Billionaire Romance Boxed Set 1(145)

Then I left the plot, not looking back over my shoulder. My breath already was coming faster as I moved toward the part of the cemetery where my mother would be buried. It didn’t look like any caretakers were around, so I would have to find her grave myself. I walked on, my toes beginning to freeze as my feet marked a trail towards the places where snow had drifted into piles on the paths through the cemetery.

My hand hung at my side, white fingers clutching the remaining bouquet of roses. Row on row and still nowhere near the end. The trails here ran crooked at the edges, overrun by brown and deadened weeds no hands had torn out in the springtime. My mother had been laid there, among the paupers and the unknown, the homeless and the kinless. I ached with guilt for not having come earlier, but the anger at my father inside me had altogether disappeared. Emptiness took its place, a quiet space in my mind amid the grief threatening to flood my senses.

The last row. I turned to the right and saw the slab, knowing it was hers before I read the inscription. The stone was whiter, newer, and the front glowed brighter in the daylight than any other around it. Dark patches of lichen crept up the uneven, pockmarked sides of the white slab, spiders crawling over stone. I knelt down and brushed the frost off of the front inscription.

Katalin Tomlin

1961-1992

Just her name and those dates. Nothing that mentioned she had been a loving wife and mother. Nothing about her, not a “Rest in Peace” or a “Forever in Our Hearts.” All of my vague memories, all of her life, reduced down to a name and number. Why hadn’t my grandmother’s family done something for her? It felt wrong.

“Mom,” I whispered.

When I touched the cold marble, it was as though the barricade that I had built up over the years, the dam that I had made, cracked and crumbled, swept away in a fast-moving river that was fed by some secret underground source. I broke down and wept: my face grew warm, then hot, then burning. The wind picked up and whistled among the cypress trees at the perimeter, the cold murmurings of a faraway tribunal.

“I’m sorry,” I cried. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, mom. I’m sorry.”

I did not know what I was apologizing for. For the years lost and taken for granted. For every mischief I got into. For waiting so long to grieve.

It had been too long. I didn’t even remember the sound of her voice. Slowly, but surely, the pieces of memory, so fragile and precious, had cracked and melted and ebbed away on the tides of time like so much glass being fractured, crystal by crystal, into sand. Her voice that had sung to me when I was young.

The tears ran and wet my collar as I pressed my handkerchief to my face and soon it soaked through, and still I cried and cried, the wet and dripping handkerchief clutched between my fingers in a paralysis of sorrow, nothing mattered. Not even my nose dripping so much, my tears wrinkling my face, so hot and wet and constant. My mom’s body was here, under me, and for the first time in a long time I let myself care. I let my emotions rise up inside me and take over, and in the roar of hurt and pain I found myself again.

I sat there for a long time, until I was steady enough to stop sobbing.

“I love you, mom.” I pressed a hand on the stone. It was cold and hard and dead, so unlike the tree in my grandmother’s yard. I thought that I would want to stay and talk, but now that I had seen where she lay buried, I didn’t want to. I didn’t know why. It struck me that I had been expecting more to come of my visit, for the world to stop, to change direction.

I stood up and touched my collar. It felt frosted, and that was when I realized that my hot tears had turned to ice in the air here. I pulled the coat collar out and brushed the frost away. There would be more tears later, but for now the world felt peaceful. Not numb, not suppressed. Just peaceful.





Walking out of the cemetery, my thoughts were a jumbled mess. I didn’t even notice when a car pulled up next to me, and I started when the car stopped at the curb in front of me and the driver got out. It was Eliot. He looked at me over the hood of the car, and I just looked back. I didn’t care how horribly puffy and red my eyes must be. He didn’t care for me anyway, so why should I care what he thought? Eliot walked around the front of the car to me.#p#分页标题#e#

“I’m glad I found you, Brynn! I talked with Mark already, but he said you had been gone since the morning. I thought you might be here.” Eliot stopped in front of me, just then noticing my bleary face.

“Brynn? Are you alright?” He dug in his pocket and brought out a fresh handkerchief. I took it gratefully and blew my nose. The sun had broken through the afternoon clouds and its rays warmed the top of my head.