It’s how I feel when I look in the mirror.
“Oh, I have,” I reassure her. “A little coke here. Some weed, of course—but that hardly counts. She was always the one who couldn’t say ‘no’.”
“And you?” Amie asks softly.
“I couldn’t say ‘no’ to her,” I confess.
Faith was my addiction and I’ve been searching for it ever since.
Chapter 22
Before
Faith came home. She always did.
Sitting across from Faith was like looking into a funhouse memory. It was the same face, but now it was worn with experience. Wherever she had been—whatever she’d been up to—had prematurely aged her and she was trying to hide it. Her raspberry lipstick only highlighted her sallow skin and ringed eyes. She smacked her lips together nervously while her hands reached to fiddle with her hair. That was, at least, familiar. As far back as Grace could remember her sister had done that, but now her hair was cropped short and her fingers came up empty. She settled for drumming them on the tabletop instead.
“How did you find me?” Grace had been forced to sell Nana’s house. It was the last place she’d seen Faith before she disappeared.
“My boyfriend found you. I didn’t ask how.” Of course, she hadn’t. Faith never asked the uncomfortable questions.
“Why are you here?” Grace had no issue being direct though. Her sister had returned for a reason. She suspected it was Max.
Faith blew out a long breath and raised her eyes to Grace’s. “I made a mistake.”
They said acceptance was the first step, Grace thought. She’d learned that much from the weekly support group she’d begun to attend. It had replaced the nightly meetings she’d gone to at first. The ones where she searched for answers about where things had gone so horribly wrong. Grace had brought Max to the meetings as a baby, but as he got older and she had discovered more about the cycles Faith was caught in she gradually figured out that she’d become addicted to her search—as addicted as she’d been to her sister in the first place. Spending every day dredging up the past wasn’t going to change it.
Yet Grace continued to go if only to one. It was a sad thing to feel comforted by being near broken people, but she had slowly built a world from it that didn’t make her feel so alone.
“Do you think?” Her retort came out more harshly than she’d meant. Perhaps because today she wasn’t feeling acceptance and forgiveness and all the things she had struggled to teach herself at those meetings. “I spent the last year wondering if the police were going to knock on my door.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” Faith no longer looked her sister in the eye. “I want to see him.”
“You want to see him?” Pressure swelled in her chest. It was all coming out now. The anger. The sadness. The terror and frustration that she would fuck things up and ruin an innocent life. “I spent the last year feeding him, taking him to doctor’s visits, and staying up all night with him. Where were you when he crawled or pulled himself up for the first time? Where were you when he had fevers from teething?”
“I want to see him now,” Faith tacked on the now as if it held any meaning.
“And before?” The words trembled from her. “Why not before?”
“It’s complicated.” Faith licked her lips.
“Enlighten me, because we have all the time in the world.” She didn’t add that there was no way in hell she was taking Faith to see Max. Not now. Maybe never.
Cool down. She’s trying to do the right thing finally.
Finally, but too late.
“Jason and I are getting really serious,” she began.
“Who’s Jason?” Grace interrupted.
“My boyfriend. Well, more like my fiancé.” A slow smile crept across her pink lips as a chill crept up Grace’s spine. “Anyway, he really likes kids. He has two of them with his ex-wife. She doesn’t really let him see them. He can’t wait to meet Max.”
Grace swallowed, but she couldn’t digest the meaning in Faith’s words. “How long have you known him?”
Her tongue darted over her lips. “Years. He’s not just some guy, sissy.”
If that was meant to reassure her, it failed on all levels.
“And how long has he been divorced?” Grace asked softly.
“A couple of months.” Anyone else might have blushed at this revelation given the previous answer, but Faith waved off the question flippantly.
Grace didn’t bother to seek further clarification. It should have shocked her that Faith had been involved with a married man, but it didn’t. That was the problem. And if she really had known him for years, he’d seen her use. He might have even been the one providing. It really only left one more question.
“Is he Max’s father?”
“I thought he might have been,” Faith admitted, “but I knew when he was born that he wasn’t.”
“How?”
This earned a blush. “Jason is black. I didn’t really know until Max was born.”