Page 139 of The Temptation

I suck in a deep breath and hold it when he pulls it open without a word, and there she is.

My mother.

Pale. Still.

Too quiet for someone who used to scream her way through life.

I don’t move at first. I just stand there, taking her in. I thought I’d feel rage or maybe nothing at all. But what creeps in instead is something I can’t quite name.

She looks peaceful. Maybe for the first time in her miserable life.

I release Lucia’s hand and step closer. My heart’s thudding in my chest, but everything else feels numb.

“You really did it this time, Mum,” I murmur in a low voice. “You finally found a way to disappear for good.”

There’s so much I never said. So much I never could say. And now all I’ve got is this cold room and a dead woman who gave me life and took just as much from it.

“There were times I hated you,” I whisper. “Yet, I still loved you. Too much, and maybe not enough.”

I stare at her face, searching for some trace of the woman I used to chase through the streets at midnight. The same one I dragged out of too many drug houses to keep tabs, begging her to get clean … to come home.

But that mess of a woman has now gone.

She’s just a body.

A silence that can no longer argue back.

I inhale sharply, blink away the sting in my eyes, and step back. “I hope you finally find peace now, Mum. If you happen to make it through the pearly gates, tell Dad I said hello.”

The second those words leave my mouth, I feel stupid. The only thing I know about the man who helped create me is his name. I don’t even know what he looked like, but sheloved him. I know that much. That was the one constant in the chaos that became her life.

I stand there a moment longer, staring at the woman who, in so many ways, was a stranger to me. And I find myself wondering what she was like before her life went to hell. What our lives would’ve looked like if my father hadn’t died in that accident.

If she’d never gotten hooked on her meds?

If she’d had someone to hold her together before she fell apart? I was just a baby when all of that started.

I lean down and press a chaste kiss to her cold skin. I can count on one hand the number of times I did that while she was alive.

Before I draw back, I drop my mouth near her ear. “You don’t get to haunt me anymore,” I say, soft enough that Lucia doesn’t hear.

But even as I reach for my wife’s hand and turn to leave, I know I’m lying.

She will.

The scars that woman left on me are too deep to ever fully heal.

I feel tired, emotionally spent, and so fucking sore by the time we get back to the house.

The drive home was quiet. Not tense, just still.

Lucia curled into my side and held on tight while I sat there, staring out the window, trying to make sense of everything I’d just seen. Trying to find sorrow for the woman who birthed me, even if she never knew how to be a mother.

She’s being transferred to the crematorium in the morning. I’ve decided to have her cremated. I’ve got no fucking clue what I’m going to do with her ashes, though.

I don’t know if there was a place she loved, somewhere that meant something to her, besides her dealer’s front steps. And I can’t even scatter them at my father’s grave, because I don’t know where that is either.

All I have are pieces. Fragments of two people who never got to be whole. And somehow, I’m what’s left of the mess that was once my family.