Page 108 of Reckless Obsession

Except after a point, I’m not really hearing her anymore.

My brain does that thing where it starts shutting doors to survive.

Her voice dulls. Then blurs. Then becomes nothing but movement. Her mouth forms words I can’t quite catch, and I see Tristan replying sharply, Jamie cutting in, my mother somewhere in the middle. The whole room sounds muffled, as if I’ve been shoved underwater and expected to keep smiling politely through it.

Something hot and vicious keeps rising inside me.

Anger.

Jealousy.

Humiliation.

And something else too, something uglier and softer, something with no clean name because naming it would mean admitting how much this is actually hurting me.

Then I feel my mother’s hand.

Cool and steady, closing gently over my fist where it’s clenched white-knuckled against my thigh.

I look down at it, and that’s when I realize I’m breathing too fast. It’s shallow and even but subtle enough that no one else at this table has noticed.

But she’s my mother.

She notices everything.

My eyes lift to her warm gaze, and what I find there isn’t confusion or concern. It’s something quieter and sadder.

Not sad for herself.

Sad for me.

And in that single unbearable second, I understand.

She knows.

She knows something is going on between Tristan and me. Maybe not everything. Maybe not the specifics. But enough. Enough to look at me now with that particular ache in her expression, the one mothers reserve for watching their children hurt over something they can’t fix for them.

My heart stutters.

How long has she known?

How much has she seen?

I’m still trying to process that, still trying to figure out what to say, whether to even say anything at all when I hear footsteps racing toward the dining room.

“Grandma! Grandma!” A child’s voice, bright with excitement. “I brought Nala and Nolan to show you!”

Then Richie—Tristan’s sister’s son, all happiness and terrible timing—bursts into the dining room, his hands held out in front of him as if he’s carrying treasure.

My eyes drop to his palms.

And the world stops.

Two huge, thick, dark tarantulas are crouched against the pink of his small hands, their legs moving in tiny, tentative shifts that make something old and buried split wide open inside me.

No no no—

It happens too fast for thought to catch up.