Chapter 5: What Linda Mitchell Never Said Out Loud
My mother looked at Richard the way you look at something you've tried very hard to put away in a drawer and close.
He looked back at her calmly.
Jake stood up.
"Mom, this isn't—"
"Sit down, Jacob." She didn't raise her voice.
She never had to.
"I'm not here to argue with any of you.
I'm here to talk to Sarah."
"Then talk," I said.
She pulled the chair beside Jake's slightly away from him, sat down, and folded her hands in her lap.
The posture was familiar.
She'd used it at every serious family conversation I could remember.
Composed.
Controlled.
Slightly above whatever was happening.
"I made a decision when you were born," she said.
"I made it to protect this family."
"You made it to protect yourself," I said.
Her chin lifted slightly.
"I was twenty-six years old with a three-year-old son and a husband who would have left me if he found out.
What would you have had me do?"
"Tell the truth," I said.
"Eventually.
At some point in thirty-seven years."
"It was never the right time."
"It was never the right time," I repeated.
"Mom.
You just called me a damaged clearance item into a microphone."
Her composure cracked at the edges.
Just slightly.
Just enough to see what was underneath.
"That was Brittany's idea," she said.
"You joined in."
Silence.
Richard had not sat down.
He stood near the wall a few feet away, still and quiet, giving the conversation whatever room it needed.
I was aware of him without looking at him directly.
There was something steadying about it.
I wasn't sure why.
"Did you read it?" he asked me.
Quietly.
Just to me.
"Yes," I said.
My mother's eyes moved to him.
"You brought a letter." Her voice was flat.
"After everything I asked of you."
"You asked me to disappear," Richard said.
"I did that for thirty-seven years.
I think I've met my obligation."
"You had no obligation.
You had an affair with a married woman and then you sent letters for decades to make yourself feel better."
"Linda." His voice stayed level.
"She was sitting in a ballroom an hour ago being laughed at by two hundred people.
By you.
Don't talk to me about making myself feel better."
My mother's jaw tightened.
Jake looked at the floor.
I watched my mother's face and tried to find something I recognized.
Some version of her I'd always hoped was real underneath the one I'd grown up with.
The mother who had looked at me when I was small and seen a problem she'd made and couldn't figure out where to put.
"Did you ever love me?" I asked her.
The question came out quiet and direct and surprised even me.
My mother looked at me.
For a long moment she said nothing.
"Of course I did."
"It never felt like it," I said.
"My whole life, Mom.
It never felt like it.
And now I'm sitting here trying to understand whether that was guilt or resentment or whether you just genuinely preferred Jake, and I don't know which answer is worse."
Mason pressed his face against my arm.
My mother looked at her grandson.
Something shifted in her expression.
Not softness exactly.
But something adjacent to it.
"I didn't know how to look at you," she said finally.
"Every time I did, I saw what I'd done.
And I didn't know how to separate that from who you were."
It was the most honest thing she had ever said to me.
It was also the most devastating.
"So I paid for it," I said.
"My whole life.
For something you did before I was born."
She didn't answer.
Which was its own kind of answer.
Richard cleared his throat.
"I'd like to speak with Sarah," he said.
"Alone, if that's possible.
Not tonight if she's not ready.
But at some point."
My mother opened her mouth.
"That's Sarah's decision," Jake said quietly.
His first words in several minutes.
"Not yours, Mom."
She looked at her son like she was seeing someone she didn't entirely recognize.
Jake held her gaze.
I looked at Richard.
The gray at his temples.
The careful stillness.
The way he'd handed me that envelope like it was something fragile that had been in his pocket for a very long time.
"Not tonight," I said.
"But yes."
He nodded.
"Whenever you're ready."
Mason had been quiet through all of it.
Now he looked up at Richard with the direct assessment that nine-year-olds are capable of when they've decided to take something seriously.
"Did you really write her letters?" Mason asked.
"I did," Richard said.
"Did she know?"
"No.
Your grandmother sent them back."
Mason absorbed this.
"That's not very fair," he said.
"No," Richard agreed.
"It wasn't."
My mother stood up.
She straightened her jacket.
She looked at me with an expression I couldn't fully name — too many things in it at once — and then she walked back toward the ballroom door.
She stopped with her hand on the door.
"The will," she said, without turning around.
"What Jake told you.
I want you to know I said that in anger."
"I believe you said it exactly as you meant it," I said.
"And I think we both know it."
Her hand dropped from the door.
She pushed through it without another word.
The corridor was very quiet.
Jake let out a long slow breath.
"She's going to call her attorney on Monday," he said.
"I know how she works."
May you like
I looked at him.
"Then I suppose we have the weekend to figure out what to do about that."
