So I was free to worry about my own problems.
A poisons expert who had a bone to pick with me.
“I’m just up early and bored,” I lied.
“Yeah, sure,” Brooks said, unconvinced. “Well, Louana is laid up. So why don’t you cook breakfast?” Brooks suggested, not giving me the out I wanted. And I was pretty sure he knew that.
“I’m not a great cook.”
“Even a bad cook can whip up some eggs,” he said, shrugging. “Don’t know how, watch a video,” he told me, giving me a slap on the back as he made his way out of the kitchen.
Well, it could be worse, I guess. He could have tasked me with washing the bikes or cars, or doing yard work, which would have meant that Evangeline would have had to pass by me on her way into the club.
At least if I was in the kitchen, she wouldn’t immediately see me if she was coming inside to see her daughter.
I could be a real pussy and make Voss bring them their share of breakfast once he got up.
Decision made, I set to making breakfast.
I wasn’t lying to Brooks. I wasn’t a great cook. But that didn’t mean I didn’t know how to feed myself. A fair chunk of my travels had involved a lot of camping. Camping meant you had to figure out some way to eat.
I’d gotten good at one-pot meals, and learning how to season shit to make even plain food more palatable.
So I decided on eggs and some breakfast potatoes. Keep it simple.
Louana was a fan of making omelets, mixing whatever meats, cheeses, and vegetables we had lying around into it. And every single time, they were fucking banging.
I had to stop myself from imagining how she might have made them for the two of us every day had I not ran out like I did. Or thinking about what other kinds of meals she might have cooked up for dinners that we’d eat across from each other at a table while we talked about our days… and helped feed our kids.
Louana, having grown up as an only child, had once told me that she’d like to have several herself. I’d never given it much thought before her, being so young, but I figured that if they were part me, and part her, that I would like a bunch of them too.
My mind was on exactly those things still as I beat the eggs and milk together.
It was right then, also, that I sensed I wasn’t alone.
Don’t tell me how I knew, but I knew.
The tensing of my stomach was the only sign I needed.
Louana’s mom had arrived.
And found me.
She was a gorgeous woman, a vision of what her little girl would look like in a couple decades. If maybe Evangeline had slightly different eyes than her daughter.
“You know, I’m conflicted with you,” she said, sighing a bit as she looked at me. “On the one hand, you treated my little girl like gold. And you stepped up last night when she needed you. But on the other, I watched that girl crumble and fall to pieces when you left her, crying so hard and for so long that I almost took her to a therapist, we were so worried about her.
“And the next thing we knew, she was packing up and telling us she just couldn’t be in this town anymore. And so she wasn’t. Not for more than a week or two at a time. For years, Valen. Years. Your selfishness and caprice took my girl from me. I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for that.”
Her words were like hot knives to the gut, one after the other after the other. I damn near doubled over at the sensation.
Because I didn’t know.
How could I?
I’d left.
I hadn’t looked back.
I hadn’t even asked around, even when it was killing me not to know how she was.
Maybe a part of me didn’t want to know, didn’t want to see the damage I had done to a girl who had been nothing but fucking amazing to me.
It was hard even to imagine that girl she’d been—confident, headstrong, unshakable—crying, let alone “crumble to pieces.”
Maybe I had convinced myself that I didn’t have to be racked with guilt every moment of every day because a girl like Louana, she landed on her feet. She didn’t cry. She got pissed.
In fact, I think when I did allow myself to think of her through the years, I always pictured her angry with me, bone-deep furious at leaving her and possibly making a fool of her, something I knew she could never forgive.
Even when she showed back up to prospect, I figured that was just still the burning embers of her anger from long ago.
Not pain.
I don’t know how it might have changed things if I had known the truth, that she wasn’t angry, but hurt.
I liked to think it would have made me turn around, go home, apologize, try to be a better man.
I just didn’t know if that was the case.
Still, the image bothered me.
Evangeline wasn’t an exaggerator by nature. So if she said that Louana had been in pieces, she meant that.
That was what I had done to the only girl I’d ever loved.
I’d ruined her.
And I’d fucked up not only her life, but her relationships with her parents and friends.
It was no fucking wonder she hated me, that she saw the first opportunity to fuck with me, and took it.
“I never meant to hurt her,” I told Evangeline, shaking my head.
“The funny thing is, your intentions don’t matter. The end result matters. And the end result was you hurting my little girl. And my little girl running off to Europe for years to try to outrun the memories of you.”
Evangeline took a step deeper into the kitchen, her voice going lower. “Do you know what she did in Europe, Valen?”
“I have an idea,” I said, nodding.
“Do you know how many times I answered the phone from her to her telling me I’m okay or Don’t panic before she told me about some new, horrific thing she’d been through? Because she was halfway around the world and alone with no one to have her back.
“That girl spent every day since the day you left hardening herself up, trying to make sure nothing and no one could ever hurt her again like you did. So I hope to God that the new, harder version of her is making your life a living hell. And that you aren’t too fucking stupid and selfish still to learn the lesson she is trying to teach you.
“Actions have consequences—whether what you did was intentional or not. And she is going to make sure you never do something like this again to anyone else. Now boil some tea water,” she demanded, dropping two teabags down on the counter next to me. “And steep these for at least five minutes each before you bring them in.”
With that, she was gone.
Leaving me suitably chastened.
I was pretty sure my balls had retreated back up into my body at some point during her heated speech.
Because, like I said, moms were scary. Moms were scary on a good day. But when they were in the mood to defend their kids against someone who wronged them?
Fuck.
“You good?” Voss asked, sliding in almost immediately after Evan’s exit.
“Were you just standing out there, eavesdropping?” I asked as I put the tea water on.
“Think I wanted to get neutered too?” Voss asked, and a choked laugh escaped me at that.
“I guess that’s fair,” I agreed. “That anger has been simmering for a lot of years. It probably felt good for her to get it out. And I had it coming.”
“Sounds like it,” Voss agreed as he walked over to the coffee machine.