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“THAT DOESN’T MAKEyou a bad person,” he immediately responded.But didn’t it?Didn’t it make me aterribleperson for ever thinking, or wishing, or feeling something that ugly?

“Sometimes people are too far gone,” he continued. “That it feels like they already are.”

I nodded, wiping away more tears. That’s exactly what it felt like. Like she’d been there without ever actually being there. A shell of a person, of a mom, who’d flipped on the vacancy sign and had long given up on life.

“You haven’t said much about your mom, but from the sound of it…she was in pretty deep?”

I nodded again, because again, he was right. Besides the obvious fact that drugs had taken her away from me, I’d never known a sober mother. There were only three versions of her I knew, and sober had never been one of them. There was the euphoric, blissfully high version of her. The mom that blasted music from her“good old days,”and constantly burned food in the kitchen while begging me in vain to “live a little,”and “dance with me,”and “just try it; one hit won’t kill you, Jess.”

And then there was the version of her that I sometimes, albeit reluctantly, found myself feeling sorry for, even though she was in a hell of her own making. The mom who’d lay in darkness for days at a time, sleeping and drifting in and out of deep depression. The mom I heard hurling her guts out at three-a.m. because she was coming down and hadn’t been able to get her fix. The mom who cried, and prayed, and promised thatthis timeshe would get sober, thatthis timeshe would be better.

But the version of her I got the most, especially in the end, was the same side of her that I hated the most. The fiend; the angry, and screaming, and willing to do whatever she had to do—to hurt and manipulate and steal from whoever she had to—to get her next fix, version of a drug-addicted mother.

That, or she wasn’t there at all.

“She was,” I answered Greyson’s question out loud, releasing a deep and shaky breath. “I don’t think she could’ve stopped even if she wanted to. I mean…I know she couldn’t. I knew…I knew she would go out like that…that it would end like that…

“So, yeah.” I swallowed. “She was in deep. Way too deep for way too long.” I blew out another breath and clenched my hands into two tight fists against my forehead, fighting off the rainstorm of tears I felt flooding forward.

I wasn’t sure how I felt anymore. About any of it. But I knew that the anger I’d felt about it all—about her—for so long, had somehow disappeared between one conversation with Greyson and the next. Like it had been taken away by the tide and washed out to sea. But somewhere in its wake, I felt a sadness and a loss I hadn’t allowed myself to feel for her before.

And that locked space in my heart where the few good memories of her remained hidden and buried, filled with it.

The loss of my mom, the pain of it, lanced through me for the first time since the day I found her on our bathroom floor. As if it had lay waiting, building and multiplying in force and intensity for the past year, it slammed into me. I curled over on myself, a lifetime’s worth of tears breaking through with a loud sob.

In the end, it didn’t matter what my story looked like, how ugly or broken or damaged it was,I was still just a girl who had lost her mom, far too early.

I felt Greyson’s hands slip around me, pulling me into the comfort of his arms. I gripped his shirt in my fists and cried. I cried, and I cried, and I cried, and I didn’t try to stop my tears from falling. I cried for the girl who’d sat at the end of her mom’s bed at six-years-old and didn’t understand why she never wanted to get up and play with her.

I cried for the girl who’d hid in dark closets when her mom’s boyfriends raged and screamed and threw things against the walls.

I cried for the girl who had to protect herself from the world when there was no one else around willing to save her.

And I cried for the girl who had begged God, every night, to make things better, but whose prayers were never answered.

There was a lifetime lost in those fifteen years. I’d been forced to learn how to love with a heart that was riddled with scars.

I was still learning. How to love myself, even though I’d never been taught how. How to love others. How to let them in without being afraid of getting burned.

I don’t know how long I sat there, crying, with Greyson’s arms wrapped around me. But he never moved away. He just sat there and held me, the entire time. One hand ran up and down my back, soothing, as the loss of my mother and a childhood abandoned washed through me again and again.

We’d hardly known each other, I realized. My mom and me. We’d never beenMomandDaughter.Instead, we’d spent all of our time in darkness, learning how to resent each other. And it hurt, beyond what I could fathom, that we’d never be able to change that. That we’d never get that time back. Her addiction stole it all away from us.

But somewhere in the middle of that thought, in the middle of a world of pain and heartbreak…I remembered her smile. The glimmer of hope in her eyes when she told me she’d make it out alive this time. The laughter on her lips when she’d hand me a burnt chocolate-chip cookie, or brownie, or piece of pie. The rare, soft passes of her hands through my hair when she’d thought I was sleeping.

I promised myself then, that I would try to remember these things more. That I would try to let those memories of her eclipse the hurt she’d caused. Because in order to spread that much misery, she must have been waging one hell of a war inside of herself, too, all on her own. I couldn’t pretend to fully understand it, but I knew I could learn to accept it.

Eventually, my flood of tears ran dry. I sat up and wiped away the evidence of it. I was sure it was useless; I could feel how puffy my eyes were, how red and raw my cheeks felt from wiping, and wiping, and wiping away at the steady stream that had poured down my face.

Greyson reached over and tucked my hair behind my ears, the corner of his mouth hitching up in a small, sad smile. And in the same way that I’d accepted all of his demons, I could feel the way that he wholly accepted mine, too. In the way his green eyes held mine with understanding. In the way he was still holding me, our arms and legs entangled between us. In the way he quietly whispered“I’m so sorry”more times than I could count.

“I know my situation is different,” he said after a long while. “And I don’t know the first thing about what you’ve been through,” he added. But it felt like he did. It felt like he knew exactly what I’d been through.

“But my dad made it out alive,” he continued, “and it still feels like I lost him. I’ll never respect him, and I’ll never be able to stand being around him long enough to have a relationship with him.” He shook his head. “Not after everything he’s done…I can’t. I can’t stand that my mom took him back, and I can’t stand how they’ve swept everything under the rug like it never happened. And I think…I think thatyou, more than anyone, can understand why the first chance I get, I have to get the hell away from them.”

I looked into his eyes again, and I don’t know how, but I knew what he was going to say before he said it.

He ran his hand through his hair, shifting away from me the slightest bit. “I have just over a month left before I leave. One month, and I’ll be eighteen and graduated and officially enlisted. I want to start over, start a new life apart from all of this, you know? A life where I’ll never have to look my father in the face again while pretending to respect him or have to rely on him for anything.”