And like I said, she wasn’t wrong. When I look back to that first year of paralyzing desperation and numbness, I see now how bad I was.
Especially, a few months after I got back from Plumeria when I got my period late and for a few days there I really thought I might be pregnant with his baby.
I wish I could call what I went through a pregnancy scare because I’m pretty sure that would have been healthier, but it wasn’t. It was a pregnancy hope, like I could have settled for at least having a part of him.
Nevertheless, being called pathetic and stupid wasn’t what I needed to hear at the time; what I needed was a friend nothing more, nothing less.
I haven’t had much luck in that department.
I mean, I have formed friendships over the years thanks to my job, but they’re all online-friends and none of them know about Wyatt.
My thriving career as a graphic designer has been the only bright spot in the otherwise bare landscape of my life for years.
I work mainly in the book industry, making covers and promo material for publishers and indie authors.
One of the things I love the most about my job is the fact that I only really need a laptop to get assignments done and manage my business, meaning I can do it from anywhere in the world, and starting Monday I will be doing it from the little town of Jewel, Colorado.
A place I haven’t seen since my mom passed when I was a little girl, a place forever etched in my memory.
A happy place.
A place in which, as fate will have it, I just got a chance to start over in because my great-aunt Sylvianne, someone I thought had been dead for years, actually only passed away a few months ago and left me the run of the Snowdrift Lodge, the wonderful B&B where I spent so many happy summers in a gem of a town —pun intended— that I’ve remembered fondly for years.
A vision of the colonial-style eight-bedroom mansion with the huge wrap-around porch and the vast expanse of immaculate fenced-in lawns backed by the forest fills my mind and I smile again, excitement mounting inside of me.
I can see Aunt Sylvianne’s face clear as day, kind eyes, the same dark blue color of my own, staring back at me from nests of tiny wrinkles, a mischievous grin forever dancing on her thin lips, hands always wrapped around a book, cradling multi-hued tea roses from her garden or busy with a pair of crochet needles.
I blink back tears, swallowing my disappointment.
I could have had so many years with her before she passed, but Lance —I’m not even calling him ‘dad’ in my mind right now— saw fit to make sure I couldn’t for his own devices.
Not counting Alle, my ten-year-old sister who I love to bits, I don’t have much in the way of family and I hate the thought that Lance and his wife not only took my baby sister so far away from me, but that he would also do such a nasty thing as to lie about Aunt Sylvianne being dead, but I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised: there’s very little one can put past Lance Davis, that much I can tell even if I know him just a little, to be honest.
He was never truly involved in my upbringing and I barely remember his presence from my childhood as something in the periphery of my life, but never at its center, since I was never at the center of his own.
My mom and Lance were in a ‘casual’ relationship.
Meaning my mom was desperately in love with him and he couldn’t care less.
By the time I was two, he had already completely moved on, both from me and from her, though I must own he did look after me money-wise.
Not that a little kid can really do much with a child support check, it can hardly be expected to tuck you in bed and kiss you goodnight.
Mom and I were an unbreakable duo and she was an amazing parent to me.
She got really sad sometimes, even a five-year-old could tell, but she never let it touch me.
She was pretty alone, though.
She was shy like me and didn’t have much in the support-system department, family or friends wise.
Mom’s parents died before I was born, they got her really late in life so she had no siblings and her own grandparents had been long gone.
Her only living relative was Sylvianne Bellewood, an elderly maternal great-aunt, her own grandma’s kid sister.
She loved Aunt Sylvianne very much and as a tradition, we would spend at least a month every summer with her in Jewel —Mom was an elementary teacher here in Jacksonville so we always had to go back before school started.
I hated leaving Colorado behind every time. I might be a born and raised Floridian but I’m a mountain girl at heart.
Every year mom would rent a pick-up and we would make an adventure of the trip, slowly traveling across the most scenic roads from Florida to Colorado and taking a million pictures —my mom’s definitely the one I got my love for photography from.
Last time I was sent there I was nine and my mom wasn’t with me. She had gotten the big C that year and had passed before I really knew she was sick.
Lance didn’t drive me, he booked me an assisted flight and got me on a plane alone in June.
I asked when he was coming to pick me up and he just shrugged and said it would be a few weeks before he knew what to do with me.
Aunt Sylvianne came to get me from the airport herself, driving her little beat-up beloved mint green Beetle.
I loved Aunt Sylvianne, but I was scared when I got there, I was scared my father would really just leave me there and never come back for me at first, then by the time I wasn’t so grief-stricken any longer, by the time I had actually started to think maybe it would be a good thing if he left me there, he came.
It was February.
I didn’t know it back then, but that would be the last time I would see my aunt.
I remember them getting into this huge row about my aunt wanting a bigger role in my life and money talk.
I didn’t understand the details back then, but now I know my aunt was pissed at him because since he had become my sole guardian at my mom’s passing he had been stealing money from the trust fund I had gotten from her side of the family
After we got back to Florida, I asked Lance many times why I was no longer allowed to speak with my aunt, not even over the phone, but he would only bark that it was for my own good if I never saw the ‘old bitch’ again.
He told me if I still felt like I wanted auntie when I was eighteen then I could do as I pleased and go visit her, but up until then, every contact would be prohibited.
I couldn’t understand why he cared so much in the first place since he could never be bothered to spend time with me anyway.
From that day forward any hope of having a normal childhood or forming attachments with people was out for me.
Lance has no extended family and he pretty much left me to be raised by nannies, with whom he would inevitably mess around with and then they would be gone and a new one would start taking care of me, so I didn’t even have the time to form relationships with any of them.
When I turned sixteen he had another daughter, Alle, with his girlfriend; they married and I got completely cut out from the picture. Melania never liked me and always made me feel like I was a stranger in my own home and Lance was oblivious to it all or simply didn’t care, and the only reason I stayed as long as I did was because of my baby sister.