Chapter Twelve
Willow
She wakes up in the middle of the night. When she steps into the living room she sees Liam asleep and she doesn’t want to wake him.
So many missed calls on her phone. It’s bugging her as she heads to the kitchen to get a glass of water.
“Pathetic!” she whispers to herself as she notices that there are no drinks. The only thing that she can afford to drink is water, even after the owner had warned her about drinking from the tap. She doesn’t care as she pulls down he tap and let’s it run for a little while and then glances over to make sure that Liam is still sleeping.
She can’t afford credit for her phone. She hadn’t realized it was her grandma calling her because she hadn’t heard her phone at work. It was in her pocket and after the long day that she had the only phone calls she was going to be expecting were to do with bills. Yet, she looked at her phone and worries that the only reason her grandma’s calling is because something’s wrong. She holds the glass in one hand and her phone in the other.
It’s early, but she knows that her grandma always wakes up at five-thirty. It’s a habit formed when she was a teacher. Willow hesitates before calling her, not because of the time, but because she’s worried about the little credit that she has left on her phone. Curiosity gets the better of her as she calls her grandma back.
“Nan, it’s me, Willow.”
“Hello dear, let me call you back. I’m just heading to the bathroom.”
“Okay.”
Willow hangs up the phone, relieved that her grandma is planning on calling her back and saving her credit.
She sips her water and then after the foul taste, she decides that she may need to start buying bottled water after all. She hopes she won’t be sick from just tasting it. Almost as soon as she slips between the covers again to await the call back from her grandma, her phone rings.
She quickly picks it up in fear that she’ll wake not Frank, but Liam. She doesn’t know if she can face him today.
“Nan?”
“Sorry, did I wake you?”
She shakes her head. “No, I was worried that I woke you up. I didn’t know if you were still getting up early in the morning.”
Her grandma chuckles, “You know me too well, dear.”
Willow sighs gently. She’s so far from the one place that she considers home. She should just pack her bags and go back there. After all, her grandparents have never met Frank. They don’t even know that he exists. She’s just about to tell her when her grandma says, “I’ve got good news for you.”
“Me, too,” Willow says excitedly. She’s about to tell her that she has a great-grandchild and they’re coming home.
“Your mom’s here.”
“Mom?”
“I know she doesn’t like to be called that. But I think that she’s changed.”
Willow freezes. She was happy to go home to her grandparents, but to deal with Harriet too just feels like too much to bear.
“What does she want?”
“Well, don’t be like that. She was working in Vegas for a while as a dancer.”
Willow nearly drops her phone, even though she was lying down with it close to her ear. This was too much of a coincidence.
“Can you believe that she even got married?”
Grandma’s laughing, but alone. She realizes and stops, “Anyway, she was working as a dancer or something in Vegas and married some bad man or something. She even got him sent to prison. Anyway, luckily he’s still there and with the help of the police she managed to change her ID and everything, but there was one thing that she always missed.”
“What’s that?” Willow feels as if her heart’s stopped beating.
“Home.” There’s an awkward silence, then her grandma continues. “I shouldn’t have said all this to you on the phone. You had something to tell me. You said it’s good news. I hope that you’ve met someone and you’re bringing him home. It’s been forever since you’ve been here.”
Willow shakes her head. “I need to go. I’ve got a headache.”
“Oh. Your grandpa said that I shouldn’t tell you. But I thought that it has been so long that we could all put it in the past.”
Again, Willow is unable to breath properly, let alone sleep.
“Okay, I can see that he was right, as usual. You give me a call when you get the chance. Just don’t be a stranger.”
“Bye.”
Her grandma was going to say something, but Willow doesn’t give her a chance as she hangs up the phone and once again cries into the pillow, the same way she did when she came home from work. The woman that Liam’s looking for just happens to be her mom and to make matters worse, the man looking after her son just happens to be his step-granddad.
Willow sobs as she realizes that there’s only one thing to do. She needs to leave. For the first time in a long time she’d felt safe and had thought that she had a future, but, as usual, it had been taken away from her. Life was cruel to her, and she didn’t even know the reason why.