My mother lowered her head.
“When Daniel came back into my life, all the feelings I had buried for twenty years returned. We started talking about the past. We talked about your father and what he had done. We talked about the lives we might have had together.”
Her voice cracked.
“Then we crossed a line. And every day afterward, we found another reason to keep the secret.”
I wanted to hate her.
I wanted to believe that Daniel had manipulated her, that she had been lonely, that she had made one terrible mistake.
But she was my mother.
She had watched me fall in love with him.
She had held my hand while I cried over the fear of losing him before the wedding.
She had helped me choose the dress I would never wear.
And she had continued seeing him anyway.
“You could have told me,” I whispered. “You could have told me about your past with him. You could have warned me about my father. You could have told me anything.”
