Chapter 27
Porter couldn’t get his mother out of his head. The last time they’d seen each other, the last time they’d spoken, it had been gruesome. The absolute worst day of his life. The day she dropped him on the street corner with a hundred dollars in his hand, a suitcase full of clothes, and absolutely no idea how to function in the outside world.
But he missed his mother. So much it physically hurt. With Brinley’s presence in his life, he’d not expected to be dragged back to the compound where he’d spent the bigger portion of his young life. But dragged back he was.
He was a man devoured by love, in love with a woman he wasn’t supposed to have. And he knew he was going to burn in hell—of this he was certain, but he no longer cared. She’d brought happiness into his dreary, dark life. Brinley inspired him to be better, to be a man she’d be proud to call hers. For her, he’d move mountains, he’d change his act, get clean once and for all, finish building his house and move away from the roommates who dragged him down. He’d be better for her. A much better version of himself.
But he hadn’t expected this.
He didn’t expect that his intense feelings for Brinley would make him curious—curious about his mother, and if she missed him as much as he sometimes missed her. He didn’t expect to find himself standing in front of Samuel at the gates of the compound, bribing him with fifty bucks so Sam would turn a blind eye and allow him to knock on the door of his parents’ home. He’d been bribing Sam for months on Brinley’s behalf, but this time it was for himself. He had to face his past, face his demons, face the parents who no longer acknowledged his existence.
There he stood, trembling as ice-cold raindrops fell from the sky and onto his bare arms. Should he knock? Ring the bell? Or should he accept that his family had moved on without him?
He despised them, but at the same time he ached for them. And he had no idea what to do.
Before he had the chance to make a decision, the porch light turned on and Porter’s entire body stiffened in response. No longer a choice to be made, he had to face whomever would answer the door in just seconds.
It was his younger brother, Matt; they hadn’t seen each other in years. Matt had grown at least three inches taller than Porter and now towered over him in the doorway, a scowl upon his pimply face.
Porter wasn’t at all intimidated by the size of Matt; instead, he stood tall and demanded that Matt get his mother. He needed to speak to her. When Matt refused, Porter yelled past him into the house.
“Mother!”
“She doesn’t want to see you. You no longer exist,” his brother hissed.
“I’m right here, right in front of you, a*shole. Of course I exist.”
“Not to us,” Matt said with a snarl. “Look!”
His brother gestured to a family portrait that hung in the hallway behind him. Dark blue ink was scribbled across Porter’s face, as if he could simply be erased from existence. Porter stood on the porch, his shoulders slumped as he stared at the photo.
Alice Hammond rounded the corner of the hallway and locked eyes with her son. She looked just as he remembered her, with maybe a few unfamiliar wrinkles and a little more gray in her hair. But her face was just as he remembered. The face of someone he trusted with his life.
“Porter,” she whispered before shooing several of his siblings away from the door. When they left begrudgingly, it was just Alice and her son, face-to-face for the first time in years.
“You can’t be here,” Alice said, her head shaking back and forth.
“Was it really this easy?” Porter asked, gesturing to the photograph.
His mother hung her head.
“What? You just pretend I was never here, that you didn’t carry me for nine months? That you didn’t nurse me as a baby?”
“Stop it, please,” Alice begged, her eyes filling with tears.
“No, I need to know!” Porter glowered at the woman who had raised him, the woman he loved more than anyone else in his world. “I need to know how you could throw me out like a piece of f*cking trash!”
“Watch your language!”
“Are you kidding me? You tossed me aside and you’re going to correct my f*cking language?”
Alice winced, then cried out, “Profanity is not allowed in this house!”
“Where’s Dad?”
“My husband isn’t here this evening.”
“Ah, with another wife, I see.” Porter sneered, crossing his arms in front of his chest. “Do you enjoy sharing him, Mother?”
He couldn’t imagine giving his heart to another woman now that Brinley possessed every fiber of his being. He wanted her and only her. Her happiness meant more to him than his own. He had no idea how his father, and the other men on the compound, could dole out their love in that way. In fact, he was pretty certain that they didn’t. They were doing what was expected of them, just like the women of the compound. And for that, he felt sorry for them.
When Alice didn’t answer his crude question, they stood in awkward silence. Porter wanted to believe there was a shred left of the kind woman he knew for the first years of his life. The woman who held him in her arms when he scraped his knee. The woman who baked him his favorite dark chocolate cake on his birthday each year. He had to know if she was still inside the woman before him.
“I had to see you,” Porter whispered. secretly wishing his mother would reach for him, to take his hand or pull him into her embrace. But she didn’t. She stood several feet from him, cold and stiff.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered, breaking eye contact and crossing her arms in front of her terry bathrobe, her hair still up in the traditional braid. “But you shouldn’t have come.”
“Mother, don’t you miss me?” he pressed, desperate to know the answer.
“No.” Her eyes bored into his, and he knew. She had no regrets. She stood by her decision to remove him from the Hammond family.
Once again, he was wounded. He was the young boy standing on the street corner, watching his mother drive away from him. Watching her withdraw her love.
“You were supposed to love me,” Porter cried. “More than Father, more than the prophet. I’m your child.”
“You were.” Alice’s words were cold, calculated, rehearsed. “You were my child.”
Her words stung more than anything had in Porter’s life. But before he could even attempt to recover from the pain of her words, she continued. He braced himself as she began to speak.
“But now you’re just a stranger. A stranger who needs to leave my home.”
Porter’s teeth clenched so tightly his jaw ached. Her words shocked and destroyed him. Seething, he replied, “You were supposed to protect me from the evils of the world, not become one of them.”
Alice swallowed hard, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. Porter didn’t care. He wanted to hurt her, to cause her pain the way she’d caused an insurmountable amount of pain for him and his life in the outside world.
“How do you live with yourself?” Porter shook his head, fighting back the tears that were building. He couldn’t let her see the emotion that was expanding within his chest. “You’re a despicable human being, and I’m better off without you.”
“Leave, please,” his mother begged.
He knew he’d affected her. He’d finally broken through her tough exterior to expose her lies, her hypocrisy, her selfishness.
“No problem,” he snapped before punching the front door. His knuckles made contact, denting the wood. “I’m outta here!”
Porter heard the door slam behind him. He knew that in just a few short hours, his mother would block out their entire interaction, as if it had never happened. His decision to confront her was a disastrous mistake. He didn’t think it was possible for his mother to wound him more than she had years ago in his father’s truck.
But she had. Her cold reaction to him standing in her doorway destroyed him. The way she looked at him, the cutting bite of her words. Now, more than ever before, he knew he was an orphan in this world.
Alone.
And then his phone buzzed from the pocket of his jeans.
With tears burning his eyes, he trudged through the mud to seek out the only person he could trust. The single, solitary person who actually loved him. Who wasn’t ashamed of his existence. The only person in the world who understood him and loved him just the same. Despite his faults, despite every shitty decision he’d ever made in his lifetime.
She was the only one who mattered.