Chapter Thirty
“Mom, Mom, listen to this!”
Maya pressed her small fingers to the neck of the guitar and used the other hand to strum the strings. Lord help her, her kid was a natural.
“That sounds great, sweetie,” Claire said, looking up from the stack of bills she was going through. Maybe one of her friends could babysit a few nights in the coming weeks so she could squeeze in a few more clients. She felt bad asking them to do more for her when they had their own lives, their relationships, would soon be wanting to have kids of their own. She needed someone else who could help her…
But thinking of help made her think of Ryan.
And that wasn’t going to help her at all.
“I’m not a babysitter,” he’d told her. “I’m her father. Trust me, we’re going to be fine.”
But she had trusted him. And it hadn’t been fine.
Maya was back to her usual routine, running around as though nothing had happened. But for Claire, it was harder to forget.
So she’d better stop imagining some alternate universe in which everything worked out and Ryan magically grew up and got his shit together and stopped dragging her daughter to bars and paid attention and put himself second and came back to Gold Mountain and loved her.
Because that was the worst part about it. After everything that had happened, she still wished he would come back and love her.
Maya looked up from her guitar. “Mom, why are you crying?”
Claire wiped a tear that had escaped down her cheek. “It’s nothing. Play me another chord, okay? Which one do you remember?”
Maya went back to the guitar, frowning in concentration, making things up that would have made Claire’s ears cringe except that any sound coming from the guitar was better than her daughter seeing her cry.
She thought she was in the clear, until suddenly Maya stopped, looked up, and said, “When’s Ryan coming back?”
Claire’s heart sank. She’d hoped Maya had finally stopped asking. Every day that she came home from school, she walked through the door with hope written all over her face, like she thought today was going to be the day. Claire knew that look, and she knew that feeling. She’d kept Ryan away precisely so her daughter never had to go through that rollercoaster of emotions, the crash and burn that came from loving someone so hard and then finding them gone.
“Ryan’s in Chicago, remember?” she said.
“How come?”
“Because that’s where he lives.”
“But can he visit?”
And then they had to go through the whole spiral of questions again—why Ryan wasn’t here, why he wasn’t coming back, why they couldn’t go and see him.
“What if you just told her the truth?” Sam suggested the next time they got together at Mackenzie’s, when Maya was at a sleepover with friends.
“That Ryan’s her father, I loved him, he almost killed her, and I sent him away?” Claire shook her head, aghast. Sam was always the practical one, thinking through every angle. But it was clear the woman didn’t have a five-year-old.
“I know I’m a monster for not saying anything in the first place,” Claire said. “But I was hoping I could wait until she’s eighteen to make her kill me for lying. Right now, I just don’t think she could process that much information.”
“She’ll get over it,” Mack said, laying a hand on Claire’s shoulder. “She’ll forget about him soon. Trust me, in another year, it’ll be like he never existed.”
Claire knew Mack was speaking from experience. She’d been in and out of foster homes for almost her whole childhood. She more than anyone knew what it was like to let go.
But the thought of Maya forgetting Ryan altogether—as though he’d never come into their lives, never taken Claire rock climbing or whispered in her ear or held her as if she were the most beautiful, most important person in the world—made her feel even worse than a thousand questions about where he had gone.
She sighed. “I’m just tired of feeling miserable.”
“I know,” Sam said. “But the way I see it, you have two options. Number one is to do nothing. You miss Ryan, Maya misses Ryan, but time passes, and eventually you feel better. Or you don’t, but you accept being miserable as your default position.”
“I don’t think Sam likes option number one,” Abbi said wryly.
“Option two,” Sam went on, “is that you do something.”
“Like what?” Claire asked skeptically.
“Like call Ryan. Tell him that you love him. Give him another chance.”
Claire could feel the blood draining from her face.
That was definitely not an option.
That was an option for crazy people. Reckless, irresponsible people who thought, Gee, wouldn’t it be fun to touch this hot stove again? And again, and again, and again?
“Option two is the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”
“Then I guess you’re stuck with being miserable and forcing yourself to get over him.”
“I should never have let him into our lives,” Claire grumbled.
“Don’t you think you’re being a little hard on yourself?”
Claire raised an eyebrow. “Tell that to my credit card debt. Insurance covered most of Maya’s hospital stay, but I still have the deductible, the ambulance ride, plus I wasn’t able to finish the courses I needed to renew my license, so now I have to figure out how to fit that in so I can keep my practice open.” The list went on and on.
Mack bit her lip. “Listen, Claire. I’ve been thinking…”
Claire looked up from her glass of wine. “Yeah?”
“I don’t really know how to say this.”
Okay, now she was suddenly worried. “What is it? Just tell me.”
Mack glanced at Abbi, who gave one of those go for it looks. Claire put her glass down.
“I know you’re mad at him,” Mack said. “You have every right to be.”
“But?”
“But do you remember when you got that birthday cake that you didn’t know had peanut flour in it?”
“Or when we all went trick-or-treating with Maya, and she grabbed those Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups so fast, she’d smeared them all over her mouth before anyone could stop her?” Abbi laughed at the memory, and Claire turned to her in shock.
“So you think I’m a horrible mother?” she said, aghast.
She wanted to storm out of there. She tried so hard, she thought she was doing everything right, even getting her life back on track after she’d made so many mistakes—
And here were the people who were supposed to be her best friends in the world, the family she’d made for herself when she realized she had to stop living under her parents’ watchful eyes and figure out her own life, reminding her of all the times she’d screwed up so badly, when the consequences were so much higher than a broken heart or a bombed GPA or a missed chance for a fancy diploma.
“That’s not what we’re talking about,” Mack said. “I’m saying, remember all those times when bad things happened and you couldn’t stop them because shit happens and no one can control it—no matter how perfect you are or how hard you try to do the right thing.”
“He made a mistake,” Abbi said more gently. “The kind of mistake any of us could make without ever meaning to.”
“I know I haven’t lived here as long as the rest of you, but now I’m terrified of watching Maya or feeding her anything,” Sam said.
“But you know about her allergy,” Claire protested. “You wouldn’t go around feeding her peanuts.” Whose side were they on, anyway?
“But Ryan didn’t feed her,” Sam said. “Someone else did.”
“When he wasn’t paying attention.”
“Which is exactly what we’re saying. It could happen to any of us. And what if—”
Sam swallowed.
“What if you cut one of us out of your life if we made a mistake like that?” Mack blurted out.
Her confession hung in the air. For a minute, no one could speak—Mack because she was too red in the face, Claire because she was too surprised to function.
“I would never cut you out of my life,” she said. She couldn’t even imagine what could happen to make her decide that about one of her friends.
“But Ryan,” Abbi said.
“It’s different.”
“Only because you have a history.”
“If it were me, you’d forgive me,” Mack said. “I know you would because we’re friends and you’d trust that I’d never do anything intentionally to hurt you or Maya. But you won’t forgive Ryan. Do you honestly think he meant for any of that to happen?”
Her question bored right into Claire. She didn’t want to answer. She wanted to drink wine and stuff herself with bread and olives and gossip about something frivolous that had absolutely nothing to do with her. These evenings with her friends were way more fun when they talked about everyone else’s sex life. When no one probed Claire about hers, because on the rare occasion when something exciting actually happened, it was almost always over before it began.
“Of course not,” she finally admitted. Of course she knew Ryan hadn’t wanted anything to happen that way.
“Then don’t you think that maybe you jumped on the excuse to push him away? He gave you a rock-solid reason to end it, and you saw your chance.”
“I’m not using Maya as an excuse,” Claire said weakly. “And anyway, he left. It doesn’t even matter if you’re right, because he left.”
“Because you made him.”
Claire turned to Sam. But she could tell by her friends’ faces that just because Sam had said it, it didn’t mean the rest of them weren’t thinking it, too.
She felt like she’d been punched in the gut.
“I didn’t make him to anything. He’s a grown-ass adult, even if he doesn’t always act like it. He was the one who tore out of here, who packed up and went back to Chicago so fast I didn’t even have a chance to see him again. He didn’t call, he didn’t text, he didn’t even make any effort to find out how Maya is doing.”
“Probably because he thinks he doesn’t deserve you,” Mack said.
Claire wanted to say damn straight he didn’t deserve her. She deserved someone who’d be there for her, who’d fight for her, who’d make sure she wasn’t alone.
But it was hard to feel as black and white about it as she had when she was in the hospital and all she’d known was that she had to do something.
Instead, she sighed. “I can’t change his mind, you guys. I can’t turn either of us into people we aren’t.”
Which was why, even if her friends were right, there was nothing she could do. Ryan had chosen Chicago, his music career, and a life on tour.
She was here, settled, with bills, clients, responsibilities, and a daughter who was counting on her.
So it didn’t matter how much she might have longed to follow her friends’ advice and go spilling her heart to Ryan, telling him she forgave him. Telling him she still loved him, and she always had.
Because he still wouldn’t be here. He still wouldn’t be hers.
No matter what, she’d still be alone.