Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 138588 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 693(@200wpm)___ 554(@250wpm)___ 462(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138588 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 693(@200wpm)___ 554(@250wpm)___ 462(@300wpm)
Sabrina laughed. “I guess so.”
Elisa leaned forward, reaching out and putting a hand over Sabrina’s. “Hey, you know I’m here for you no matter what. Whether I like the guys you date doesn’t matter, and the last thing I want is to stand in the way of your happiness. You could have heard Van and Hale’s backgrounds and put up a wall, but you didn’t.”
She hadn’t even thought about it. All she cared about was how her sister felt. Luckily, she liked her future brothers-in-law. “Because they’re great guys.”
Elisa sighed and sat back. “Mom would have. Mom would have done anything she could to get rid of them. I can hear her sometimes asking me why I’m trying. I already had one divorce. Why do I think this time it’ll work? She would have pointed out every flaw in them.”
“Because she didn’t believe any guy could be great,” Sabrina replied. “You can’t listen to that voice. Mom put so much of her own trauma on us. There’s not a piece of advice she gave us not steeped in her own self-loathing. I spent way more time with her than you did. You very smartly got the hell out when you could. I stayed home because I was scared.”
“She raised you to be scared,” Elisa pointed out. “She wanted you to take care of her. She knew I would leave, but she thought she could keep you around to be her caretaker. So she taught you to be afraid.”
Sabrina’s gut tightened even thinking about her mom. “And to not trust my own instincts. To not believe anything good could happen to me. And when you got cancer after she died, I felt like she was right.”
“It was bad timing,” her sister said quietly.
“No. It was great timing because it was caught early and you’re safe and healthy today. That’s what I figured out. Mom only looked at the bad things that happened and not how we could make it better, learn something, grow from how we handle the tough times. She constantly turned in on herself.” Sabrina had been to a therapist when Elisa had first been diagnosed and she’d known her time as caretaker wasn’t over yet. She’d nursed her mom and then sister, and talking about how she felt had helped open her eyes. She understood why she’d done the things she’d done in the past. “Our grandparents weren’t warm and loving. She didn’t have any siblings. She was alone and she learned to be that way, learned to think bad things happened because the universe wanted them to happen to her. It’s an odd form of control. A way to make things all about herself so she never had to worry about anyone else.”
Elisa’s head shook. “If the universe is out to get her, what’s she really going to do about it? That’s not control. It’s an unwillingness to put in any effort to change.”
“Sometimes change isn’t possible. I like to think Mom’s affair with Mel was her trying to change.” Meeting Mel had been a revelation. She would never have imagined her mother with a man so kind. “He’s so unlike the men she was normally attracted to, and I’m not talking about the alien stuff. Mel is kind and caring. He’s thoughtful.”
“And he scared her. She wasn’t used to having someone openly care about her and she didn’t trust it, and then she was pregnant,” Elisa admitted.
“You know she once told me she never wanted kids.” It had been a late-night revelation a few months after her mother’s initial diagnosis.
Elisa huffed. “Great thing to tell your kid.”
Sabrina shrugged. “She’d had a couple. In vino veritas. The point is, she had you and then she had me. She never loved my bio dad but she went out of her way to be with him. I wonder if there wasn’t an act of hope in that.”
“In dating a dude she didn’t love and having a child with him when she knew it wouldn’t work out?” Elisa asked, brow rising.
Her sister didn’t connect emotional dots well. “In giving you what she never had. A sister.”
Elisa stopped, her jaw tightening. “You think she had you so we would have each other?”
It might have been the kindest thing her mother had ever done. “I think it’s possible. I like to think it’s the one hopeful thing she did. We were left with very little, and then you got the diagnosis and we didn’t break. Why didn’t you break?”
A faint stain pinkened her sister’s cheeks, a sure sign she was getting emotional. “Because I couldn’t let you down.”
Sabrina’s answer was the same. “I didn’t break because I couldn’t let you down either. So here’s where we make the choice. You already did. You chose not to let the past hold you back. You chose to embrace everything you found here in Bliss. No matter what happens in the future. I’m doing the same. I’m embracing this new family you brought me into with so much gratitude. I can’t tell you what it felt like to have Dad pick me up.”