“No,” I said. “I don’t wonder. Or worry. I love you. You’re my fucking world.” I started to come undone again. “You’re my entire world. My …”
“Universe,” Kacey whispered, her fingers brushing my cheek softly. “You’re my universe. I love you, Teddy…”
She sighed then, as if content, her eyes closed. “He was right about everything,” she said. “We have so much love in us. No end to it.”
She slept then, and I held her hand as my tears fell unheeded.
Love had no end. She was infinite. She was a universe,myuniverse, and I was hers.
Love had no boundaries, no rules, no favorites.
And no limits.
CHAPTER
FORTY-EIGHT
I stared at the hospital ceiling, my room quiet but for the heart monitor they attached me to. I had forced Theo to go the cafeteria and eat something. He’d left, reluctantly, and Oscar and Dena, Beverly and Henry had taken turns visiting me, offering me sweet words and their love, but I was grateful when they left.
My lower abdomen felt heavy from the surgery; a deep ache that protested when I moved.
How can it feel so heavy when there’s nothing there?
A pall of sadness hung over me, but it was nebulous and shifting. A shred of a memory from the fog of anesthesia kept trying to find me, but every time I grasped for it, it retreated back. I wanted to remember…because it was good. It brought me a peace, even the whisper of it I managed to catch.
Jonah…
My door opened and a nurse, Carla, peeked her head in. “Are you up for one more visitor? I was going to tell her you needed to rest but she said she’s your mother.”
I stared, my fingers curling around the sheets. “My…mother?”
Carla pushed open the door. I saw the flowers first, columns of blue bonnets nestled with baby’s breath.My favorite when I was a little girl.
My mother stepped into the room, holding the bouquet. Her eyes met mine and whatever had happened between us, however many years of separation were all erased. I just wanted her.
I held my arms out to my mom, and she quickly set the flowers down while Carla softly closed the door behind her. My mom bent over me, holding me carefully.
“Oh, my sweet baby,” she whispered against my hair. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry”
I cried against her, inhaled her. She smelled of Shalimar perfume—her favorite. My arms remember what it was like to hold her and be held by her. I was thrust back in time to other moments when I’d been a scared little girl who’d wanted nothing more than to be comforted by her mother. And she’d been there…until she wasn’t.
My mom pulled away and sat in the chair Theo had been living in for the past day and a half. She dabbed her eyes with a tissue from the box beside my bed and huffed a deep breath.
“I have so much to tell you, to explain,” she said in her feathery voice. “You deserve the truth. I wanted to tell you, so badly, when you were there in our house. I couldn’t believe you were really there. The years….” She shook her head. “Once so much time has slipped by, it becomes easier and easier to let it. But when I saw you…I felt every second of those seven years, and it nearly crushed me to know you’d felt them too. I made plans that very day to fly here, to find you. I told your father…” She swallowed hard, her eyes remembering the moment she spoke of, “I told him enough was enough. That I was going with or without him.”
Hope flared in my heart. “Is he…?”
She shook her head. “He’s walled himself so deep and so thick, I don’t know that he’ll ever find his way out. “
I nodded. “What happened to us, Mom? What happened with Dad…?”
She cast her gaze down to her hands twisting in her lap. “He never wanted children. We agreed when we got married that we wouldn’t. I was a shy young woman, and he was the first man to show me any interest or love. He was my only chance, my father kept telling me, and I knew he was right. But I loved Jim too. I did. I agreed we wouldn’t have children but deep down I wanted one. I wanted you.”
She shook her head. “But even after five empty years of marriage, I was too weak to say I’d changed my mind. I didn’t sabotage him. He thought I did, but it just happened. You happened and I was so happy.”
“He acts like he hates me,” I whispered.
Tears spilled over her eyes. “He doesn’t. I know he doesn’t. He’s afraid. He married a woman—me—whom he never had to fear would leave him, and he kept you at arm’s length your whole life, so he wouldn’t have to feel anything real. There is a piece of him that is broken, but I still have hope that it can be repaired. Some day. In the meanwhile…” She smiled at me, brushed the hair from my eyes. “You have me. I’m sorry. I hope that’s enough.”
