Page 5 of A Mother’s Love

She rented a room near the college in New London, Connecticut, and got a job at a bookstore until classes started in the fall.

She moved into the dorms in August. It was a small, picturesque college with two thousand students, on seven hundred and fifty acres of land overlooking Long Island Sound, with the quaint seaport town of Mystic a few miles away.

It was a gentle place for her to reenter the world.

Halley spent peaceful years there, and got excellent grades, particularly in her creative writing classes.

She made a few friends and had a few dates, and no serious romances.

She didn’t share her history with anyone, or tell anyone she had spent her high school years in a state orphanage.

She wanted to disappear into the crowd and was afraid to attach to anyone.

She focused on her classes and kept to herself.

She took a heavy class load and graduated in three years, when she was twenty-one.

She went back to New York when she graduated, rented a studio apartment with the money from her grandparents, which was available to her by then, and still had some of her father’s money left.

She worked as a model to earn some extra money, and met Locke Logan.

Locke was gentle and protective and he was the first person she had ever told about the abuse she had endured as a child.

He asked her about it, when he saw the scars on her body, which upset him for her.

He airbrushed them after he photographed her.

Even with the scars she was stunningly beautiful.

There was a gentle aura about her, and something magical about her from within.

Listening to her history, Locke knew that Halley was a remarkable person, more than he could cope with, or deserved.

She was like a survivor of a terrible war, with scars so deep he had no idea how to help her heal them.

She had endured so much and was incredibly strong.

And what struck him was that there was a light in her that nothing she had experienced had extinguished.

She still burned brightly with kindness and hope.

Her mother had beaten her body, but hadn’t killed her spirit.

The first time Halley opened her heart and fell deeply in love was with the twins she gave birth to.

She gave them all the love she had pent up for years and didn’t even know was in her.

All her forgiveness and love and compassion went into her mothering.

She never told them the story of her childhood and youth.

She didn’t want them to know, and only said it had been difficult, and offered no details.

She was afraid they might blame her for it, as her parents had, as though it had been her fault.

She was grateful that she had an unlimited supply of love to give the twins, all the more because of what she had been through herself.

Once she met Robert, she told him her secrets over time, and eventually had told him all of it.

He had guessed some of it from her writing, where she exposed herself and her deepest feelings.

It made his heart ache for her as he came to understand and know about her past. He was awed by her fortitude and endurance, and that there was anything left of her at all.

He thought she was more human because of it, deeper and stronger, and more loving, not less.

Before she met Robert, she knew she could love a child, but didn’t know if she could love a man.

He loved her with such gentleness and compassion that she blossomed and thrived.

She was able to open up to him as she never had before, physically and emotionally.

She admitted to him guiltily that she had never forgiven her parents, and he didn’t see how she could.

He hated them on her behalf, for everything they had done to her, but she didn’t expect him to.

He loved her even more, knowing her history.

She had no bitterness or anger. She had survived, and that was enough.

And she was able to love, which was a miracle in itself.

Robert was the first man she had ever trusted and loved.

Their relationship was whole and clean, with no lingering trace of the damage that had been done to her.

She had buried the past in a dark, secret place and moved on.

She had left the past behind, with no desire to unearth it.

Loving the twins, and being the kind of mother she’d never had, had healed her deepest wounds.

And Robert was her reward for surviving.

Halley lived in the sunlight of the present, not the dark shadows of the past. She loved Robert purely and simply, as she did the twins, and he had unlimited love to give her.

Losing him when he died was the first real loss she regretted in her life.

The evil people in her past no longer mattered.

Robert and the twins had amply made up for them and had healed her injuries.

He had helped her to erase the past. She never thought of it.

It felt like someone else’s life, and she never spoke of it. The stories were too brutal to tell.

—

She thought of Robert as she sat in the quiet corner of the terrace where Valerie had gotten married.

She wished he could have seen it, but maybe he had from wherever he was now.

She still missed him but the years they had shared had been an immeasurable gift, enough to make up for everything else.

She had no burden of hatred to carry. She was fueled and motivated by love.

It filled her soul, poured through her writing, and soothed the pain of the past. She had let it all go through her writing, and her love for Robert and the twins.

Valerie’s wedding marked the end of an era.

The twins moving to L.A. was a major loss for Halley.

But she had survived much harder things, her parents, the orphanage, the years alone before the twins were born, when she had no one to love and to love her.

What she and the twins had shared would give her the strength now to make a new life for herself, without them in it every day.

She never knew why she had survived her childhood.

The scars were there to remind her, but they had faded and seemed unreal now, like part of someone else’s life.

There were no longer scars on her heart.

Robert and the twins had healed them. Halley was a whole human being and radiated goodness and hope.

The poison of her youth had never touched her.

It had only made her stronger. She knew she could survive anything, and already had.

She had volunteered anonymously for years at various shelters and facilities for abused women and children, to show them that they could survive, no matter how violent the past. It didn’t have to color their future or keep them from leading a good life.

She had found her voice and healing through her writing.

The abuse she had survived was not a death sentence, it was a challenge to face and overcome.

There could be a good life afterward, you had to reach out and grab it, and Halley had, with Robert’s help, and her girls.

They had been the bridge to health and sanity for her, the way back.

A little while later, as it got dark, she gathered up her things, thanked the still busy wedding coordinator, took a last look around, and drove back to New York.

She had a peaceful feeling of accomplishment as she did.

All her minute attention to detail had paid off.

Valerie’s wedding had been a success. The twins were off to their own life in California.

All she had to do now was start to fill her own life again.

She had done it before. It was a mountain she knew she could climb.

She had the courage and the strength, and enough love stored up in her to carry her through.

Nothing could diminish her love for her daughters, and the deep love and respect she and Robert had shared.

The ghosts of the past were gone forever and could never hurt her again.

She had found peace, and the wounds were healed.