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I tremble with nerves, so fraught with tension and anxiety that I can barely register his gesture of support. He squeezes my fingers, and I draw in a deeper breath, but I can’t bear to look at him. All I can do is watch as my mother snaps her stare from me to him. Then she curls her lip at our joined hands.
“Who the hell are you?” she retorts haughtily.
“Get. Out.” Sawyer is bold and unwavering with each repeat of his demand.
She laughs, scowling as she loses it to some twisted sense of humor. “You think you can tell me what to do?”
“Adelaide,” Dalton says in warning.
She pays my cousin no mind, laughing and pointing at Sawyer. “You think you can tell me what to do? When I’m having a private discussion with my daughter?”
She wants him to feel insignificant, but Sawyer is impervious to her tone. Again, she glances at our hands together. “I always knew you were trash, Claire.” Her lip curls in disgust as she rolls her eyes. “Sleeping with a man who carries around a filthy toolbox. I think not.” She screeches the last part.
When she turns her sneer to me, I want to hide behind Sawyer’s tall frame. I don’t. I swallow and stand firm, lifting my chin up at her in defiance.
“You can try to embarrass me by being difficult. You can try to humiliate me with your stupid dreams about fashion.” She picks up my coffee cup from the counter and rushes over to the dress mannequin before she throws the dregs of my coffee over the beautiful white fabric. She then shoves both hands against the dress form and pushes hard.
I gasp, covering my mouth as the entire thing falls over. In a blur of white and brown, the fabric and mannequin topple to the floor with a resounding thud that hits me deep in the heart.
“But I’ll be damned if you think about dragging the Rennard name through the mud by sleeping with the likes of someone like him!”
I stare at the mess on the floor. Tears sting my eyes, and I can’t bear to face my mother as she storms out of the cabin. I heave in hot breaths, shocked and wounded at her cruelty and the destruction of my hard work. I wheeze in air, trying to accept the instant and total disregard she left in her wake. Sawyer lets go of my hand as I run to the dress form and the scattered fabric that has flown all over the floor with her vicious push.
“Claire.” Dalton rushes toward the door, following my mother out. He pauses and nods at Sawyer, who comes closer to me as I drop to my knees. Then my cousin is gone, chasing after the cruel person who disrespected my efforts.
I sob, frantically trying to set the bulky dress form upright again. Fabric is torn and smeared with the coffee. It doesn’t matter, and the darkness shows on the pure-white fabrics I’ve just purchased for Lauren.
Sawyer reaches out, grabbing the form when it again falls to the side. I can barely see through the tears in my eyes as my life crumbles apart. I cry and blink, straining to see why the form won’t stay upright. With the fall, one part of the legs at the bottom busted. Even if I could get the form to stand, it wouldn’t matter.
My creation, the start of it, is ruined. I sniffle and grasp the soft material I’ve labored over. Sawyer sets the form up, canting to the side and resting against the armchair. It doesn’t tip again, but it’s pointless. The fabric is dirtied and has snags. The coffee stains the delicate embroidery it took me painstaking hours to complete.
“I…I’ve…” My tears splatter on the lace in my hands. “I’ve spent so long making this by hand. I don’t—I don’t even have a machine to make this properly, and I’ve put hours into embroidering this…”
“Claire.” Sawyer’s voice is soft and gentle as he lowers to his knees to help me gather it all. But it’s no use. It’s all ruined.
“All that time. All those painstaking moments of trying to get this perfect…” I sniffle and cry harder, broken inside by the loss.
“Come here,” he tells me carefully. He holds his arms out to me, but I can’t cave. I want his comfort and sturdy support more than ever, but I simply can’t turn toward him and let him console me. Not now. This utter act of ruin is too large to fathom, too heavy to accept.
All my work, gone. That’s not even touching the pain of my own parent, my mother, wishing to cause this ruin. The one person who should love and respect me out of an unconditional bond as mother-to-daughter has destroyed my first real project.
She’s never cared about my passions. She’s never stood by my dreams and how hard I toiled and studied for them. She’s only ever wanted to ridicule and squash my goals.
But knowing she thinks so little of me didn’t prepare me for her acting on her hatred like this.
“Here,” he says when I don’t turn to him.
I scramble to pick it all up. It’s a stained mess, and there is no way that I can salvage it, but I can’t bear to see it lying on the floor, wasted and rejected.
He reaches out, scooping up what he can. I can’t see through the shock to appreciate how he’s helping. Nothing can register. I can only wallow in the scream locked in my mind as I grapple with my work being reduced to this mess.
“Claire, come here,” he says again, gesturing for me to fall into his arms that he holds out for me.
I can’t, though. The second I lean on him, I fear I’ll never get out of this rut.
“Just go. Leave, Sawyer.” Leave and let me suffer in the peace of my privacy.
He doesn’t listen. Nope. He grabs my shoulders and jerks me as he roughly pulls me into his embrace. I’m on my knees, slanting into him until he stands with me in his arms. I hug him close, jarred from the pain of the dress being ruined to gasping in tears and desperate for his strong arms to hold me up.
