“Oh my God.”
“Please stop saying that.”
“You never told us!” I cried, shooting up from my bed. “How could you—why wouldn’t you—”
“I promised Will I’d keep it a secret,” Mom cut in. “He was married when I got pregnant. Do you have any idea what a scandal like that would have done to him? It would have rocked his whole family, his whole career! He was already campaigning at that point. He was going to be the youngest mayor this town ever had. So he asked me to keep it quiet.”
“And you agreed to that?” My voice was so shrill I barely recognized it. “You agreed to keep your daughter in the dark and accept his hush money?”
“It wasn’t hush money! It was money for Persephone—child support, if you want to call it that. I was saving it up for her in a college fund, letting it accumulate interest. Really, Sylvie. Do you think so little of me that you honestly believe I’d blackmail him into giving me money to keep our secret? I loved him, and he needed this from me. I would have done it for free!”
“Persephone wasn’t a secret, Mom. She was a human being. She was your fucking daughter.”
“And she was his, too. He had a right to be part of that decision.”
“No, he didn’t,” I spit out, shaking my head. “No, he did not have even an ounce of—”
I stopped, my mind pummeling off the track it was on and hitching onto another. She was his, too, she’d just said. But Ben was also his. And Ben and Persephone had been each other’s. Ben had probably put his hand on her cheek when he kissed her, like he’d just done to me. He had probably run his fingers through her hair, grazed his teeth against the skin of her shoulder. And just as his tension and desire began to brim over, he must have pressed his hipbones against Persephone’s, then drained himself into her, gasping and grunting for breath.
“Do you, do you have any idea what this means?” I sputtered. “Persephone—she—she dated Ben. She dated her—oh God, I can’t even say it—her brother.”
“Half brother,” Mom corrected.
“Oh, well never mind, then, I guess that—”
I sucked in a breath. It hadn’t even been an hour since I’d left Ben’s house, since he’d brushed his lips against my cheek at the door, a gentle acknowledgment of what had passed between us—our bodies cresting and falling together on the bed, my legs clinging to his waist as I pulled him deeper and deeper inside me.
My heart was pounding when I asked my next question. “Mom,” I started. “Is Will my father, too?”
“No,” she said quickly.
“Is he?”
“No! Your father is a man named Eddie. I don’t even know his last name. I have no idea where he lives or who he is really.”
I watched her for a while, looking for the slightest tremor in her expression. Nothing happened, though, not even when I focused on the pulse that ticked in her temple, the dry skin at the corners of her mouth. She was telling the truth, I conceded—the bland, unpretty truth—and relief flooded my veins like a drug. But then, in just a few seconds, my anger snapped back into place, boiling me up inside.
“But Persephone is Will’s,” I said. “And so is Ben. And they were together. How could you let that happen?”
“Obviously I didn’t know it was happening. I told her she wasn’t allowed to see him.”
“But you never told her why!” I fired back. “So she had no idea when she saw him . . . when she went out with him . . . that she—she—”
“I didn’t know she was still seeing him! That’s not my fault!”
“Yes, it is. It absolutely is.”
She shook her head, her eyes darting back and forth across the rug between the two beds. Her forehead wrinkled; her mouth sagged at the edges.
“And you know it is,” I added. “I can see it all over your face. You’re not stupid, Mom. If she’d known he was her brother, then she never would have been sneaking out to see him. Which means she never would have been out the night that somebody killed her. You know that! You know it!”
Mom covered her face with her hands, shielding herself from my words. “Stop it!” she cried. “I know! I know! Jesus, just—stop, okay? I know.”
Then, for almost a minute, she wore her palms like a mask, her breath muffled and raspy. I watched her, noticed the knobs of her knuckles—even larger now, it seemed, than just a few days ago—and I waited for her to speak again, my throat and wrists quivering with pulse. Finally, Mom dropped her hands into her lap, and I saw there were tears in her eyes, tears on her cheeks and chin.
“I never claimed to be perfect,” she said, her voice all gravel. “I know I’ve made mistakes. Why the hell do you think I drink?”
I’d never heard her speak like this—acknowledging her faults, her addictions—and I grasped at the chance to flash a light down the endless cave of that subject. I wanted us to enter it together, even if it meant we’d never find our way out. I knew her question had been rhetorical, but I answered it anyway.
“Because you couldn’t deal with losing Persephone,” I said.
“Oh, I always knew I’d lose her,” she scoffed. “I just didn’t know how or when. But I couldn’t—I can’t—deal with the part I played in it.”
She looked down into her hands, her fingers curling toward her palms like shriveling petals.
“What do you mean you always knew you’d lose her?”
She shrugged. “I lost her father. And even on nights when I had him, he was never really mine. It made sense that I’d lose her, too.”
I narrowed my eyes. “How does that make sense?”
Mom clenched her jaw so tightly I could almost hear her teeth grinding together. Then, wiping at the tears that lingered on her cheeks, she said, “You don’t know anything about the Emorys. About Will’s father. He was ruthless. He did everything he could to make sure that Will stayed away from me and married someone else. If he’d ever found out Persephone was an Emory, who knows what he would have done to get her in his grasp.”
I shook my head. “That doesn’t make any sense. You said Will wanted Persephone to be kept a secret because she’d be a scandal to his family. And now you’re suggesting they would try to take her from you?”
She let out a breath. “Both things were possible,” she said. “It was possible that if the town knew about Will having a daughter with me, they would turn on him in a second. You know how Spring Hill is—all holier-than-thou types. I’m sure they’d be able to overlook it if the affair were with one of their own—but me? South Side Annie O’Leary? No way. They’d eviscerate him. They’d send a strict message that those from the north side of town do not sully their reputations by fraternizing with diner waitresses.”
She paused to breathe again, taking the air in sharply, as if stringing together so many words had exhausted her.
“But it was also possible,” she continued, “that, regardless of the scandal, Richard Emory would want his granddaughter. That he wouldn’t be able to stand the idea of an Emory—someone from such a godly bloodline—slumming it with the likes of me. That he’d find some way to portray me as an unfit mother, bribe or blackmail the right people, and take her away from me. And obviously I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t let Persephone live with Richard. It would have been like sending her to the Underworld!”
My mouth was open, ready to respond, but at the mention of the Underworld, I froze. She said he wasn’t good enough to be her child’s father, Jill had remembered Mom explaining about the man she’d met in her classics class. So she was rescuing Persephone from a life in the Underworld.
“Did Jill know about this?” I demanded. “About Will being Persephone’s dad?”
I braced myself for the possibility that Jill might have lied to me. It seemed so unfathomable; she’d always been honest with me about everything. Still, Jill was an O’Leary woman. She would know how to keep her sister’s secrets.
“No,” Mom said. “Jill thought it was someone from college. I told you, I couldn’t tell anyone.”
“Not even your sister?”
“Especially not my sister! You know Jill. If I’d told her, she’d have barged right into the situation and tried to fix everything. But she’d only have done more harm than good. Just imagine if she told Richard to stay away from the baby! He’d have snatched Persephone up in an instant.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Come on,” I said. “He wouldn’t have taken her.”
“Yes, he would have!” she cried. “Will told me so himself!”
I paused. “What?”
“He told me that if his father ever found out, Richard would do anything he could to make sure I never saw Persephone again.”
I felt my skin flush, my pulse quickening again. “He was lying to you,” I said. “Manipulating you. He would have told you just about anything to make sure you didn’t screw up his career. I mean—just—think about this, Mom!”
“I have thought about it! I spent every day of Persephone’s childhood thinking about it. You have no idea what it was like—especially those first few years. Every time the doorbell rang, I was terrified it was Richard—that he’d found out somehow, and he’d be there on the front steps with some fancy court order in his hands. Every time a car slowed down in front of our house, I was sure it was one of Richard’s people spying on me. When Persephone was a baby, I couldn’t—I wouldn’t even take two steps from her in the grocery store for fear that Richard would pop up out of nowhere and snatch her from the cart!”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “You were her mother. You had rights. This was just Will messing with your mind. You have to see that!”
She whipped her head from side to side. “My rights meant nothing. You don’t know what Richard did—what he must have done—to get Will away from me. Will would never have picked that—that woman over me, not if he’d had a choice. Richard did something—blackmailed him in some way. He—”
“You think he blackmailed his own son into marrying someone else and having a child with her? Mom, I’m sorry, but you’re just being paranoid.”
“No, I’m not. It’s what happened, Sylvie. It’s how he was. Richard took Will away from me, and if he found out the truth, he would have taken Persephone, too. Will would never lie to me about something like that.”
She took a deep, ragged breath, the air hissing in her throat. “So that’s why we kept it a secret. We weren’t just protecting Will. We were protecting Persephone.”
“Maybe you were. Because Will had you all twisted up about everything. But Will wasn’t protecting her. Protecting her would imply that he actually cared about her, but obviously he didn’t. He never even tried to have a relationship with her.”
“Goddamn it, you’re not listening. He didn’t have a relationship with her because he cared about her! Fuck, Sylvie, I barely had a relationship with her because of how much I cared about her!”
My blood seemed to stall for the briefest of moments. “What are you talking about?” I asked.
Mom shook her head, her eyes shining with fresh tears. “I loved her more than anything in this world. She had both of us in her. She was proof of how deeply we loved each other.”
When she blinked, a tear raced down her cheek. She cleared her throat, the sound like a cold car attempting to start.
“But I couldn’t get too close to her,” she continued. Then she looked up at me, her eyes wide and frantic. “I couldn’t get too close to her just to lose her someday. I’d already gone through that once with Will. I couldn’t survive it again. I had to—I had to watch her carefully, but I had to keep her at arm’s length, too. I just, I never imagined I would lose her the way I did.”
She lifted a finger to her chin, catching a tear on her knuckle. Then she wiped at her nose.
“Do you have any tissues in here?” she asked, looking around, but I was too stuck on what she’d said to answer.
I had to keep her at arm’s length. When I pictured it, I saw Mom’s hand on Persephone’s shoulder, her arm stiff as it stretched out as far as it could go between them. It was just an expression—“arm’s length”—but the image in my head felt right somehow, felt true. How many times had I burrowed into Mom on the couch, while Persephone sat alone in a chair? How many times had Persephone announced an accomplishment—that B+ on her English paper in high school, or her citizenship award in middle school—only for Mom to steamroll over it with something I had done, something I had achieved? How many times had Persephone told me we had two different mothers, or that Mom must have loved my father because of how much she clearly loved me? But now, Mom was insisting it was the opposite: it was Persephone’s father she had loved beyond reason; it was Persephone who was the daughter—and here, a lump formed in my throat—she had cherished the most. Because of what she symbolized. Because of whose she was.
My mind flashed to Persephone’s letter, the ease and candor with which she’d recounted her pain to Ben. Shitty mother, she’d written. All that stuff with my shitty mother. And I’d painted birds on her collarbones, clouds on her wrists. I’d covered up the bruises, turned them into teacups and trees and planets, and all the while, I never knew them for what they were—symptoms of the ache and loneliness no paint could ever cure.
How much of Persephone’s relationship with Mom had I missed? How many small but accumulating hurts and dismissals had I filtered out over the years, swathed, as I’d been, in Mom’s arms? How many times had Persephone watched us together and felt her skin grow cold? How much of the warmth I’d basked in had actually been real, and how much had been reallocated from love belonging to Persephone? Love Mom wouldn’t allow herself to show. Love she kept, like a dangerous animal, at arm’s length.
“Arm’s length, huh?” I said now. “How’d that work out for you?”
She looked down at the floor and shrugged. Then she closed her eyes, and a tear dripped onto her lap.
“I wonder—” She shook her head. “I don’t even know if she ever knew how much I loved her.”
I watched her face, saw how her skin looked suctioned to bone, and I thought of how all the secrets she’d kept—who she’d loved and how much—had led Persephone to the place she’d ended up.
“She didn’t . . .” I started to say.
Mom looked up at me, her eyes almost hopeful, as if she expected me to continue the sentence with something that would ease her guilt and pain. But instead, I said something terrible, something true, and a part of me—so removed from the part whose instinct was to protect her—hoped it would shatter her into shards.