Page 167 of Only After We Met

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

“Rhys, it’s fine.”

“I shouldn’t have left. Forgive me.” I felt the words turning to mush, like always, but I forced myself to let them out: “When I found out, I was just… I was lost at the moment, and I didn’t know how to take it. I’m glad Dad didn’t tell you why I left. You didn’t deserve that.”

“I should have told you before.”

“It doesn’t matter. Nothing would have changed.”

“You had a right to know.” She wiped her cheeks. “But I never found the right time. When you were little, I thought you wouldn’t understand. And then you grew up and got older, and you were lost, and I was scared to give you another reason to distance yourself from us.”

“Mom, everything’s okay.”

Her eyes were shining, full of tears that she must have been holding back for years. She took a deep breath and brought her hand shakily to her lips. “I used to look at you and think you were like a grenade on the verge of exploding. I was scared that anything I did would be catastrophic. And I didn’t know what to do to help you.”

“I did feel on the verge of exploding a lot of the time.”

“Still, I messed up.”

“We both did.”

She reached out and stroked my cheek. “You’re my son, Rhys. You are.”

“I know I am,” I whispered.

She was thinking over what she had to say. “Your father told me what he said to you before he asked me to tell you to come see him. I don’t know how he managed to keep it to himself for so long, to live with that secret, but you know how proud he is. You’re the same way. You’re alike in that sense. It’s just something inside you. You don’t know how many times I used to tell you when you were a kid that you needed to express your feelings, that crying was liberating… You know he didn’t regret it, right?”

I felt as if I was struggling to breathe. “I’ll talk to him…” Already I wanted to leave.

“It broke his heart when he found out you had left because youlearned you were adopted. When I was in the hospital, you were the only person he had to lean on, and when you came back, he was so angry, so disappointed… He’s never been one to just swallow his anger or his pain. But your father loves you more than anyone, Rhys…”

Attacking before he could get hurt too badly. I knew that tactic well. But it had only brought me problems, disappointment, and mistakes.

I tried to put the pain aside, the discomfort weighing on my chest when I remembered the words he’d uttered about what runs in the blood. The rage that filled me that day that now seemed so distant. I felt like a plant that had grown somewhere for years, sometimes straighter, sometimes more tangled, that someone had torn out by the roots and thrown aside. And that pain remained there in a place I refused to look at because I felt weak, small. Like a nobody. Like someone who had no place in the world that was his.

I looked at my mother. So patient. So solid.

“That’s not all he said,” I told her. “He also said he had never wanted to adopt, that he did it for you, because he didn’t want to see you unhappy.”

“It’s true. He was against the idea at first. He had doubts. But they all disappeared when he took you in his arms, Rhys. He just said what he said to hurt you. It’s horrible, but it’s true… You hurt him, and he wanted to hurt you back. He should have realized that you were young and unstable. The conditions weren’t the same.”

I rubbed my chin and tried to calm myself down.

“How is he?” I asked.

“He’s got his good days and his bad days.”

“Has he gotten better at all?”

“No, Rhys. He’s not going to get better.”

“What about his medication?”

“They’re painkillers, that’s all.” She cut me off. “Eat something and take a shower. You look tired. I’ll clean your father up when he wakes up. You know how vain he is.”

She said this with a smile, as if she no longer cared to struggle against the situation, as if she wasn’t even upset that the person she’d shared her whole life with would die soon. I couldn’t help asking, “How do you do it, Mom?”

She shook her head and sighed. “I needed a few months, but once you accept reality, you start seeing things in different ways. I have two options: crawl in bed and cry, or get up and try to enjoy the time we have together, even if the conditions aren’t ideal.”