“Are you happy now?”

The rasp came from the bed behind me as I poured her some water to take the pain meds.

She’d told the people with hospice that they could come at night but she didn’t want or need anyone with her at all hours of the night.

It didn’t matter that she was barely clinging to life, her organs shutting down one by one.

Her brain was still functioning, and as long as that was in working order, she’d call the shots.

Turning, I met Melody’s gaze from across the room. She’d defied the odds, surviving for so many years, but time had run out. The doctors estimated she’d be gone in a matter of hours, possibly days.

I translated that to maybe a week.

If she could possibly survive without a functioning liver or kidneys, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she lived another six months. But her liver had pretty much shut down and her kidneys were all but done. I knew enough biology after reading up on cancer over the past few years to know what was going to happen as the internal organs shut down one by one.

Still, she could never take the easy way.

Even now, she got by on as little pain medicine as she could, almost as if she welcomed the pain. Maybe she fed on it. I had no idea.

As I crossed to her, I checked the PCA pump. The patient-controlled pain medication would be changed by the hospice nurses who came on at six. To Melody Kent, six p.m. was hardly night, but I’d lied to her and told her that the shifts available were six p.m. to six a.m. and nothing else. I wasn’t staying at her beck and call from seven in the morning until almost midnight.

Perhaps it was cold-hearted of me, but she’d done little to earn my love or loyalty.

“Have you no answer for me? Are you ashamed of the daughter you’ve been?” she asked waspishly.

Tossing my hair back, I put her medications down on the table in front of her and sat on the chair at the foot of the bed. “If you were any sort of mother, I suppose I should be ashamed. But you and I both know the only bond between us is biological. Neither of us harbors any love for the other. Why should I pretend love exists where there is none…on either side?”

“You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me,” she said.

“I’m aware. And that is the only reason I’m here now.” I’d moved back to St. Gabriel six months ago after a fall had landed her in the hospital. They couldn’t hire anyone who’d stay with her full-time. Rather, they’d tried. They couldn’t get anyone who’d last more than a few days. Nights weren’t so bad because the pain and exhaustion eventually got the better of her and she’d sleep some—or she had.

But days were terrible and she had chased off everyone.

Even bonuses of up to five hundred, a thousand dollars a week hadn’t been enough to entice anyone to put up with her bile. The few who might’ve toughened it out had been too stalwart for Melody and she’d ended up firing them.

I’d come at the behest of the oncologist and only after he’d done one thing—he’d somehow managed to secure a promise that nothing that was said or done would result in Nicky going back into Sunny Vista.

Not that I trusted a promise from her. She’d made two such similar promises to me over the years and she’d broken each one.

But the very first day I was there, I took in a draft for a temporary transfer of guardianship. I told her she could sign it, or I could leave and I wouldn’t be back.

Melody seemed to have developed an odd fear of being alone in the years since she had done her damnedest to see that I was alone. Perhaps it was karmic.

She’d sighed without argument, never mind the fact that I’d brought along my own lawyer and hers for witness.

“If you start seeing him again, I’ll revoke it,” she’d promised.

“You can try,” I’d told her.

But I had no intent of seeing LeVan with the shadow of her ghost—or even her life—hanging over us.

Now, as she lay propped up in bed glaring at me, her blue-gray eyes the only thing even remotely the same, I looked at her and realized I felt nothing but emptiness.

“Does it make you happy?” I asked her calmly.

“What?” She sniffed as she reached for the small paper cup that held a cocktail of pills. She still insisted on taking everything they’d prescribed her a year ago, as if she still had a fighting chance. “Knowing that my one and only daughter has nothing but loathing for me?”

“I don’t loathe you.” I wasn’t going to let her goad me into a fight. She relished those. “If you want the truth, I have absolutely no feelings for you. I stopped wasting them on you years ago.”

She flinched, her hand tightening on the cup minutely.

Her bones stuck out against her skin like knives as she cocked her head, staring at me birdlike. “You treat me as though you hate me but you sit there and want me to believe you don’t?”

“I don’t care what you believe,” I replied honestly. I resisted the urge to look at the time. “What’s with the maudlin ruminations about feelings, Melody? You never did care how I felt.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it, looking away.

I wondered if maybe hell had frozen over.

“You are such a cruel child. You always have been…the way you treated your brother, the way you treat me,” she whispered. “I’m dying and this is how you talk to me.”

I bit back the scoff that came to my lips as realization dawned.

She wanted pity, sympathy. She’d made a play for them before, tugging on lingering feelings a girl has for a mother who loves her—something I hadn’t ever had, either. And I’d bought into it, thinking my mother might actually regret the relationship we’d never had.

I’d ended up having my hopes smashed—again—and rather brutally.

“You don’t expect any different,” I said calmly. “Not after the way you’ve treated me for the past fifteen—hell, the past twenty years of my life. I’m not a daughter to you, Melody. I’m an object, sometimes a tool. But I’m not a daughter.”

“Get out!” she shouted, picking up the glass of water and throwing it.

It didn’t even reach the end of the bed. She’d grown so weak, that was the best she could manage.

Abruptly, pity welled. “Melody…”

“Get out!” she shouted again, her face going red. “Would it kill you to call me mother again? Just get out! I don’t want to see you! Bring Nicky by but you…you…” She shook her head, her face so red, it alarmed me.

“Get out,” she said again, her voice coming in a rasp.

Maybe I should go, let her have a few minutes to calm down.

I got up then, grabbing my bag from the foot of the bed.

“Bring Nicky,” she said, her voice weak. “I want to see my boy.”

I stiffened and looked up at her.

“I want to see my boy,” she said, her eyes glassy.

“All right,” I said slowly. “In the morning.”

Slowly, her lashes drifted down.

Hitching my bag over my shoulder, I started for the door. I’d give her a few minutes, I told myself. But at the door, I looked back. “Melody, I…”

She didn’t stir.

A cold chill raced down my back.

“Melody?” I said, louder this time.

No response.

Taking a few steps closer to the bed, I whispered, “Mother?”

Nothing. “Mama?”