“Sophia?” she nudged me.
Without warning, my emotions surged forward and took over, and as the words fell from my mouth, I couldn’t stop them even if I wanted to. Standing, I threw my words at her as if they were all the hurt she’d ever given me – the hurt I had desperately wanted to throw back at her my whole life. “If you’re asking me how I am today – now – I’m good. Amazing even. But if you, by any chance, want to know how I’ve been for the last twenty years – since you last saw me – I’ve been up and down, to hell and back. All because of you.” I stopped for a moment to catch my breath, and then continued. “I don’t know why I came here today, but perhaps it was to ask you for one thing. Please tell me how a mother can walk away from her daughter and her husband when he’s on life support, dying? Did you feel any guilt over that? Or did you just carry on with your life and build another family? Another family that you incidentally screwed over, too.”
She sat staring at me, blinking – blinking away the tears that she didn’t deserve to even have. “Baby - ”
“No! Don’t call me that. You don’t get to call me that!” I yelled at her, my heart beating wildly, and my body pulsing with adrenalin.
“You don’t understand…your father and I were over long before his accident.”
I stared at her. “And what about me? Were we over, too? How does a parent even get to decide something like that? I was nine. Nine!”
“I wasn’t mentally stable. It was better for you that I left. I did it for you.” Her eyes were pleading with me to understand, but this was something I would never understand.
I shook my head. “No. You left for yourself, and even if you left for me, you should have come back. You should have gotten the help you needed, after you made sure I was okay, and then you should have come back. That’s what a mother does. They don’t just abandon their child when shit gets too hard…oh, my God, I can’t even look at you right now.” I turned away from her, my mind and body a mess of emotions and thoughts and hate. The hate was consuming me so much I felt like I would vomit. Clutching my stomach, I focused on my breathing and willed myself not to throw up.
And then my phone rang.
I ignored it.
I also ignored the pleas of my mother.
My phone rang again.
And again.
And all the while, my mother sobbed in her bed.
She had no right to sob.
No fucking right.
My phone rang again.
Shit.
I snatched it out of my bag and answered it without even checking who it was. “Hello,” I snapped.
A pause. And then, “Sophia, are you okay?”
Griff.
A sense of calm washed over me at his voice.
“No, not really,” I answered him honestly, still clutching my stomach and praying the nausea away.
“Where are you?”
“At the hospital.” My thoughts scrambled to make sense. I couldn’t make sense.
“Which hospital, sweetheart?”
“The Royal Brisbane.”
“Which ward?”
“I can’t remember. The one for heart attacks.”
Don’t make me answer any more questions.
I can’t do it.
“I’ll be there soon.”
And then he hung up, and I doubled over in pain.
Emotional pain hurt so much more than physical pain sometimes.
“Sophia.” My mother’s voice shifted through my consciousness. “Please don’t shut me out. I made a huge mistake all those years ago, and I want to try and make it right now.”
I spun around and glared at her. “You can’t make this right. Not now. Not ever. I spent the last twenty years waiting for you to come back. And all that time I thought that if my own mother didn’t want me, how could anyone else want me? Do you know what that does to a child? To a person?” I glared at her harder. “It fucks them up,” I spat. “And, I’m done being fucked up. I’ve moved on and so should you.”
As I turned to leave, her last words floated through the air. “I won’t give up, baby. I love you and I’ll show you that I mean it.”
Her words were worthless to me. I stalked down the hospital corridor to the lift, oblivious to everyone around me. The lift took forever to come – well, it felt like forever – and I travelled down to the ground floor in silence, alone with my thoughts. When the elevator doors opened, I stepped outside and into Griff’s arms.
And I collapsed into him in a mess of tears and sobs and hurt.
He held me and let me cry it out, his hand running gently over my hair. When my tears dried up, I wrapped my arms around his waist, and clung to him.
His body and soul were my refuge.
Eventually, I lifted my face to look at him. His concerned eyes met mine, and he said, “I’m going to take you home now. Yeah?”
I nodded.
“We’ll take your car and I’ll come back and get my bike later.”
I nodded again, and he led me towards the car park.
And then he took me home and continued to be the amazing man I was fast learning he was.
* * *