Rekindling the Flame (Smoky Heights #1)

Chapter 22

TWENTY-TWO

AURORA

“Be here at nine,” Mom said when we parted ways after I got her settled in back home from the hospital yesterday. “We have some things to discuss.”

I could scoff. Does she even know me at all?

No , the asshole inside my head says. No, she really doesn’t, and it’s your fault.

If she did, I reason, she would know that be here at nine translates into be here by eight-fifteen in Aurora-ese.

Wyatt might’ve said he fucked the lawyer right out of me a couple nights ago, but it would take a lot more than one night (even with him) to fuck the over-preparer out of me.

It’s also possible that I was just worried my POS car wouldn’t make it here (no, I still haven’t let Wyatt talk me into swapping it out for something better), and I’d end up walking the last mile in my Valentino Garavani heels and had to account for that in my commute time. Ten blocks in the Upper West Side goes a lot faster than a mile walking through the untamed wilderness, wandering the barely paved backroads of the Heights. Especially since every neighbor you pass would insist on catching up along the way. I’d be lucky to make it by nightfall.

Either way, it’s barely past eight when I push open the front door to my childhood home and find a naked man in the kitchen.

The Heights has really gone downhill.

From no crime to a peeping Tom with a B&E kink? Not on my fucking watch, asshole. My mom’s going through enough. You can go wipe your junk on the dish towel at some other unlucky bastard’s house, it won’t be my mom’s kitchen you desecrate.

I’ve seen plenty of his type back home—I’ve seen more unsolicited penises in my decade as a New Yorker than a stagehand working quick change Off Broadway—and I know just what to do. Hoist my cognac leather tote bag over my shoulder more securely, and like a good New Yorker, I run for him, not away from him, screaming at the top of my lungs, brandishing whatever I have in hand as a weapon. Walking to my apartment after dark in the city, that’s usually mace and maybe claws made out of keys, depending on the path I’m walking for the night. But today, in the Heights—and still on a high from being fucked within an inch of my sanity—my guards were (stupidly) down. So today, that weapon of choice is my fluffy pom-pom keychain that my ride-or-die lip balm is attached to, but I’ll make it work. My scrappy attitude is really my secret weapon, after all.

“Get out of my mom’s house, asshole!” I scream at the intruder, flying up behind him and attacking him with the pom-pom. I brandish it like nunchucks, whapping him over the back of the head and shoulders, all I can (or am willing) to see of the stranger, doing the kind of damage I hope would make my kickboxing instructor proud.

The naked man’s mug of coffee sits abandoned on the counter as he brings his arms over his head and covers himself from the onslaught of my attacks.

What kind of intruder makes coffee? Naked ?

One that’s about to eat shit, that’s who.

“You sicko!”

Whack.

“Get!”

Whack.

“Out!”

Whack.

“Motherfucker!”

“Well, you finally got something right,” comes a husky voice that’s too familiar.

I gasp in recognition, but my arms don’t get the memo and they keep thwacking him with my deadly keychain. My bag lands with a thump at my feet, my arms too busy besieging this bastard with imminent doom to catch it as it falls, and still I continue my “best defense is a good offense” themed ambush.

“Would you mind stopping assailing me for long enough to cover myself and maybe find a towel?”

“I sure do fucking mind, you perv!”

Thwack, whap, smack.

“Come on, Aurora,” he pleads.

“You clearly didn’t mind the whole naked thing when you came in here. You know, you made your bed and all that,” I gasp out between laborious strikes. “I am seriously rethinking that whole good man category I had you under, just so you know.”

“What’s all that racket, honey?” my mom’s voice calls down the hallway.

Honey . A word I haven’t heard her use since my dad left. And I realize she isn’t asking me. She’s asking him .

He’s … here by invitation? The magnitude of all of this hits me, and I’m too stunned to keep the assault going. My arms fall to my sides, pom-pom puff in hand. She … knows about the exhibitionist intruder?

“Laura Lee,” Duke calls out dryly in response. “I don’t wanna alarm anyone, but I think Aurora knows about us.”

The emphasis on think would make me laugh if my jaw weren’t halfway to the cracked linoleum floor right now.

Sure enough, my mom rounds the corner into the kitchen—dressed in a robe with cartoon chickens on it, hair in a towel turban—and witnesses this man backed into the cabinets of her kitchen, bare ass glinting like the full moon in here, and she doesn’t even thank me for coming to her defense. For my efforts to rescue her. Nope. She looks affronted and chastises me instead.

“What on God’s green earth do you think you’re doing, dove?”

“Me?” I sputter, hand to my chest, pom-pom hanging at my side. “ME?” It’s more of a shriek than a word.

“Yes, you. Barging in here and, what? Buffing Duke’s back with that thing? Seriously, Aurora, what are you doing?”

“If I may speak up,” comes Duke’s wry voice. “I think she was trying to run me out of the house.”

“What are you doing here?” My speech is coming back to me slower than I’d care to acknowledge, but at least it’s still chock full of barbs.

“That’s really none of your business,” my mom shoots back at me.

“I’ve seen the man’s ass, in fact, I still see the man’s ass, so I don’t think I’m being particularly unreasonable by asking why. But I’ll go with my deductive powers of reasoning at this point—please, if you love me at all, don’t answer the question—and I’m just going to go wash my eyes out while you put on some clothes. Remind me, Mom, where do you keep the bleach?”

Duke harrumphs and reaches a hand out toward my mother, his body still facing the kitchen wall for whatever modicum of modesty he can still preserve. My mother leans forward, tousling her hair with the towel it was wrapped in seconds ago, and hands him the thin yellow towel. From the corner of my eye I can see him wrap it around his waist and turn around to face us for the first time.

I’ve never once in my life used the term silver fox about anyone who wasn’t Timothy Olyphant, but as Duke glares at me, glowering as he turns around, only his most necessary bits covered, I can’t help the eyeful I get, and I think he might make it into that category. Come to think of it, he looks quite a bit like Timothy.

I’d congratulate my mom on the pull if I wasn’t too busy losing my fucking mind about this development. This secret the two of them have been keeping. For how long?

Mental acuity is normally one of my strengths, but between the lack of coffee and the bare old-man ass I was faced with when I opened the door—not to mention, how that was followed by the second biggest shock of the damn decade—I am not firing at all cylinders this morning, to use a metaphor that would make Wyatt proud.

My mom’s eyes catch on my bag, slumped over on the floor by my feet, and before I can move to pick it up she’s leaning forward to grab it herself. I mean, yeah, it wasn’t a cheap bag, but it’s fine on the floor for a minute. Hopefully my laptop survived the fall, but really, it’s the least of my worries at this particular moment.

But it’s not my laptop my mom reaches for.

Her fingers close on a pink envelope, Mom written in elegant script on the front. “What’s this?” she asks, voice a whisper.

That envelope has been in there since last Friday. It was going to be my surprise after repaying her life’s biggest regret at the rec center, had that day not taken a turn for the awful. Haven’t been able to bring myself to toss the envelope yet, even if what it represents is more than dead to me now.

“Nothing,” I say automatically, hand flying for the envelope, but she’s quick for an old lady on the downslope of life.

I feel two sets of eyes on me and Duke makes a move to block my path, him and that too-thin yellow towel I don’t want to go near, as my mom settles in at the dining room table to open the oversized envelope.

“Seriously, Mom,” I try again. “Just give it back.”

“Oh, is this for your other mom?” The snark in her voice has bite, but it’s not mean. It’s more me than Lexi whose bite is usually meant to take your legs out from under you.

“It’s not …” my voice trails off, because what do I even say?

She slides her finger along the top of the envelope beneath the flap to rip it open and there’s no going back now.

Mom pulls out the giant custom card and gasps at the picture on the front. A photoshopped image of her and me (had to get her picture off of Facebook, but I got it), in front of the Grand Palace in Bangkok.

“What is this?” she asks in a small voice, but she’s already opening the card and I know she knows.

Two thick, glossy rectangular pieces of paper with rounded edges slip out as she opens it, and she catches them.

“Tickets?”

Technically, they’re printouts I had made on Etsy to represent the digital tickets I’d bought, but close enough. It doesn’t matter now anyway. Not a chance she can travel that far with how quickly her cancer is progressing.

I shrug instead of answer.

“Oh, Rory,” she whispers, and fuck me, her eyes are glinting abnormally bright beneath this chandelier from the ’70s.

I hear a sniffle from Duke at my side and turn to face him right as he’s wiping a fist across an eye, like he got some dust in it or something.

“Can we go back to what he’s fucking doing here?” I point at him for emphasis.

“What I’m fucking doing is your m—” Duke doesn’t miss a beat, but I cut him off.

“NO. We aren’t doing that, thank you.” My hand in his face should shut him up, but it doesn’t.

“I assure you, we most certainly are,” he says with a wink to my mother and just gross . But she grins back at him, looking twenty years younger and not fatally ill, and why is that almost cute? She never looked at my dad like that, as far as I can recall. The bags under her eyes don’t look so large, the twinkling in her eye adds some much-needed life to her appearance, and somehow it sparks hope deep inside me. That maybe I could have that one day too.

The door swings open abruptly and all three of us turn to face the front door, Lexi barging through it, sunglasses high on her thin nose, attitude all over her face, wild hair tumbling all over the place.

“Thought I’d beat Rory for once in my life,” she singsongs as she steps over the threshold, and then comes to a dead halt when she meets all of our gazes. “But apparently not. What the fuck did I just walk in on?” she asks, pushing her glasses up to hold her hair out of her face, and pointing between us all with a judgmental finger. Her brown eyes, identical to mine, narrow on the pom-pom still clutched in my hand. “Are you into tickling now, Aurora? Rory would’ve never,” she quips. “But I guess we all develop new kinks as we age. I don’t even wanna know what woke this one up. Do us all a favor and keep that to yourself, thanks. If that shit’s contagious, I don’t want to risk it.”

I glare at her silently, tongue pressed in my cheek, willing her to register the scene in front of her, what’s way more important than my keychain.

“Well,” my mother says quietly, gesturing to the dining room table. “I invited you girls to be here at nine this morning,” she stresses the time, still a good half an hour away, “to sit you down and talk to you about what to expect from here.”

“I didn’t expect to walk in on a naked Duke in your dining room,” Lexi says, huffing out a breath like she’s got a heavy load on her shoulders. “But I guess it was only a matter of time.”

“You knew?” I accuse her, more than ask her.

“Of course I knew,” she screws up her face at me, like I’m as big of an idiot as I was when we were in grade school. “I mean, duh, the man hasn’t left the bar since Reagan was in office, and all of a sudden his room is just open for Rory. Mom kicking us out of the hospital every night. There’s been dozens of clues, you two aren’t as clever as you think you are. You’ve been about as subtle as Rory trying to sneak Grady in and out of her bedroom window when the whole house could hear her bedsprings creaking.”

Cheap shot, and my scowl tells her so.

Lexi continues dryly. “I’m just glad I didn’t have to hear your headboard squeaking, Mom. You’re probably smart enough to put pillows behind it. Rory’s hormones developed before her brain did.”

I change the subject as rapidly as possible. “How long has this been going on?” I ask my mom and Duke.

“Long while,” he says quietly.

My mom watches him, adoration shining in her eyes, and something inside me softens, melts into a puddle that Wyatt started, he’s been working on warming up—made some pretty good progress last weekend, with staying here, helping the chickens, that hike we took, the cider, and that memorable night in his truck—but this might’ve done it. That ice around my heart might finally be nearly gone now.

“We started … prioritizing it more when the diagnosis came,” she adds softly.

“Well, thank God you finally said it out loud.” Lexi rolls her eyes and drags a chair out from the table, scraping along the old, dark hardwood floor loudly as she sits down in it. “Worst kept secret in this town. Gracie said Grady told Ronnie he suspected it months ago. It was only a matter of time before everyone else figured it out too.”

Figures that Wyatt is the only one who put it together. All the times he might have known, the times he might have spilled their secret but chose to respect them instead flash before my eyes. And where that would normally piss me off, it warms me that he chose to protect their peace.

My mother sighs, but it’s not a heavy one. “If the cat’s already out of the bag, you may as well stay for this talk, then, Duke.”

He pulls another chair out from the table, across from Lexi and next to my mom, and Lexi’s eyes on his naked upper body speak volumes, but her mouth still says it anyway. “I get that you’re, like, built and whatever, but would you mind putting on some clothes? I don’t want to stare at my future stepdaddy’s nakedness at the breakfast table, thanks so much.” She shoots an acidic smile that’s zero percent authentic at him to try to sugar up the words, complete with several overdone blinks.

Duke mutters, shakes his head, and walks away, leaving the three of us alone. I take the fourth chair, the one across from Mom, and stare at her expectantly.

“We’re going to start telling people,” she says. “About my diagnosis.”

“Yeah, we got that much,” Lexi says, a little more scathingly than I appreciate being aimed at our mother. But I think it’s her way of protecting herself from the reminder. That mom has a diagnosis, and it’s not a good one. But not saying it out loud doesn’t change the fact it exists.

“Like Aurora has been saying,” Mom gestures at me, “it’s better to wrap up loose ends than leave things unsaid. So I’m going to not leave this as a surprise for people, or leave them to speculate and gossip as my condition worsens—” her eyes cut to Lexi’s, who doesn’t even look rightfully ashamed at her loudmouth reputation. “—and I’m going to start telling people, give folks a chance to get some time in with me before it’s too late. Plus, you know how this town is. It’ll be all anyone talks about until the next new thing, but I wanted you girls to know first, so you can be prepared for people comin’ to you about it, or the things you might hear.”

“This mean I can finally tell Gracie?” Lexi asks. “She knows I’ve been lying to her, and she’ll probably give me an ‘accidental perm’ next time she does my hair if she hears it from anyone else.” I snort a laugh.

My mom nods. “Yeah, you’d better, but maybe you can let me tell one or two others first. We all know that girl’s got the biggest mouth this side of the Mississippi after a couple sips of anything stronger than a light beer.”

“Hey,” Lexi snaps. “She’s kept quiet on your little tryst,” she says, pointing at my mom.

“Ooh, that’s a four-dollar word for you, Lex,” I tease her. “You learned that one in 40 Days and 40 Nights , didn’t you?” She had a strong Josh Hartnett phase for a while there.

Duke steps back into the room, preventing the spat from escalating, and thankfully he’s dressed in his usual jeans and a checked shirt this time, gray hair styled back from his face, weathered cowboy boots on his feet. He takes his seat next to Mom and his hand closes over hers, atop the table where we can all see it. When his thumb runs across the top of her hand, the backs of my eyes sting.

Unfortunately for me, that motion calls Lexi’s sharp eyes to the table, the card and tickets lying there.

“The fuck is that?”

Just like Mom, her hand darts out before any of us can stop her. She picks up the card, the tickets laying on top of it, and scans them with impressive speed, putting it together rapidly.

“For the two of you?” The acid in her tone is unmistakable. I could feel that chill from halfway across the country, were I still there.

“It wasn’t exactly a cheap trip, Lex,” I start, somewhere between defensive and soft. “Not like offering to cover a meal for you or something. It’s first-class, international tickets and an entire itinerary in a foreign country.”

“Right. For you and her. Something you knew I couldn’t join you on. Because why would I want to share in my mom’s final time alive? I’m just the bitchy older sister you left behind. I’m not even dying, so I’m not enough for you to care about, I guess.”

This kitchen just became a pressure cooker, and there’s nowhere for the steam to vent. We’re about to boil over into a very dangerous explosion if anyone so much as breathes near this room the wrong way.

“It wasn’t meant to leave you out, Alexis. I was just trying to get some time in with Mom. Do something fun together.” My voice is softer than usual, trying not to step in any snares she’s left lying around.

Alexis puts a hand up in my face, bitter anger and hurt across her features. “You can’t just come back here and throw money around and expect to buy back your place in Mom’s life. I’ve been here, been with her even when I had a choice.” She slams her pointer finger into the table, emphasizing her point. “You show up only when it’ll eat you alive for the rest of your shitty, lonely, pathetic life if you didn’t, and use your money to try to make up for it. But that doesn’t change the fact you don’t give a shit about any of us, anyone who isn’t named Aurora.” That one slices deeper than I’d like it to. To add insult to injury, she throws the tickets at me, and while they don’t go far, the sight of them fluttering down in the streaky light will take permanent residence in my mental replay of all my worst moments for years to come. “Fuck you,” she spits out at me. “We don’t want your money. All she wanted was you , and you wouldn’t give her that. Now all I want is you to leave again.” She sneers at me, disdain rolling off her thickly, in waves. “Thailand wouldn’t be far enough if you ask me. Maybe we can make this a one-way ticket? You can fuck off for good this time.”

“That’s enough ,” my mom tries to roar the words, but it comes out as more of a croak.

Duke speaks at the same time. “Alexis.” There’s more gravitas in his voice than I’ve heard before, and I’m impressed with the authority he commands in the name of harboring respect for my mother.

Me? My head is spinning, thoughts getting more violent than they have in weeks, like an angry sea, they slap against the sides of my skull, crashing into me repeatedly, no safe harbor, nowhere to escape as they assault me.

My mom’s words, the last thing she added to her bucket list, mock me as Lexi’s words echo through my head.

Sure would be nice if my girls got along again. If I knew you two would be okay and have each other, even if I’m not here.

Not only is Thailand not happening, looks like she won’t get that wish either. For all the ways I wanted to help make this transition easier on my mom, I’m feeling like one hell of a failure right now.

The tears start to brim, nose and the backs of my eyes stinging, and I stare into the light to try to chase them away.

I hear Alexis arguing with both Duke and my mother as they continue to chastise her. “I’m only speaking the truth.” I don’t have to look at her to see the cool indifference she’s sporting. I can picture the exact face she’s making.

“Go cool off,” he tells her.

“Leave,” my mom’s brittle voice cuts off any other arguments my sister tries to throw out, and I hear the sounds of her chair scraping back, her stomping off, the door slamming, and two heavy exhales. Maybe three?

I focus on the one thing that I’m able to right now. The thing that pisses me off instead of breaks my heart.

“I can’t believe you hid this from me.”

“I’m sorry, remind me why my love life is your business, Aurora ? When’s the last time you shared anything about your life with me?” I don’t know what’s in the water supply in this house, but every woman who’s ever lived here came out spicier than the garden variety normally found in the Heights. Or maybe it’s just genetic and Lex and I both got it from the woman in front of me.

“I moved back here for you. I quit my job for you. I gave up my entire life to come be with you and help you through this. And you kicked me out because you didn’t want me to know he’s here?”

Duke leans back in his seat, eyes bouncing between my mother and I, but he looks like he’s ready to jump in the moment my mom asks for a tag team, and right now, I fucking dare him to.

“Oh, don’t pull that on me,” my mom scoffs at me. “I never asked you to come back. That was your call. And thank God your bosses had more sense than to let you quit over me. We both know when this is all over, you’re going to go right back to that place you call home, and dive back in right where you left off.”

Not sure why that gouges a path in my gut. I think this might be the first moment I’m realizing I haven’t been counting down to that picture she painted lately. That some part of me has been warming up to the idea of more time with Wyatt. This interim life I have going here has become … nice. It doesn’t sound as crazy as it used to that I could be happy here.

“And you and I both know you staying here when we haven’t so much as seen each other since you were twenty-one would’ve been like holding a magnifying glass to an ant hill. Whether it was me, Lexi, or you that blew up, that was never going to end well. I appreciate you being here, doing what you can to make up for lost time, but you can’t just expect to be treated like the last twelve years didn’t happen, Aurora. You left a lot of damage in your wake, and I’m trying to look past it in light of what we’re all going through, but just because you feel different after all these years, it doesn’t mean everyone else sees you that way. To us, you’re the same Rory who left without a word and never came back. Going by Aurora, having a new hair color and a degree—” probably not the time to correct her, it’s actually three degrees, “—with some fancy clothes doesn’t change that for us.”

“I’m gonna take off, Laura Lee. Let you ladies talk this out.” Duke stands with a somber face and leans in to kiss my mother’s cheek. His mouth twitches into something of a chuckle at whatever thought he pops into his head. “Guess I don’t have to wait until Rory’s back to the bar to come over tonight.”

My mom tilts her head and produces a small smile for him. “You sure don’t, handsome. Guess you can come over whenever the hell you feel like it now. All our secrets are gonna be public property soon.”

With a smack against her lips, he takes off, and my mom and I stare at each other in the uncomfortably quiet home.

“Let’s hear it, then,” my mother says, resigned, and lets her arms fall to the table with a slap.

I stare at her in question, my best you’re gonna have to do better than that, opposing counsel face in place.

“Have at me. Now’s your chance.” She tosses her arms up and lets them fall down again. “You’re thinking it. You’ve been thinking it for all these damn years, you might as well say it, Rory. All that resentment you hold for me. And your father.”

My sharp inhale gives away how precisely she just hit that nail on the head.

“You think I don’t know that you’ve held it against me all this time? That it’s my fault you left? You’re the one who wants me to tie up loose ends while I’m still around, now’s your chance to duke it out with me. So do it. Lay it on me.”

An alarm goes off in the kitchen—what timing, like now is the time, regardless of what the gurgling in my stomach has to say about it—and we both look over to it. My mom stands up, takes a couple pills of varying sizes from her plastic pill planner, downs them like a pro with the mug of (surely cold) coffee that’s still on the counter there from when I came in earlier this morning.

When she comes back and reclaims her seat, I’m not looking forward to this any more than I was when the words first left her lips, but this is probably a talk I can’t avoid for another dozen years. So I remove the filter between my brain and my mouth.

“He left, and you did nothing. He left us for her and you let it happen.” The first tear falls down my face, a lifetime of anger, betrayal, and hurt in that single droplet. I swipe it away, pissed that it broke through the barrier.

“What, did you want me to have her taken out?” Mom tosses back at me. “Thrown in the river with a bunch of rocks?”

I roll my eyes, swallow the sardonic chuckle that tries to escape, despite the somber setting. “God, you’re a tough old broad.”

She raises her brows at me. “About time you noticed. Where’d you think you got it from, anyway, huh?”

I blow out a big breath and tell her what I should’ve way too long ago. “I didn’t leave because of you . I left because of him .”

“So, to get back at him for leaving your family, you left your family? How’d that work out for you?” The way this woman busts balls as a hobby, she’d make a hell of an attorney if you ask me. All my best traits that make me such an asset for the firm surely come from her, after all.

“I left because I couldn’t go through that, Mom. It hurt enough to have my dad do that to my mom. The man I’d trusted most my entire life. If it happened to me by my own husband? I wouldn’t have survived. I don’t know how you did, actually.”

If it could happen to the best woman I’ve ever known, what the fuck chance did my shitty ass have at finding and keeping love in this town? Lord knows the pattern Wyatt and I were in back then wasn’t healthy. We had good parts, yeah, but neither of us were willing to become the people we needed to be to make it work long-term, and neither of us had the balls to call it off either. We would’ve gone down the exact path my parents did. The one his parents did. Heartbreak. A broken family. All I did was pull the plug before it got pulled for me years later, when it would’ve hurt way more.

“It wasn’t a surprise to me, Rory. You think I’m as dumb as Ronnie looks?”

My head pulls back at that, and I shake it a couple of times, stunned. “You knew ?”

“What, you think he was some brilliant son of a bitch about cheating on me for half our marriage? Of course I knew.”

Whatever remaining esteem I’ve held her in all these years just bottomed out, crashed through the floor, and dug itself deep into this rocky soil beneath every building in this town. It was bad enough that she didn’t know, that she was as blindsided as I was by him leaving our family for a woman barely older than Lexi was at the time. But for her to know ? I don’t know how to respect her at all after that bombshell.

“If you haven’t bothered to talk to me in all these years, I know you haven’t been talking to him,” my mom hypothesizes, already knowing she’s right. I give her a tiny nod to confirm.

I cut almost all the ties to the life I left. The occasional text with my mom was about it once I was gone. Definitely didn’t give my new number to my dad who bailed on us. Cheat on my mom, abandon your girls? You’re dead to me.

“But growing up, that man was your hero. You and Lexi both. Sure, he was a shitty husband, but he had value in some areas.” She looks around, at the walls of the house we’re in. “He provided for us, above and beyond what my income would’ve allowed for with two young kids. But we could’ve done without his money. More important to me was the way you two loved that man. You’re both so headstrong, having him around was good for you. Flawed as he might be, he wasn’t a bad father.”

Until he ran off with a girl barely older than his daughters, if you count that sort of thing. I bite the retort back, but my mom’s eyes narrow in on me like she knows what I was thinking, and hell, she probably does. She leans forward, from across the table from me, elbows on the wooden surface.

“Listen, Aurora. One day, when you’re a mom, you’ll understand. Or maybe you never will. But when you’re a parent, all you can do is what you think is best for your kids. It’s the only thing that matters when you’re a mother. You’ll make some mistakes, you’re bound to. Lord knows I did. But you’ll try to do your best, and that’s all you can do. I’m sorry you think I failed you by staying with him despite the sort of husband he was. But I’m thankful you had a father for those additional years. It was worth it to me to keep him around for the two of you, even if my marriage was nowhere near perfect. And when you were good and grown, ready to move out on your own, I kicked his ass out.”

My jaw slackens at that. She kicked him out?

All these years I spent judging her, pitying her, for what she went through. The way she was made a fool of. How what she went through convinced me not to give the best years of my life to some man who was going to string me along like an absolute idiot, and it wasn’t even true?

My mom keeps going, dropping more truth bombs on me. “Your daddy isn’t every man in Smoky Heights, Rory. He’s just one man. Duke isn’t your dad. Wyatt Grady isn’t your dad. There are good men here. I know because I’ve had one for a long time now. And Duke is the kind of man on his worst day your father could never dream to be on his best.”

There’s a foreign sensation in my chest, and I realize it’s the final drip of the last of that ice that’s been thawing around my heart.

The love in my mom’s voice. The warmth when reflecting on how well Duke treats her.

It cinches it for me. Makes it clearer than the Hudson could ever hope to be that I was so fucking wrong. Maybe Wyatt and I were idiots way back when, but we’ve both matured. We could absolutely work out now. I think this has been dawning on me for weeks, maybe longer, but this has solidified it for me. Staying in the Heights doesn’t seem like a punchline anymore. It’s more like the fuzzy light flares on the beautiful shot at the end of a movie, when you see the happily ever after. Mine just might be here after all.

So after my mom and I finish laying it all on the table, clearing the air and hugging for a long, long time, I head for the one person that somehow doesn’t hold my past against me. The one who has more of a right to than anyone else, and still chooses not to.