Fire Inside:A Chaos Novel(14)

Then again, she’d never liked Elliott. “He may be brilliant, darling, but men like him never get very far. Middle ground. My girl? My Lanie? Looks like yours?” She had flicked my hair off my shoulder before she finished by declaring, “Breeding and beauty like yours, darling, you deserve to be on the arm of a star!”

I shoved this memory down and replied, “I’ve had a tough week at work.” This wasn’t a total lie. “So I need a quiet weekend.” That wasn’t a total lie either.

“Okay, quiet is good,” Mom returned. “Bedder than you rubbing elbows with Tyra’s family. Whad she was thinking, I will nod ever know. Such a priddy girl, too. Total waste. Her parents must be devastated.”

Suffice it to say, not only the Connecticut banker mom but also the Tennessee farmer’s daughter mom did not approve of the Chaos MC.

“They’re good people, Mom,” I told her for the four hundred and fiftieth time.

“They’re bikers, Lanie.”

She said the word “bikers” like uttering those two syllables spontaneously filled her mouth with acid.

“Can we not talk about this?” I asked on a sigh. “Really, it’s been a tough week and I’m exhausted.”

“Okay, wad d’you wanna talk about?”

I didn’t want to talk at all.

I didn’t want a lot of things and I hadn’t wanted most of them for a long freaking time.

I didn’t want my fiancé to be dead.

I didn’t want my fiancé to be dead by being whacked by the Russian Mob.

I didn’t want to live with the knowledge, and the guilt, that his antics with the Mob got my best friend kidnapped, twice, and the second time it got her stabbed. Repeatedly.

I didn’t want to be alone.

I didn’t want to be so damned lonely.

I didn’t want to live like I was living—the nightmares, the fear, something no one would understand, something I had to hide so people I cared about didn’t get worried.

I didn’t want my Mom to be wasted… again.

I didn’t want to know she was sitting alone in the big house on all that land in that exclusive estate where I grew up, close to the country club, every single resident a snob.

I didn’t want to know she was alone because Dad was either working or on a business trip.

I didn’t want to know these were his ready and oft-used excuses, otherwise known as flat-out lies, for leaving Mom alone for a night, a weekend, a very long weekend and all of this so he could be with his mistress of thirty years.

I’d seen him with her more than once. He wasn’t careful. He was arrogant. He kept up the pretense of the secret even knowing it wasn’t a secret and hadn’t been for decades. He even gave Mom filthy looks when she was drinking even though she was drinking because the love of her life had two loves of his and he expected her to share though he’d never asked if she would. So she’d made the decision to do so because he was the love of her life but also because, without him, there would be no big house close to the country club and she wouldn’t be getting slaughtered on forty dollar bottles of wine and top-shelf martinis.

“Mom, how about you call me tomorrow? We’ll talk then. Now, I really have to get some sleep.”

This got me nothing and I knew what that meant. She was pouting. When I was a kid, I wondered if Dad wouldn’t have found another woman if Mom hadn’t acted like a spoiled brat. It was only later, when I grew up, that I knew it didn’t matter if she pouted or was spoiled. You didn’t do that to someone you loved.

Not ever.

Elliott would never have cheated on me. Other boyfriends had and it hurt. No, it killed.

Elliott did not, would not. He didn’t even glance at other women when we were out.

For Elliott, it was only me, and if I’d had him for the lifetime I was meant to have him, I would have lived that lifetime knowing, without a doubt, it would always only be me.

“Okay, baby girl,” Mom slurred, bringing my thoughts back to her. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

She didn’t sound disappointed, she sounded crushed. She was hurting. She was lonely. She was wondering, as she had been for decades, where she’d gone wrong.

So, of course, I felt daughterly guilt. I should be there for her.

I just couldn’t help. I’d tried. I’d failed. Taking these phone calls. Having gentle discussions trying to bring her around to talking about what she was drowning in booze, discussions she always firmly veered in another direction. Sensitive talks about how she might want to lay off the wine a bit, more talks she firmly took in another direction.

Years of it.

I had nothing left to give.