Page 173 of Beautiful Scars

Mom gives me a faint smile, and takes a tiny sip of her wine. “What is it?”

I sit up, wine sloshing over my hand. “That’s why you took her? Because of Alex?” I’m not being vague on purpose—I can barely speak from suppressed fury. But Mom knows exactly what I’m talking about, because her already pale cheeks go white.

“What if Alex found her?” she whispers. “You were a child yourself. You had no protection down there. Your father refused to—”

“Don’t you dare bring Dad into this!” I yell, slamming my wine glass down on the nearby coffee table. “He has nothing to do with this!”

Spots of color appear on her face. “Exactly,” she says coldly. “Your father did nothing.” She sets her glass down too, much calmer than I had. Then she starts counting points off her fingers. “Nothing to raise you, nothing to protect you, nothing to—”

“Enough! Everything you’re accusing him of, you forced on me. Because of you, I’ve done nothing to raise her, or protect her.” I jump to my feet. “You take me to her right now.”

Mom frowns at me. “Who?”

“Maddie!” I stab a finger toward the floor. The word feels foreign on my tongue, but I guess that’s her name now. She stopped being Grace a long time ago. “Now.”

She slowly gets to her feet, wrapping her arms around her chest like she’s just starting to feel the chill. “It’s ten o’clock at night—”

“And you’re the First Minister of Scotland,” I tell her, barely managing not to shout. “Surely, by now, you know how to pull a few strings.”

Her lips go even thinner than usual as she stares at me. It’s only a second, and then she recovers. “Think this through, Meisie. You’re a complete stranger. You can’t just barge into a child’s bedroom in the middle of the night and turn their life upside down. That’s not what…”

Her words trail off but she doesn’t need to say it.

That’s not what a mother would do.

It’s like she backhanded my soul.Hard.I slump back down on the sofa.

Fuck, it hurts, but she’s right.

What kind of mother thinks like that?

Maybe she’s been right all along.

Damn Cillian. Damn him for giving me a glimmer of hope that Mom had been wrong. For making me believe that maybe I could figure it out, and he would be there to help me.

He’s going to prison, apparently.

“We’ll visit first thing in the morning,” Mom says. “You can see for yourself how happy she is. Maybe then you’ll stop hating me.”

I look up at her.

Maybe then I’ll stop hating myself.