J. Robb - Bump in The Night

„She did.“ Grace pointed to the envelopes. „Apparently they were all returned to her unopened.“

„You never got any of them?“

„I never even knew about them. Or about my mother’s attempts to contact me.“ Grace took a deep breath. „There are things about me… about my past…“ She was silent for so long, Josh thought she might be having second thoughts about opening up to him. Suddenly the words just tumbled out. „My mother left when I was three. I don’t even remember her. After she left, I was raised by my father.“

„Any brothers or sisters?“

She shook her head. „Just me and my dad. We moved a lot. From small town to small town. To say my life was sheltered would be an exaggeration.“

He chuckled. „There’s nothing wrong with small towns or living a sheltered life.“

„I wasn’t just sheltered.“ She paused a moment, deep in thought, before going on. „Looking back, I realize that I lived in total isolation. I can’t recall a single childhood friend.“

„What about the kids at school?“

„I was homeschooled. My father was a poet. A very successful one. That made it possible for him to be home with me, seeing to my education without the benefit of tutors. By the time I was ready for college, he took a job teaching creative writing at the local university. At the time, I thought he did it to make the transition easier for me. Now I realize that he had other reasons, as well.“

„What reasons?“

She shrugged and avoided looking at Josh. „Now that I know how desperate my mother was to find me, I suspect he wanted to see to it that she didn’t succeed.“

„And you never searched for her?“

„I had no reason to. My father raised me to believe that she wanted no part of our lives.“

„Now that’s some kind of anger. Did you make friends in college?“

„I guess it was too late to change. By then I’d become so comfortable being alone, I found it hard to reach out to the other students. So I continued to be pretty much alone, except for my father. But when I couldn’t stand being smothered by his need to control me any longer, I chose a career that would take me as far away from him as possible. We had a terrible fight.“

„He’ll get over it. You have a right to your own life.“

„My father passed away while I was photographing the people of a small village in the Sahara. We were still estranged and never got a chance to make peace.“ She gave a dry laugh. „I’m not only as obstinate as my father, but as unforgiving.“

Josh closed a hand over hers. „You can’t stay locked in guilt, Grace. What happened in die past doesn’t have to affect your future.“

„But don’t you see? Whether I like it or not, the past has shaped me. Having read these letters, I realize that there was another half of my life. A piece of me had been missing, and I didn’t even know about it.“

He could feel her pain in every word and wished with all his heart that he knew how to ease it. „What do the letters say?“

Grace’s fingers traced the edge of an envelope. „They’re all the same. An outpouring of love from a woman whose heart is broken by the separation from her only child. In every letter my mother asks how I’m doing, and what sort of person I’ve become. And she begs me to forgive her for not being a part of her life.“

„Does she say why she chose to leave?“

Grace shook her head. „She gave little explanation, except to say that she’d met a man who had been her soul mate. When my father learned of it he told her she would never see her daughter again. In one letter she claims to have obtained court-mandated visitation rights, but by then we’d left the state, and for years her efforts to find us were thwarted.“

When she looked over at him, Josh could read in her eyes the shock that was beginning to set in. „It’s going to take some time for you to process all this information, Grace. You shouldn’t try to digest it all in one big gulp.“

She looked down. „I feel as if I’ve been.in some horrible train wreck that took the lives of both my parents. And somehow, I was the cause of it.“

„That’s not fair. You didn’t cause this, Grace. You were just a kid. Your parents were two consenting adults. Whatever they did to one another, it was their choice, not yours.“

„I know. But there’s more. I didn’t just spend my life missing my mother. I was all too happy to mirror my father’s hatred of her. I nurtured it. Embraced it. And now that I’ve learned the truth, it’s too late. In her last letter to me, my mother writes of her impending death. Now there’s no way to make things right between us. All because of my father’s bitterness, and my willingness, in fact my eagerness, to share it. That’s what makes this all so crushing. Not just knowing that my mother spent a lifetime trying to reconnect with me, but the fact that I swallowed my father’s story without question.“

„Don’t do this to yourself, Grace. Don’t let this new information make you angry and bitter.“

„I have a right to be bitter.“ Her tone was harsh, brittle. „Looking back, it seems I spent my entire childhood trying to be the kind of person I thought my mother incapable of being, in order to placate a father who reveled in his darkness. And he’d been playing with my emotions.“ Her voice was a cry of pain. „I’ve been regretting the choices I made that caused our separation, believing that he was the only one capable of loving me. And now I find I’ve been grieving the loss of an unforgiving man who did everything he could to make me into his own image. And for that unforgiving man, I conteYnplated taking my own life.“

Josh was staring at her with a puzzled look. „What do you mean by that?“

For a moment she fell silent. The only sound in the cabin was the hiss and snap of the logs on the fireplace.

Now that the words had been spoken, there was no way of taking them back.

Grace took a deep breath. „Just before your plane crashed, I was sitting on the end of the dock wondering what it would feel like to just slip into the water and let the lake take me.“

Her words sent Shockwaves through him. He treasured life so deeply. Lived his life every day to the fullest. Though many would accuse him of taking foolish, dangerous risks, he harbored no death wish, but only the desire to live in the moment.

He latched on to the only thing he could. „You didn’t follow through on your impulse.“

„I didn’t.“ For the longest time she sat quietly, staring at the clutter of letters and photos. „But who knows what I might have done if your plane hadn’t crashed at that very moment?“

„Then I’m grateful for my accident.“

She glanced over. „Do you believe it was an accident?“

He shrugged. „Do you have a better explanation?“

„I don’t know. I’m thinking about the legend, and the fact that the warrior woman’s story mirrors my mother’s so closely. Is it all a coincidence? Or is there something more here? How did Wyatt know I was here? What was he to my mother?“ She sighed and rubbed at her temples. „Oh, Josh. I’m so tired of thinking.“

He reached a hand to her shoulder and could feel the knots of tension. „Here. Let me help.“

Turning her slightly away, he brought both hands to the back of her neck and began kneading. With a sigh of contentment she leaned her head to one side, then the other, while he continued working the tightly-coiled muscles of her neck and shoulders.

She gave a deep sigh of pleasure. „Oh, that feels heavenly.“

„I’ve been told I have very talented hands.“

Beneath the warmth of humor in his tone was something darker, deeper. She experienced a quick rush of heat and decided to throw caution to the wind. She’d been alone too long. And what better way to forget, at least for a little while, the sudden, wrenching pain that had been thrust on her?