Chapter One
Eighteen Years Later
Veronica
The sound of my phone ringing wakes me from my drunken slumber, causing pain to ricochet through my brain. The phone rings a few more times before thankfully going silent. After taking a deep breath, I crack an eye open and look around the hotel room, trying not to think of how bad my head is hurting or how my stomach is threatening to push out all the liquor I forced into it last night.
Carefully, I sit up and take in the destruction of the trashed room. My eyes land on an open pizza box, and my belly chooses that moment to revolt. Jumping from the bed, I rush to the bathroom and lose the contents of my stomach. By the time I’m done, my entire body is aching, and my head feels even worse than it did before.
After a quick shower, I walk out of the bathroom, still feeling like shit. Tossing my towel on the floor, I walk toward my suitcase. Just before I reach it, I see a nearly empty bottle of Patron lying on the floor. How the hell I’m even able to move after drinking so much, I’ll never know. In my defense, I deserved to get shit-faced after being forced to spend Christmas with my mother, stepfather, and my stepbrother and his family. It was definitely the day from hell.
I haven’t spent Christmas with my mother since I was thirteen. The next year, she and my stepfather, Timothy, decided to go to Aspen for the holidays and let me know that I was not welcome to join them. I was fine with it. Instead of spending Christmas day in the cold and silent house my mom calls home, stuck in my bedroom all day, I was allowed to stay with my dad. Since then, we have made it a tradition to spend Christmas together. He takes me somewhere different every year, showing me a way to live that I would never experience being stuck behind the stone walls of my stepfather’s mansion.
This year, though, my mother demanded I put in an appearance. Now that my stepbrother, Miles, and his wife have a child, Mom and Timothy decided that the entire family should be together for the holidays. I don’t know why they’ve suddenly chosen to portray the image of a close family when they never cared before.
My brain kept screaming for me to say no, to refuse even considering stepping foot in the house I haven’t been in for four years, but I didn’t. Instead, I listened to the little girl inside of me that still wants her mother’s love. Of course, I didn’t get what I wanted. Instead, I found nothing but the cold loneliness that I knew as a child.
Mom and Timothy complained about everything from the size of my waistline and my hair color of the month to my choice of careers. Mom went as far as offering to pay for me to go to her beauty salon to get my hair fixed, stating that the red made me look cheap. I didn’t bother telling her I would change it soon. I didn’t see any reason to let her know that I switch my hair color more often than most women switch out purses.
Then, she went on to suggest I should go to a fat camp. She even gave me a brochure for one that her friend had recently gone to. She said the results were amazing. When I told her I wasn’t interested, she said maybe I should consider getting liposuction instead, like being a size twelve is somehow grotesque.
My stepfather attempted to talk me into going back to college, one of his choosing of course. He went on and on about how I should get a business degree. He would pay for it, of course, even though he refused to pay for culinary school. Luckily, Dad stepped in and coughed up the tuition. If he hadn’t, there is no way I could have gone.
When I told him I wanted to go the Culinary Institute of American, Timothy laughed at me. He told me he didn’t think a person needed to go to school to learn something as menial as how to cook. To him, being a sous chef in one of the most exclusive restaurants in Chicago is the same thing as running the grill at Dairy Queen.
Of course, Miles had to chime in a time or two. He just had to point out how the ink on my arms reminded him of my father, a man that he and Timothy held no respect for whatsoever. The only one who didn’t join in the game was my sister-in-law. She just looked at me with pity in her eyes. She wasn’t acting haughty or condescending, merely feeling sorry for me. That alone made me feel even worse.
I was supposed to stay with them, but by the time Miles and his family headed home, I was ready to hit the road. I had heard enough about how disappointed they were in me. The minute Miles walked out the door, I packed my suitcase and called a cab. Forty-five minutes later, I was sitting on the bed at the hotel with a bottle of Patron in my hand, counting down the hours before I could hop on an airplane and get back to my real life.
Just as I start to pull my t-shirt over my head, my phone rings again. I drag the shirt on quickly then grab my phone from the nightstand. When I see my stepbrother’s name flash across the screen, I contemplate not answering it. I’m not in the mood to deal with his shit. Then, the image of my three-month-old niece flashes through my mind. To see her again, I would put up with just about anything.
“Hello,” I say, plopping down on the bed.
“Where the hell are you?” Miles shouts, his voice full of rage.
I blink in confusion, wondering what the fuck is wrong with him. He never loses his temper, never. In all my years, I’ve never even heard him raise his voice. Even without raising his voice, just the fact that he said the word hell is surprising. Like my mother and Timothy, he firmly believes cussing is for the lower classes, for people who are not intelligent enough to get their point across without using foul language.
“I’m at the hotel,” I finally answer, looking at the clock on the nightstand. “I’ll be leaving for the airport in about an hour.”
“Why the fuck are you at a hotel? You were supposed to spend the night at Dad’s,” he growls out, using a tone that causes my head to pound again.
Not willing to explain myself to him, I ask, “What the hell has put you in such a glorious mood this morning?”
The phone goes quiet for a minute; only the sounds of him breathing fills my ears. I wait impatiently, wanting to get this over with as quickly as possible. Miles and I have never been close. Being nearly ten years older than me, he never even saw any reason to get to know me. We were nothing more than strangers that happened to have parents married to each other.
Tired of waiting, I ask, “What do you need, Miles?”
“Dad and your mom died last night,” he states in a much calmer voice as if what he was telling me wasn’t tragic.
“What did you just say?” I shout, jumping up from the bed and tightening my grip on the phone. “What the hell are you talking about?”
He goes on to tell me everything, no emotion at all evident in his voice. There was a gas leak in the house, and both our parents died of carbon-monoxide poisoning. As an afterthought, he lets me know that the live-in maid had also lost her life. Luckily, the cook was visiting her family, and the gardener’s house was not attached to the main house, so they were spared.
My brain is going in a million different directions, but one question keeps pushing its way to the forefront. “Why the hell didn’t the monitors wake them up?”
The mansion was wired with a deluxe security system, including fire and carbon monoxide monitoring. The minute gas started leaking, an alarm should have sounded, and the authorities should have been alerted. There is no reason in the world that three people should have lost their lives, one of them being my own mother. I’m not going to let myself think about that just yet, though.
“I don’t know the answer to that yet,” he replies, an edge to his voice. “The fire chief says that it looks like the security system was manually shut off, but he won’t know more until the investigation is finished.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Timothy never cuts it off,” I state, feeling my body vibrating with a mixture of anger, surprise, and loss.
I was never close to my mother. I was raised by a series of nannies and household staff, one of those being the live-in housekeeper who died along with my mom last night. Mom was only around when I did something she didn’t approve of, or if she wanted to show me off to one of her cronies. Most of the time, I felt like I was just a burden to her. In fact, other than a few unpleasant phone calls, I haven’t really talked to my mom in years. Still, she was my mom, the only one I will ever have.
“Why weren’t you there?” he barks out, ignoring my statement. “You were supposed to spend the night there.”
Suddenly, it hits me, the reality of the situation. I could have died last night. I could have lost my life, just like my mother and stepfather did. If it wasn’t for all the snide comments that sent me running, I would be dead. That realization hits harder than my own mother’s death.
“You were supposed to be there!” he shouts again, bringing me out of the morbid thoughts. “Why in the hell are you staying at a hotel?”
“If I was there, I would be dead, too,” I reply, feeling the weight of my words on my shoulders.
Along with the guilt I feel, it makes my stomach turn once again. Yeah, I feel guilty but not much more. Maybe, after this all sinks in, I will start to feel the grief of losing my mother. For now, I try to focus on the positive. At the moment, the only thing I can be grateful for is that the cook and I weren’t there.
Georgia is the only person I missed from that house after I left. She was already working for Timothy when my mother married him. She ran the kitchen with a firm hand but always had a smile on her face. She was more like a mother to me than mine ever was. The majority of the time I spent at home, I was in the kitchen with her. I started helping by the time I was seven. By nine, she was teaching me to cook complete meals. Spending time with her is where my love for cooking began. She is who encouraged me to follow my dreams.
Knowing that now is not the time to get lost in my thoughts, I direct my attention back to Miles. “I can’t believe this happened.”
Instead of commiserating with me, he barks out an angry order. “You need to get over here right now.”
With that, he hangs up the phone. I stare at it for a moment, my thoughts swirling around in my head. A vision of my mother’s face fills my mind. Try as I might, as much as I wish to see a smile, I can’t get the nasty snarl off her face. I shake it away and stand up, walking over to my suitcase and grabbing a pair of jeans.
As I pull them on, I search my soul, trying to find the pain I should be feeling. Instead, I find a sense of loss—not for the loss of my mother so much as the loss of the mother I wish I had. Even though I’m an adult now, I had still hoped that one day she could be the mother I longed for and needed. I do feel pain at the fact she lost her life so young, not to mention for the deaths of my stepfather and the other poor woman that is no longer among the living. Still, my soul is filled with regret of what I would never have: a mom.
Not thinking, I walk back over to the nightstand and pick up my phone, clicking on the name of the one person in the world I love more than anyone. If anybody can help me through this, it’s him. Lifting it to my ear, I wait for the voice of the man I know will make everything all right. On the third ring, I get my wish.
“Hey, baby girl,” he says, causing tears to fill my eyes.
Sniffing away the tears, I say the only words I can. “I need you, Daddy.”