you were with Wendy?”

My mom’s face crumpled, and she sank into the nearest chair without answering. I didn’t remember a time in our family’s life when Kat screamed at her, and I bet she couldn’t either. In high school, I’d done pretty much all of the disciplining, and they’d always been so close. It was jarring for me to hear Kat take that tone with her; to my mother, it probably felt like a physical knife in her throat.

For a moment, her trembling lips parted as though about to speak, but no words came out. Where could she start after so many years of intentional silence?

Kat rounded on me then, her eyes huge and wild. “The paperwork was in your purse. You knew she was in the hospital! Why did you lie to me about this?”

Because that’s what I do, I almost blurted. That’s what I’ve always done. Instead, I licked my lips and fumbled for an excuse. “I didn’t want you to worry. You have so much on your plate with the move—”

“Bullshit,” she howled. She shook the papers in the air. “It says she was hospitalized for severe depression. That she wasn’t able to function at home. That kind of thing doesn’t spring up out of thin air.”

She looked at my mother, who was now bent over in the chair, her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands. Her shoulders were shaking. Kat’s furious expression changed to one of terror.

But when she turned to me again, the fear transitioned straight back to anger. “How long has this been going on? How long has she been sick?”

Oh boy. Kat was going to freak out. But there was no sense in telling partial truths now. She’d only figure it out herself when she was calmer, and then she’d be even angrier. I sighed and did the math in my head. “More than fifteen years.”

The hand with the papers dropped to her side, and Kat’s face went white. She swayed on her feet. I reached to try to steady her, but she shoved me away.

“It’s episodic!” I quickly amended. “She has bad streaks and good ones. She’s been mostly good, mostly stable for a whole decade now.”

Still ashen, Kat dropped into a chair at the other end of the table from my mother. Almost a full minute passed before she spoke again. “So it wasn’t migraines all those years when I was little.” Her voice had almost no inflection at all.

I imitated it with my response. “Correct.”

Kat turned her back on me and switched chairs so that she was right next to my mother, who still sat with her face in her hands. “Mom,” Kat said gently. She tugged on my mom’s wrists until my mom straightened and opened her eyes.

Shame was clear on her face. After all these years, she was still so humiliated by a condition she had no control over. Even though we butted heads constantly, her embarrassment broke my heart.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Kat whispered. “I don’t want to be angry with you, but I feel so…betrayed. We talk about everything. Or I thought we did. Why would you not share this huge, important, life-impacting, horrible thing with me?” Fat tears plopped out of her eyes and trailed over her bright pink cheeks. Kat was one of those super-annoying girls who looked pretty when she cried. “Did you think I couldn’t handle it?”

My mom shook her head furiously and wiped the tears from Kat’s face. “No, my beautiful girl. You can handle anything.” She cleared her throat. “It was purely selfish of me to keep it from you. I didn’t want you to know.”

“But why?” Kat pleaded.

My mom closed her eyes. Her voice was so hoarse. “Because I wanted one daughter to think of me as purely ‘Mom.’ Someone whose love for me wouldn’t be complicated and diminished by my illness.” She tucked Kat’s hair behind her ear. “Someone who still looked at me like a role model. Someone to think I was strong.”

Drops of water landed on my hands and ran between my fingers. Oh. Tears. My face was completely wet.

Kat nodded thoughtfully to show she was listening. Then her eyes crinkled tenderly at the corners, and she gave my mother’s shoulders a little shake. “And do you think that I suddenly feel differently toward you now that I know about this?” She raised her voice. “Of course not! Mom! There is nothing that would change the way I look at you or how I feel about you. If anything, I love you even more and think of you as even stronger now that I know what you’ve been dealing with all this time.”

My mom gripped Kat’s shoulders, and they clumsily collapsed into a weeping hug. I took a long, shaky breath and finished my bourbon. Good. This was good. No more secrets. I’d always known that Kat’s love wouldn’t change one whit if she knew about my mother’s illness. Thank goodness my mother finally realized this too. And if seeing them cling to each other in their little love fest made me feel like a third wheel…well, I was used to it.

An anxious waiter appeared in the doorway. “Ah, we’re going to need this room.”

“Ten more minutes.” I stared him down until he left.

My mom released Kat and pulled back to look at her tenderly. “I’ve imagined telling you everything for years, but I was just scared. Thank you for not being angry with me.”

Kat managed a watery smile. “Of course I’m not angry with you.”

I let out a sigh of relief and rotated my neck. One crisis averted. Now we could move on—

At the table, Kat stood and marched toward me with her hands on her hips. “But I am livid with you, Tess.”

I almost laughed. Of course. I wasn’t going to get off easy. Kat needed someone to blame for all these years of being in the dark, and it wouldn’t be my frail mother.

She advanced on me. “There’s no excuse for you. You should have told me about this years ago. I get that I was a kid when it all started, but I haven’t been a kid for a long time. You had no right to keep this from me! This is my family, for Christ’s sake! How could you?”

There were so many things I almost said. That I didn’t tell her because my mother always asked me not to. That most of the time I actually did still think of her as a kid. That I wanted to protect her.

But I knew that none of these answers would placate her. She wanted to lash out. I was feeling guilty about this and so, so awful about Max…I deserved a little wrath right now. I could be her target. So I just shrugged and looked at the floor.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, Tess?” I almost flinched again; Kat never used the f-word. “I love you, but you can be so goddamn hurtful. You honestly make the worst emotional decisions of anyone I’ve ever met.”

Her words pierced me like an arrow to naked skin and vulnerable organs. The day’s events had stripped me of any armor, so I just absorbed the pain. She wasn’t just speaking of my reticence about my mother’s condition. I knew my sister.

“Kat, no—” My mother softly tried to interrupt.

I waved her off. “She’s talking about Daniel too.”

Kat’s eyes blazed. “So what if I am? That was the last time we all cried so much, right? And again, it was because of something Tess did.” My mother drew in a sharp breath, but I held my ground. The words hurt—but she wasn’t wrong.

“Kat,” I tried softly. “I told you at the time and I’ll tell you again now. I’m so sorry that you were hurt so much when Daniel and I split up. It was incredibly unfair—”

“I’m not just upset for myself!” she yelled. “I’m not that shallow. Jesus, Tess. Do you have any idea what it’s like watching the person you love most in the world blow up her life? And for no reason!” I let out a helpless wheeze of air. She’d loved Daniel so much. I could never make her understand.

Her lips curled into a thoughtful sneer. “Sometimes I feel like you’re the emotional equivalent of someone going around accidentally killing people with her car…you don’t mean to do it, but it’s negligent homicide just the same.” She shook her head, looking self-righteous and contemptuous. “To yourself and others, you’re just a life-ruiner—”

“Katharine, that is enough!” My mother’s voice cracked through the air like a whip.

Kat and I both gaped at her. Kat probably because my mother had never yelled at her and me because…uh…it almost sounded like she was defending me. That couldn’t be right.

She pushed herself out of her chair so that she was standing too. “Tess’s behavior at the wedding…well…”

“Holy shit,” I exclaimed. We were really going to do this, huh? Seven years later, my mom was finally going to talk to me about Daniel? We’d never discussed it before. Never. When everything erupted on my wedding day, she’d cooperated with Daniel’s fuming mother to shut everything down, but she never talked to me about it. She never even cared enough to ask why I’d ruined it all.

Until now, apparently. “You want to talk about Daniel now?” I gripped my hands into fists because they were shaking. “You finally want to ask why I slept with his cousin?”

“Heavens, no. I know why you did that.” After all these years, my mother could still shock me. Kat gasped.

“Oh really?” I asked, sarcasm and skepticism dripping from the words. She knew nothing about me, then or now.

My mother walked to me and looked me straight in the eye. For just a moment, it was less like looking at an older version of Kat and more like looking in a mirror. “You did what you did because you knew that marrying Daniel would have been a huge mistake.”

Kat let out a murmur of protest, and my mom half turned to give her an emphatic head shake. “He didn’t love the real Tess, sweetheart. He loved the Tess she’d had to be for all those years taking care of us.”

She turned back to face me. “You didn’t want to go from dutiful daughter and half mother to Kat to being a dutiful wife to Daniel. You wanted to be a rising star at work. You wanted to go a bit wild.” She cleared her throat and raised an eyebrow. “While that streak has gone on longer and been more extreme than I personally like, you deserved it.”

Reeling, I didn’t even pull away when she tentatively reached out, put her hand on my shoulder. “You deserved to be an individual. To grow into your own woman instead of being defined by everything that had happened and by everyone around you.”

She tucked my hair behind one ear, just like she’d done with Kat. “The thing with Daniel’s cousin…well. Tess, you did the right thing in a terribly wrong way.”

More tears fell from my eyes to the floor. The shock of her words, the shock that she was dead-on right, had numbed me a little, but my body was apparently reacting in all sorts of ways.

Kat walked slowly back to the table and plopped down hard onto one of the chairs as though my mother’s words had vanquished her ability to stand. I followed and dropped onto the chair next to her.

The anxious waiter stuck his head back in the room. “Ten more minutes!” I barked. It looked like he might protest, but confronted with three weeping women, he fled.

My mom sighed and sat down as well. “I never should have let your engagement get as far as it did. I knew you were miserable. You’d never have gotten so skinny otherwise,” she said wryly, and I almost smiled.

“I should have made you face it, but I was in denial too.” She gestured between herself and Kat. “Daniel was so good to Kat and me that I wanted him to be right for you. But deep down, I knew he wasn’t.” She looked down at the table, avoiding eye contact. “During your engagement, you lost weight and stopped sleeping. I had one of my worst depressive episodes.”

What? My eyes popped to her face. She just smiled sadly. “Thankfully, I got myself out of that one.”

I closed my eyes and scrunched up my face. “The morning after the non-wedding, I cooked myself a full pan of scrambled eggs and ate the entire thing. That night, I slept eight straight hours.”

She sob-laughed. “Your body knew it was the right thing, even if your heart and mind were torn.”

The room was silent for a long minute before my mom spoke again. She sounded exhausted. “We should have had this conversation a long time ago, girls. That’s my fault, and I’m sorry.”

The radiator in the corner of the room hissed on, flooding the space with warm, stuffy heat. “It’s not all your fault,” I heard myself say, as if from a great distance. “We’re both bad at this kind of stuff.”

“You really, really are,” Kat muttered. “Both of you. Just awful.”

I hiccupped a laugh and risked a look at her face. The rage was gone, replaced by a wide-eyed and wary look. I certainly couldn’t blame her. My mom and I had put on quite a show today. Strangely united, we’d given her a lot to process.

I had so much to pore over myself. To think, all this time there’d been someone who understood. And for that someone to be my mother. I pictured my brain exploding.

The waiter stuck his head in the room again, a look of resolve on his face. A look that quickly disappeared as the three of us yelled in unison, “Ten more minutes!”