“No.” Those brown and caramel irises were on me.

Rinsing off my bowl, I set it in the sink as I faintly listened to Leslie and Aiden discuss his workout. I ignored the way his shirt clung to his sweaty chest, ignored the way he kept glancing at me. Regardless of what Leslie had said, I wasn’t in the mood to deal with him even if he’d loved the hell out of his grandparents.

Somehow, I managed to paste something similar to a grin on my face as I walked right by Aiden, purposely letting my shoulder brush his arm because I was positive Leslie was watching. “I have a lot of work to do. I’ll be upstairs if you need me,” I said more to the older man than to the one I was married to.

Only Leslie responded.

Which was fine. It was totally fine, I assured myself as I climbed the stairs. Aiden could be pissed at me all he wanted. I was mad at him.

I had just gotten to the top when my phone started ringing. Closing the door behind me—because anyone who would be calling me right then was not going to be on my list of people I’d want to talk to—I picked up my cell from where I’d left it on the nightstand. MOM flashed across the smooth screen.

To give myself credit, I didn’t flip the phone off, curse, or even think about not taking the call. I was going to take the damn call because I wasn’t petty. Because I had nothing to feel bad about.

I just didn’t want to talk to her. Now or anytime soon. That was all.

“Hello.”

“Hi, baby.”

Okay. That had me rolling my eyes. “Hi.”

“I’ve been so worried about you,” she started off.

Was that why she’d waited almost two days to call? Because she was so worried? Damn it, I was being a bitch. “I’m fine,” I let her know in a dull tone.

“You didn’t have to leave like that.”

There was only so much a person could handle, and I was at my tipping point. I’d been at my tipping point, and it was all my fault. If I hadn’t ignored my instincts and gone to El Paso, this could have been prevented. I’d been the idiot. Then I’d given everyone else the ability to piss me off. “You—”

“I love you both.”

“I know you do.” Once upon a time, when I was a lot younger and lot more immature, it had killed me that she loved us equally. I wasn’t a borderline psychopath like Susie. I hadn’t been able to understand how she didn’t take my side each time there was an issue. But now that I was older, I realized there was no way I could ever ask that of her. It was just one of those things. On a bitchy day, I thought broken things couldn’t help but love other broken things.

I might not be flawless, and I might have hairline fractures all over the place, but I’d sworn to myself a long, lone time ago that I wouldn’t be like either of them.

It was a terrible, shitty thought. Mostly because I held my mom and Susie as the prime examples of who and what I didn’t want to ever be.

But there was only so much I could take. “I’m not asking you to not have a relationship with her, but I don’t want one with her. Nothing is ever going to change between us. I might get along okay with Erika and Rose sometimes, but that’s it.”

“Vanessa—”

“Mom. Did you hear what she said? She said she wished she’d hit me harder with her car. She tried to spit on me. Then Ricky grabbed my arm. I have bruises. My knee hurts every single day from what she did.” Damn it, my voice cracked at the same time my heart seemed to do the same. Why couldn’t she understand? Why? “I’m not trying to argue with you, but there’s no way I could have stayed after that.”

“You could have walked away,” said the woman who had walked away a hundred times in the past. This was the person who couldn’t deal with her problems if there wasn’t some sort of bottle around.

Damn it. I was so angry with her in that moment, I couldn’t find a single word that wouldn’t be brutal, that wouldn’t hurt her feelings. She said some things that I didn’t listen to because I was too focused on myself. I shoved my sleeves up my forearms in frustration. Squeezing my free fist closed, I didn’t even bother trying to count to ten. I wanted to break something, but I wouldn’t. I fucking wouldn’t. I was better than this. “You know what? You’re right. I really have to go. I have a lot of work to catch up on. I’ll call you later.”

And that was the thing with my mom. She didn’t know how to fight. Maybe it was a trait I’d picked up from my dad, whoever the guy was. “Okay. I love you.”

I’d learned what love was from my little brother, from Diana and her family, and even from my foster parents. It wasn’t this distorted, terrible thing that did what was best for itself. It was sentient, it cared, and it did what was best for the greater good. I wasn’t going to bother analyzing what my mom viewed as love again; I’d done it enough in the past. In this case, it was just a word I was going to use on someone who needed to hear it. “Uh-huh. Love you too.”

I didn’t realize I was crying until the tears hit my chin and plummeted to my shirt. Fire burned my nose. Five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven-twelve-thirteen-and-fourteen-year-old Vanessa all came back to me with the same feeling that had been so strong in those years: hurt. The Vanessa who was fifteen and older had felt a different emotion for so long: anger. Anger at my mom’s selfishness. Anger at her for not being able to clean her act up until years after we’d been taken away from her. Anger for being let down for so long, time and time again.

I had needed her a hundred times, and ninety-nine of those times she hadn’t been around, or if she had been, she’d been too drunk to be of any use to me. Diana’s mom had been more of a mother figure to me than she had been. My foster mother had been more maternal than the woman who had given birth to me. I had practically raised Oscar and myself.

But if it weren’t for everything I’d been through, I wouldn’t be where I was. I wouldn’t be the person I was. I’d become me not because of my mom and sisters, but in spite of them. And most days, I really liked myself. I could be proud of me. That had to be worth something.

I’d barely managed to wipe off my teary face and set down my phone when a familiar bang-bang-bang called a knock rattled my door. If I was capable of snarling, I’m sure the facial expression I made would have been called exactly that.

“Yes?” I called out in a sarcastic tone, resisting the urge to throw myself back onto my bed like a little kid. Not that I’d ever done that, even back then.

Considering “Yes?” wasn’t exactly an invitation to come in, I was only slightly surprised when the door opened and the man I didn’t exactly want to see in the near future popped his head inside.

“Yes?” I repeated, biting the inside of my cheek to keep from calling him something mean. I was sure my emotions were written all over my face, my eyes had to have some trace of the tears that had just been in them, but I wasn’t going to hide it.

Aiden opened the door completely and slipped inside, his eyes sweeping across the room briefly before landing back on me sitting on the edge of my bed. His eyebrows scrunched together as he witnessed what I wasn’t trying to hide. His mouth depressed into a frown. One of his hands went up to reach behind his head, and I tried to ignore the bunched biceps that seemed to triple in size at the action. His Adam’s apple bobbed as his gaze swept over my face once more. “We need to talk.”

Once upon a time, all I’d wanted was for him to talk to me. Now, that wasn’t the case. “You should really be spending time with Leslie while he’s here.”

Those big biceps flexed. “He agreed I should come up here and talk to you.”

I narrowed my eyes, ignoring the tightness in them. “You told him we got into a fight?”

“No. He could tell something was off without me saying anything.” Those massive hands dropped to his sides. “I wanted to talk to you last night.”