7
SAVANNAH
After that conversation,he took me back to bed and we both napped. I awoke to an empty apartment, which pissed me off, but I found a note on the refrigerator after I’d showered, changed and had gone to make coffee.
No one will ever understand me like you do, Savannah. I’m grateful for you.
Jr.
I strokedmy fingers over the note, wondering if he knew what he’d done by choosing to sign off with ‘Jr.’ and not just Aidan.
The son was leaving me the note, not my husband.
It got me thinking about how many roles we played on a day-to-day basis and how we juggled them. Sometimes doing a good job of it, sometimes doing the opposite.
As I set the machine to brew me a double shot of espresso, I grabbed my cell and rang my mom.
"Hey, baby," she chirped, sounding cheerful.
I used to think she was on medicinal pot she was so cheerful, but now, I just knew that she was at her most merry when she was stressed.
Considering where my mind had drifted before I’d called her, I told her, "You sound stressed."
"How can you infer that from two words?"
"Because I know you as well as you know me? What’s going on?"
Lorelei Daniels was many things, but she was not a liar. Not even if it made it easier on her family.
When she was silent, I mused, "Remember that time when you told Camden, Paris, Aspen, and I that you and Daddy were divorcing because he’d cheated during a tour?"
"I donotsound like I did then."
"You were cheerful then," was all I said. "You chirped out the explanation as if you were telling us how many gifts Santa had brought us."
"I made a mistake. You know that," she grumbled.
"I’m not arguing. That fan was a whack job. She made everyone believe that they were in a relationship together."
The psycho had gone so far as to make deep fake sex tapes of them together. They’d gone viral in a heartbeat until Daddy had gotten an injunction against her and they’d been taken down.
Not that anything was truly deleted from the internet.
"I’m just saying that you sound like you did then. That’s all."
I refused to freak out until I knew what was going on.
"I have to have surgery."
"What kind of surgery?" I asked cautiously.
"A hysterectomy." She swallowed. "I-I had cancer there, baby, but I beat it and I was in remission, and now they’re saying that it’s wise to have the whole… area… removed."
It took a lot to rob me of speech. A hell of a lot, in fact.
But Mom’s news had me unplugging the coffee machine so it’d stop hissing at me and backing away to the nearest wall so I could slide down it.
"Baby? You still there?"