“Well, I’m not.” I snapped again. Standing upright, I looked her in the eye and told her the truth. “I’m not scared. It’s just…it’s just…”
“It’s just what?”
She was going to keep pushing!
“It’s Wyatt! He’s…different, and I don’t know how…I don’t think I’ll be able to talk to him the same way now.”
She stared at me for a long time. Slowly, she crossed her arms, which meant I wasn’t going to like whatever she was going to say, but she was going to say it anyway.
“What? Mom.”
“Why do you think you can’t talk to him?” She asked.
Of all the things, I thought she was going to ask that wasn’t it. “He’s like a completely different person—I was wrong about him all this time.”
“Helen, I know you, that you know what this family sometimes needs to do—”
“I know what this family does, Mom. I’m not an idiot, but Wyatt doesn’t do…do this,” I replied, lifting the tablet for her to see again. “If he is violent, he never hurts people who aren’t related to the issue.”
“This is who he’s always been,” she replied softly, looking at me as if I’d just time-traveled and didn’t understand how the world worked.
“Mom, Wyatt tries to be to be good despite the fact that he’s a—”
“Helen, I’m not sure why you think that.”
“Can you stop making it seem like I’m crazy? Wyatt has a temper, he can be like a little kid time sometimes, and sure, he gets in fights. He’s even killed people, I know that. But he’s never gone off the deep end like this.”
Again, she just stared. I sighed, adding, “Look, obviously he’s not the best of people, but between him and his siblings, he’s the most—”
“Violent,” she interrupted me.
“What?”
“Out of all your cousins, Wyatt is the most violent, Helen. I’m not sure why you have rose-colored glasses on when it comes to him. Or how you missed who he is, but you need come to grips quickly. Whatever he, your father, and uncle are planning, that,” she pointed to the tablet in my hands, “is just phase one.”
“Of all the things Ethan and Dona have done, why would you say that Wyatt is the most—”
“Do you remember when your biological father took you away from us?” she asked it, and it was as if she’d slapped me across the face.
Nodding, I whispered back, “I was eleven.”
“You were gone for two weeks,” she whispered, her hands balling into fists. “But it felt like two years to me. It left like he gutted me. And your father, your aunt and uncle, they kept telling me to wait. Your father swore upon his life that he’d you bring you back, but they just wanted to get you back without causing a scene—”
“I know—”
“No! You don’t know. Because they didn’t get their way. Wyatt, at twelve, brought you back himself.”
“What?”
CORA – AGE 38
“We need to wait?” I asked softly, glancing over each and every one of their faces around the living room until I finally looked to Declan, my dear husband, who sat on the edge of the sofa, by the fireplace, his knuckles white, his face blank.
I didn’t need blank. I needed determined.
“Cora, we need to be careful,” Evelyn said as reached out to me, but I smacked her hand away.
“Careful?” I repeated, feeling ready to wring her neck. “She’s my daughter. Some nobody has TAKEN MY FUCKING DAUGHTER!”