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I let out a soft breath. “Hey, Mom. How are you?”
“Do you even care?” she asks.
“Of course I care.”
“If you cared, you’d pick up the phone whenever I call you.”
Okay, she’s pissed. Which is understandable considering I was ignoring her.
“Noted. I’ll be sure to do so the next time your name flashes across my screen. Now if that’s all, I’ve got a ton of work, Mom.”
“Wait,” she says, stopping me from hanging up. “I have something to tell you.”
That gives me pause. For a second, just one second, I imagine she’s going to tell she’s finally going to leave him. Get a divorce and finally get some happiness and freedom. But that’s naïve and I know it’ll never happen. She’ll never be strong enough to do that. And I hate it so much.
“I’m coming to New York,” my mother tells me instead.
I arch an eyebrow. “Why?”
“To see you, of course. I miss my son and I just want to make sure you’re eating healthy. Your father mentioned that you’ve turned into a bit of a workaholic.”
Odd that my father would have even noticed something like that in the first place.
“It’s fine, Mom. I can take care of myself,” I assure her.
The last thing I need is her presence in this city.
“Of course you can, Gray. But I am your mother and we haven’t spent any time together in as long as I can remember. I talked to your father and he agreed that it would be nice if I came to spend a couple of weeks in New York.”
“You mean he gave you permission,” I grit out.
She ignores that. “I’ll be staying with you in the penthouse.”
That has me falling still. I don’t mind that she’s coming to New York. But her staying with me is a big issue.
“No way. You have another son, remember? Stay with him; I’m sure they’d love that.”
My mother may have not have given birth to Xander, but she treated him the same way she treated Mikayla and I growing up. He’s just as much her son as I am. And growing up, I hated it. I was jealous of how she treated him. But I’m a big boy now, and I’ve come to understand that Xander needed a mother’s care since he couldn’t get it from his own mother.
“I’ll be staying with you in the penthouse, Graham,” my mother says stubbornly.
I groan. “We have tons of properties in the city. One call and I can have the townhouse on the Upper East Side prepared for you.”
“Expect me at the penthouse this weekend, Graham. Goodbye, honey.”
She hangs up the call and I rub the side of my forehead. I know what she’s trying to do. Once in a while, she gets it in her head that she’s going to try and force a sort of reconciliation between us, or a heart-to-heart. I know she wants forgiveness, but she’s never done anything to me.Sure, lied about how she and my dad met and everything about his first wife but I can get over all of that.
It’s what she does to herself that I can’t stand.
“Where are we going?” Isabella asks for the twentieth time in the past hour.
I glance at her with a frown. “Do you think if you ask me enough times I’m suddenly going to cave and tell you?”
She pouts, crossing her arms over her chest and leaning into her seat. It’s 6 p.m. and I spent the whole day trying to prepare this for her. It was surprisingly harder than I thought, but I got it done.
“We’re almost there, Sunshine. Just give me a few more minutes,” I tell her. “Also, is there any way I could convince you to wear a blindfold?”
The look she shoots my way is answer enough. I sigh softly.
