Chapter 154

Chapter 154
Linnet's POV


The words hung in the air between us like a guillotine blade suspended by a thread, and I found myself unable to move, unable to breathe, unable to do anything except sit there with my hand still gripping Mom's across the scarred surface of our kitchen table while the radiator hissed its familiar rhythm. The whole world seemed to contract down to this single moment, this single truth that was about to reshape everything I thought I understood about my mother's past and my own present.

Mom's fingers tightened around mine with a strength that surprised me, her knuckles going white with the force of her grip, and when she spoke again her voice had changed—had shed the wistful nostalgia of remembering young love and taken on something rawer, something that made my stomach clench with anticipatory dread even as I forced myself to keep my expression neutral, supportive, giving her the space she needed to tell this story in whatever way she could manage.

"At first," she said slowly, each word seeming to require conscious effort to produce, "living with Cole really did feel like I'd found happiness. Real happiness, the kind I'd never experienced before." She paused, swallowed hard, and I watched her throat work as if she were trying to force down something bitter. "We had a lot of sex, Linnet. A lot. And we both enjoyed it. Very much."

The blunt honesty of it caught me off guard despite my attempts to stay composed, and I felt heat rise to my cheeks even as I kept my grip steady on her hand, kept my gaze fixed on her face rather than looking away in embarrassment because this wasn't about me and my discomfort—this was about her, about the truth she was finally trusting me with, and I owed it to her to receive it without judgment or squeamishness no matter how much the explicit details made something squirm uncomfortably in my chest.

"Those months," Mom continued, and now there was something almost wistful in her voice again, a ghost of remembered pleasure that made the contrast with her current fear even more stark, "were probably the happiest of my life up to that point. He made me feel wanted, desired, beautiful in a way I'd never felt before. And the physical connection between us—" She broke off, shaking her head slightly. "It was intense. All-consuming. I thought that kind of passion meant we were meant to be together, that what we had was special, unbreakable."

She fell silent then, her gaze dropping to our joined hands, and I gave her fingers a gentle squeeze, a wordless encouragement to continue even as my mind raced with uncomfortable parallels to my own relationship with Bryson—the way physical intimacy had felt like proof of something deeper, the way I'd let myself believe that desire and love were the same thing, that the intensity of wanting someone meant they were right for you in all the ways that mattered.

"I'm tired," Mom said suddenly, and for a moment I thought she was going to stop, was going to retreat back into silence and leave me hanging on the edge of this half-told story. "Would you mind if we—"

"No," I interrupted gently, reading the exhaustion in the lines of her face, the way her shoulders had begun to slump as if the weight of memory was physically crushing her. "Of course not. We can talk about this tomorrow, or whenever you're ready. There's no rush, Mom. I'm not going anywhere."

But she shook her head, a small, decisive movement that contradicted the fatigue evident in every line of her body. "No," she said firmly. "I need to finish this. Need to tell you everything while I still have the courage to say it out loud." She looked up at me then, and I saw something fierce burning in her eyes beneath the fear, a determination that reminded me uncomfortably of my own stubborn refusal to back down from difficult truths. "It's actually... it's easier, somehow. Saying it all at once. Like lancing a wound—it hurts, but the poison needs to come out or it just festers."

I nodded slowly, understanding even as my heart rate kicked up another notch in anticipation of whatever was coming next, whatever truth was so terrible that it required this kind of metaphorical surgery to extract. "Okay," I said quietly. "I'm listening. Take your time."

Mom took a deep breath, held it for a long moment, then released it in a shaky exhale that seemed to carry years of pent-up tension with it. When she spoke again, her voice had steadied slightly, taken on the quality of someone reciting facts rather than reliving experiences, and I recognized the coping mechanism for what it was—the same emotional distance I'd used when explaining to Emma what had happened at the Doyle mansion, the way you had to separate yourself from the events to survive the telling.

"One afternoon," she began, and I could see her retreating into the memory even as she spoke, her eyes losing focus as if she were watching scenes play out on some internal screen, "I decided to try baking cookies. I'd never been much of a baker, but I wanted to do something nice for Cole, wanted to surprise him with something homemade and thoughtful." A bitter smile flickered across her lips. "He was in the living room playing video games, and I called out to him when the cookies were ready, asked if he wanted to help me take them out of the oven."

She paused, and I felt my stomach tighten with premonition, with the sick certainty that this domestic scene was about to turn violent in a way I wasn't prepared to witness even secondhand.

"He said he'd help," Mom continued, her voice dropping lower, and I had to lean forward slightly to catch every word. "Came into the kitchen all confident, and I reminded him to use the oven mitts because the pan would be hot. But Cole—" She swallowed hard. "Cole said he didn't need them. Said he had it under control. And then he reached in with his bare hands and grabbed the pan."

"Jesus," I breathed, unable to stop the exclamation, and Mom's lips twisted into something that wasn't quite a smile.

"He dropped it immediately, of course," she said. "Burned his hands pretty badly. And I—" Her voice caught, and when she continued there was shame threaded through every syllable. "I laughed. Not cruelly, not to mock him, but because the situation was so absurd—he'd been so confident, so sure he didn't need protection, and then reality hit him hard. It was the kind of laugh that comes from surprise and relief that nothing worse had happened, that the cookies hadn't been ruined, that he'd learn to listen to warnings in the future."

The dread in my stomach had solidified into something cold and heavy, because I could already see where this was going, could already feel the shape of what came next even before Mom spoke the words that would make it real.

"He slapped me," she said flatly, and the casual delivery of those three words somehow made them hit harder than any dramatic buildup could have.