Page 71 of Cruel Kiss

I write it down.

I write about my father, and the glass, and the sound my mother made sweeping it up. I write about the last night, the one I've never told anyone the true shape of. I write what I did and why I did it and how old I was, and how I've spent my whole life since then trying to prove I'm not the thing that did it, and how I built a house full of children in my mother's name so that some part of the world would be softer than the part that made me.

I write that I never once regretted it. That's the part that damns me, and I write it anyway, because it's true, and because if she's reading this then the truth is the only thing I have left to give her.

Then I write the last line.

You are the most beautiful thing I have ever put my hands on, and the only clean thing I ever wanted, and if you're reading this, then loving you was the last good decision I made. It was worth every day I didn't deserve it.

— R

I read it once. I don't read it twice.

I fold the pages. I go through the drawers of a kitchen that isn't mine until I find one, and I put the letter in it and write her name on the front.

Calista Meadows. Not Bradshaw. Not Akov. Her own woman.

I seal it.

Then I open my briefcase and tuck the letter inside, in the flat pocket at the back. Next to it, soft and worn and folded a hundred times, is the napkin. Her escape route. The thing she handed me and then took back. The two of them lie there together in the dark of the case, her way out and my way of saying everything I couldn't say to her face.

I close the lid on both of them and click the latches shut.

Upstairs, the line of light under her door has gone out.

I sit at the table until morning comes.

Then I get up and start the coffee. A lot of cream. Just the way she likes it.

20

CALI

My mother calls Thursday to say she's coming for Sunday dinner.

"A proper one," she says. "With cloth napkins. I want to meet him."

"Mom—"

"You married a man, Calista. I found out from your son. Hayden told me at the zoo. He said, 'Grandma, Mommy married the pancake guy.'" She lets that hang there. "So I'm coming Sunday. And I'm going to sit at your table and look this pancake guy in the eye."

I say okay because there's no version of the conversation where I say anything else.

I spend Friday and Saturday getting ready. I clean the parts of the house that don't need cleaning. I make Ronan promise to be around Sunday, which he agrees to without blinking, which somehow makes it worse.

"Your mother," he says Saturday night, drying a dish. "Tell me about her."

"She's going to hate you."

"Probably."

"She raised me alone after my dad left. She doesn't trust men. She especially doesn't trust men who look like you."

"What exactly does that mean?"

"Like they've never been told no."

He hangs the towel on the oven handle. "She'll be pleased to learn I get told no constantly. By her daughter. Several times a day."