TWELVE
Dom
STAYING AWAY FROM TRISS THE last two weeks had been hard. Every day I’d had to force myself not to show up on her doorstep, not to ask—no, beg—for a second chance. It wasn’t just because I wanted to get to know Lily, which I did, desperately. It was Triss herself. Ever since I had seen her again at the reading of Robert’s will, I had felt this overwhelming need to constantly be near her.
Somehow, I had found the willpower not to give in to those needs and stayed away, telling myself that she needed time to settle in with the girls before I barged back into her life.
Seeing how devastated, almost broken she was over her mother had changed all of that, though. I couldn’t stay away now. She needed someone to hold her up while she went through this, and I wanted to be that someone.
After she was gone, I went back inside and checked on my own patients before once again stopping by Savanna’s room. She was still asleep when I got there, but I could tell her breathing was only growing more labored. The rattling in her chest wasn’t something I had wanted Triss to have to hear. I knew Crandall had been right when he had said her time was growing short.
My heart ached for Triss.
Instead of going home, I took a seat beside Savanna’s bed and just sat there, watching her breathe. Watching over her for Triss. It wasn’t going to be long now, and I didn’t want her to be alone when it happened. The urge to intervene, to assist her if and when she stopped breathing tried to destroy me, but I knew she had a DNR. Knew that I wouldn’t be able to help her when it ended.
I had always liked this woman, and now, knowing everything she had done for my daughter and how she had helped Triss when I hadn’t been there to do it myself, I felt like I owed her. She had earned my respect and loyalty, and I wanted to be there when she took her last breath.
In a way, it wasn’t fair. This woman was a good person, a loving mother. Meanwhile, there was my own mother, who didn’t know the first thing about any of those things. Yet the good woman was fading by the hour, while the evil one would grow older, tainting more lives over the years until she finally died.
However, when Savanna passed, she would be surrounded by those she loved and who loved her. Whereas Nancy would most likely die alone. She sure as hell wouldn’t go with me holding her hand.
I was done with her, just as my sister had said she was.
After talking with Kim, hearing her side of the story of what had gone on all those years ago, I knew she had been pulled into my mother’s scheming. She had been weak, still trapped in her own personal hell addicted to drugs, and our mother had promised to protect her. With Robert’s words from his letter to Triss ringing in her ears, haunting her, she had decided to go into a long stay at rehab to get clean.
My relationship with my sister was never going to be the same again. I couldn’t trust her as I once had, not knowing what I did now. Not when she had helped tear Triss from my life and fucked my daughter’s world up in the process. But I loved her, and I couldn’t completely turn my back on her.
We had agreed that our mother had to be stopped, and the only way to put an end to her evilness was to completely get her out of our lives. So while I supported her decision to go into rehab, she was supporting mine to never have anything to do with Nancy again.
I hadn’t spoken to my mother sense the reading of Robert’s will. I wanted to, hell, how I wanted to, but I didn’t trust myself not to do her some kind of physical harm if I were to be face to face with her. My lack of contact with her hadn’t stopped her from attempting to reach out to me or Kim. She called us multiple times daily, leaving messages that made her seem lost and alone without her children there to console her.
The trouble was, we could so easily see through her now, so it wasn’t hard to read the meaning behind her words. Her ‘I don’t know what I will do now without your stepfather’ meant she wasn’t getting the money she was so used to spending on an hourly basis and wanted us to foot the bill. Her ‘I miss you so much, darling’ meant that she was bored and no doubt wanted to play around in our lives once again.
Avoiding her calls hadn’t deterred her though. She had tried repeatedly to get my doorman to let her into my apartment, but I had made sure they knew she wasn’t welcome there and even advised them to call the police if she didn’t leave peacefully. She had even stopped by my office, but my receptionist and nurses knew she wasn’t welcome.
With Kim away in rehab, our mother couldn’t easily get to her as she once had. Fuck, I wasn’t even sure she knew where Kim was. As long as she couldn’t get her claws in my sister, I was fine with her being clueless where Kim was concerned.
Nancy was the biggest reason she had started doing drugs in the first place. Having put so much pressure on her, demanding she be smarter, thinner, more beautiful. Feeling like you aren’t enough to your own mother isn’t a way for anyone to have to feel, let alone a daughter who only wanted to make her mother proud. Yet that was exactly how our mother had treated Kim, and I hadn’t known it.
I had been blind to her faults, and for that I only had myself to blame.