There was no relief to be had, only an aching sadness. Her mother had effectively died years before, replaced with a woman who screamed at night and pointed at horrors that weren’t there.
“Hey, love, are you coming back to Diana’s?” Her brother, George, slipped an arm around her shoulders.
She sighed. She loved Diana, but she didn’t think she could handle being at her perfect sister’s house today. It reminded her far too much of everything she’d lost. How could she watch Diana and her babies and her husband? She very likely would never have a family of her own. There had only ever been Peter who had been interested in her, and now he was gone.
“I think I’ll go to the office for a while.” Work was numbing, blissfully so. When she was translating a document or analyzing a code, she wasn’t thinking about everything she’d denied herself over the years.
And when she caught sight of Damon Knight, she could sigh and daydream a little. Her own James Bond.
“Do you hate us, Pen?”
She nearly sighed. It was very much like her brother to bring up their family problems on a day like this. “Of course not.”
She turned away, hoping he would let it all drop. He could go to Diana’s and drink her excellent wine and pretend that he was in mourning. Damn it all. She didn’t want to hate him. Tears blurred her vision.
“I wouldn’t blame you if you did.” He fell into step beside her, his normally handsome face a bit worn and weary. “I think I hate myself a little today. I know Diana does.”
“I don’t want to talk about this now, George.”
He stopped her, his hand reaching out. “You never want to talk about it, Pen. You seem to think that if you let it go, it will just float away and we’ll never have to deal with it. I loved Mum. I know I didn’t show it the way you did, but I loved her and I realized something last night. I realized that the way I prove it is by keeping this family together.”
George had been constant. Even after their mum had lost the ability to recognize him, he’d come to visit twice a week, making the long train ride from Oxford to London without fail. Diana had paid as much as they could toward Mum’s care and brought meals by on occasion. They had tried.
But they hadn’t been forced to live with the daily struggles. They had their own families.
“If I let you, you’ll drift away from us, Pen. I don’t want that. I don’t want to end up like the other families I’ve seen break apart after their parents die. Sure we would probably see each other this Christmas, but you would make up an excuse to miss Easter and then time would do the rest. I know the burden you carried. I know you carried it alone. You have every right to hate us. We didn’t do everything we could have. I should have moved back.”
And given up his work? Should Diana have left her children at home to stay with their mother? Should she have put that pressure on her marriage? Penny knew how hard it was for a relationship to survive that kind of burden. When she really looked at it, she’d driven Peter away because she wouldn’t make time for him. First there had been her father’s long battle with cancer and then her mother’s dementia. She’d made choices. Perhaps they’d been the right ones, but they’d led to her engagement dying a slow, pitiful death.
“It doesn’t matter now, George. I don’t blame you. You did what you could.”
“It does matter. Damn it, I don’t want you to end up a bitter old woman. It’s the last thing Mum would want.”
Penny stopped cold and turned back to her brother. His suit was plastered to his lanky body, his normally perfect hair bedraggled. There was no mistaking the fire in his eyes.
She felt a spark of her own. “I’m thirty-two. I’m hardly old.”
But she felt every single one of those days.
“You don’t date. When Diana and I offered to watch Mum so you could go out, you always turned us down. You don’t go out with friends. God, I don’t even know if you have friends. I’m worried because I don’t think Mum dying is going to change anything for you. I think you’ll just go on the same way. I think it’s gotten easy for you to be alone. I think it’s gotten easier for you to be angry than it is for you to forgive us. We weren’t as good as you, Pen. If it had been left up to me and Diana, she would have gone to a nursing home a long time ago.”
They had argued it was the best place for her, but Penny couldn’t send her mum to one of those places that reeked of urine and death and utter despair.
God, the last few months, it had been how her own home smelled.
Dying was a horrible business. Even when the death wasn’t her own.
“Come out to dinner with us. Just you and me and Diana. We’ll tell everyone else to take a hike. Just the three of us.”
“I want to go home.” She just wanted to be alone. She wanted to shut the door of her house and…what? Mourn? Wallow in self-pity? Eat ice cream and pretend like she wasn’t turning in to exactly what George was afraid of?
She’d stopped smiling. She used to bake cakes for her fellow employees and go to lunch with the “girls,” as she called them. She used to laugh and let them tease her about her crush on Damon.
It had all gotten to be too much. Even she could break.
Could she put herself back together? She’d made the choice to put her life on hold to take care of her parents. Could she find the girl she’d been?
George stared at her, his arms open. She could be mad at him or she could choose another path.
A sudden memory hit her. Her younger brother slugging an upperclassman at their school because he’d called Penny ugly. Diana had been there, holding her hand and promising her that everything would be all right. George had taken a black eye and Diana had taught her everything she knew about makeup.
They had been a little gang, the three of them. No one else could understand what it meant to have lost their parents. Others could sympathize, but they couldn’t understand the uniqueness of her grief.
She’d been strong for years and never quite realized what it had cost her. No smiles. No tears. No anything.
Grief hit her like a wave, rolling across her and bringing an odd sense of peace.
She let the umbrella fall away and stepped into her brother’s arms.
For the first time in years, she allowed herself to truly feel.
Chapter One