Page 37 of Sharing Forever in Hope Creek (Hope Creek #2)

Callie’s barrier of reserve crumbled. ‘But you went to university, Mum. You were smart and you earned a degree! You could’ve led a different path.

’ She couldn’t hide her angst at the path her mother had taken when her education could’ve given her such better— legal —opportunities.

‘Your life could’ve been so different from the generations in your family. ’

‘I had no options. My degree was paid for by the mob,’ she sneered.

Callie heard the anger in her mother’s voice and she frowned, realising she may have judged her mother when she hadn’t understood all the circumstances.

‘My family was in their debt, then I was in their debt. I had to work for them to pay off that debt. I had no choice.’

No. There had to have been a way out. She wasn’t going to let her mother play the victim. ‘You had a choice but you chose the easy way out! You could’ve worked your way through uni and applied for government assistance.’

‘I owed them money before they paid for me to go to university. I inherited my family’s debt.’ The edges of her lips pulled downwards. ‘I fell in love with your father. I fell pregnant with you.’ There was defensiveness and even a hint of accusation in the bald statement.

‘Are you telling me you had no options to escape from their influence?’

Julie’s eyes narrowed. ‘None that would’ve kept us together or kept me alive.’

When Callie sucked in an audible breath at Julie’s statement, her mother’s shoulders rounded slightly.

Callie wondered again whether she’d been too harsh in the judgement she’d made when she was little more than a child—when she hadn’t been in possession of all the facts.

Julie lifted her chin defiantly but then she admitted, ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right. I was weak and I opted to swim with the current rather than against it.’

Words failed Callie. She had no idea how to respond.

‘Your father and I did look at alternatives after you were born but they were all too hard,’ Julie continued. ‘Too dangerous. So we took the easy path.’

Despite telling herself this was never going to become about their relationship, Callie couldn’t help herself. ‘How could you love Mike knowing that he killed people for a living?’

‘Soldiers kill people. Doesn’t stop people loving them.’

Callie made a frustrated sound and her hands spread out to work in angry, jerky movements in front of her as she hissed, ‘A hitman is totally different from a soldier.’

‘Oh, you sound so self-righteous, but you’re wrong, Callie. Your father killed people, yes, but he was a soldier for all intents and purposes.’

‘He was a hitman for a criminal gang,’ Callie shot back.

‘It was an underworld war but a war just the same and everyone in that war knew the risks.’

Callie couldn’t believe her mother could sit across from her and justify cold-blooded murder. ‘What was I then in this so-called war, Julie? Collateral damage?’

The hard sneer dissolved and Callie thought she might have broken through her mother’s barriers.

She knew she should stop. She knew she shouldn’t expose her vulnerabilities, but now she’d started, she couldn’t hold back the twenty plus years of bitter recriminations she’d harboured.

‘You didn’t care enough about me to leave the war. Did you ever love me?’

Julie’s head fell forward and her shoulder-length greying hair obscured her expression. Callie watched her mother’s shoulders rise and fall as though her breathing was laboured.

‘Yeah,’ she said at last. ‘We both loved our little Sweetpea.’

Sweetpea.

It’d been her parents’ pet name for her. She remembered now. Had she always remembered but tried to block those memories?

‘When you turned two we talked about leaving—of making a new life for ourselves in another country. We started stashing money away so we’d have enough when the time was right.’

‘The time was never right,’ Callie deduced with cynicism. ‘I guess Mike’s services were always required because people kept crossing the mob. There was more money to be made, and how much money was enough money?’

‘The time was right,’ her mother told her sharply. ‘We had everything lined up but the big bosses had bugged our home and discovered our plans. They told us if we ever left they’d hunt us down and slit your throat in front of us.’

Callie gasped and her hands gripped tightly at the edge of the table.

Her mother leaned forward and lowered her voice.

‘We didn’t suddenly slip up, Callie. Your father and I became deliberately careless.

We knew the only way you’d ever be safe was away from us, and we knew the only way we could make certain you were away from us was if we were in jail.

It was the only way to ensure you didn’t grow up indebted to them as well. ’

Callie stared at her mother, open-mouthed.

It was impossible to believe and yet the truth of Julie’s words was in the way her expression willed Callie to believe her.

Beliefs Callie had held all this time were upended abruptly. Her thoughts were in chaos. Her head swam in confusion. ‘What are you saying?’

Julie’s throat worked up and down a couple of times as she swallowed. Then her jaw firmed and the hard expression was back in her eyes, yet this time Callie sensed that Julie was working hard to summon that expression.

‘Julie?’

‘We’re not good people and I don’t pretend for a moment that we are.’ Julie looked away from Callie. Through clenched teeth she said, ‘Neither Mike nor I are looking for redemption but, for what it’s worth, once you were born, you were the only thing that mattered to us.’

Callie’s first reaction was to push the declaration aside—to disbelieve it. After all, words were cheap. Yet, the sincerity in her mother’s tone hit at her heart and made her realise that the reason she wanted to discount Julie’s words as lies was for her own self-protection.

Unbidden, images of her childhood flashed back up on the screen in her mind.

Hadn’t her mother taken the time to read her at least one bedtime story every night?

Hadn’t Callie loved curling up on her father’s lap and hearing him tell her that she was his sweetpea?

Memories she’d suppressed started crowding her.

No! She didn’t want to remember those things.

It was easier to cope with the loss of her parents if she clung to her belief that there wasn’t a shred of good in them and that they’d never loved her. Yet, if life with them hadn’t been good, why would she have missed them so much when they were carted off to jail?

Now, as an adult, she realised that self-protection had made her lock all those good memories away. It had been easier to accept her new life if she told herself her parents were both completely evil monsters and if she refused to remember that there had been love in their home.

Damn.

She put her elbows on the table and had to hold her head in her hands as dizziness assailed her.

‘Are you okay, Callie?’

The concern in Julie’s voice struck again at the core of her as the room blurred.

Closing her eyes, she nodded a little. ‘Give me a minute. I’ll be okay.’

It took more than a minute and more than a few deep breaths before Callie was able to open her eyes.

In fact, she only pulled out of the dizzy spell by sheer determination when Julie said, ‘If you’re okay, open your eyes, because otherwise a guard will come over and that’ll be the end of our meeting. ’

‘Okay.’ Callie summoned what was probably a weak smile as she managed to open her eyes and put one hand in her lap so that her head was only supported by one hand and not two.

‘Are you healthy?’ Julie asked.

It was just as well Callie was still using every ounce of energy she had to try to suppress her emotion and think about why she was here, or she may have laughed at Julie’s sudden show of maternal concern.

‘I’m under a lot of strain,’ she replied.

‘Otherwise, healthy. The fainting is just due to …’ She pulled herself up.

Hell! This wasn’t the way this was supposed to play out.

No. She wasn’t going to sit here and pretend that they had some kind of normal mother–daughter relationship where she was going to share intimate details about her pregnancy and her health.

Callie felt a quick stab of guilt—of regret—as her mother stiffened a little before biting down on her lip and sending Callie a quick nod.

Her lips twisted and she looked around the room, seeming to give herself time to come to terms with the way things were between them before she started talking again.

‘I’d been pulled into the world of crime and your father had been too.

It’s not as easy as you think to resist it.

’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Before you know it, they own you. They have something incriminating on you and the screws keep turning tighter. We didn’t want you to be sucked into the that world, Callie,’ Julie continued.

‘We weren’t only trying to find a way to keep you alive.

We wanted you to have a chance at a normal life. ’

Although her inner voice still screamed in denial, Callie challenged her. ‘Why didn’t you reach out to me if you knew where I was?’

‘It was better that way.’ Julie shook her head. ‘You knew it too, or you would’ve reached out to us way before now.’

‘I’m sorry. I …’ But was she sorry? She bit back the words.

If what her mother was saying could be believed, her parents had cared for her enough that they went to jail to try to give her a chance at a life away from the world of crime.

But Callie didn’t know her mother well enough to be able to trust that she was speaking the truth.

The truth she knew was that her father had murdered in cold blood, and her mother had played her part by allowing the criminal network to thrive.

Her mother may not have pulled any triggers but she had enabled activities such as drug running and prostitution that destroyed the lives of thousands—and she’d been convicted of helping to dispose of two of her husband’s victims.