by Sarra Cannon
“They should just be finishing up with the breakfast crowd,” Jenna says. “Are you going to head over there?”
“I will in a little while,” I say. “But there’s one more thing I need to do first.”
Penny squeezes my hand. “I’m proud of you,” she says. “It’s not going to be easy to say what you need to say, but I promise you, you’ll feel so much better once you finally do it.”
I give her a big hug. I know she understands how terrifying it can be to stand up to your parents, and it gives me courage to know that she has a better relationship with them now than ever before.
“Call me if you need me,” Jenna says.
The three of us embrace and hold each other for a moment before heading our separate ways.
“Thank you both for being here with me,” I say. “I needed this.”
“That’s what friends do,” Penny says. “Let us know how it goes, okay?”
“I will,” I say.
We all get into our cars and drive away, and as I turn onto the street where I grew up, my pulse begins to race. My mother is expecting me this morning so that we can plan the final touches for the engagement party, but she’s not going to like what I have to say.
I pull into my parents’ driveway and park in the back, taking just a moment to give myself a pep talk. I know that what I’m about to do will change our relationship forever, one way or another. I say a silent prayer that she truly listens to me this time.
I knock on the back door and she appears, still wearing her robe and carrying a cup of tea. My father is standing behind her in the doorway.
“What’s happened?” she asks, clutching the robe at her throat. “You look just awful. Have you been crying?”
“Yes,” I say. “I’ve been crying for hours.”
Mom swallows and pats her chest. “It’s Knox, isn’t it?” she asks. “I told your father he would do something to break your heart, and now it’s happened, hasn’t it? Come into the kitchen, sweetheart, and you can tell us all about it.”
Her words sound very concerned, but I could swear I saw a hint of satisfaction in her eyes when she glanced at my father.
I’m quiet as we make our way back to the kitchen, but the peace I felt back on the beach is fading as my anger takes hold.
“What did he do?” Mom asks. “Is the wedding off?”
She glances at my hand, but frowns when she sees the engagement ring still in place.
“The wedding at the church is definitely off,” I say, watching her expression carefully. She turns away from me, but I can see the excitement in her eyes.
She’s been hoping I would call off this wedding from the moment I announced our engagement, and I see with sudden clarity that my happiness has never been the most important thing to her. Not even when I was a child.
Her own happiness has always been front and center. My happiness is not even a factor. If it was, she wouldn’t be excited about the idea of my heart breaking into a million pieces, which is what would happen if I ever lost Knox. How can she not understand that?
“I’ll make some tea and you can tell us all about it,” she says. “Though I have to tell you I’m relieved to hear it. He was never the right man for you, Leigh Anne. I’ve told you that a thousand times. Does this mean you’re going to send in that application? Oh, Leigh, I couldn’t be happier. And don’t you worry for a second about all the deposits and everything. We can get our money back, and if we can’t, we’re not going to worry about it.”
She pauses for a minute.
“I might not be able to get the money back on your dress, but no bother. We’ll figure it out,” she says.
“My dress?” I ask. “I never decided on a dress for sure.”
She shrugs and turns away. “I know, but I figured with the wedding moved up to the spring, we really didn’t have time for you to be going back and forth,” she says. “I went ahead and paid for the ball gown we both loved so much. It’s just perfect, and Amanda’s already started on some of the alterations.”
I’ve completely reached my limit with her. She ordered a dress without even talking to me? I can’t take this anymore.
“Sit down, Mother,” I say.
Mom turns around, her hand still outstretched and a look of complete shock on her face. “Leigh Anne, what’s gotten into you,” she says.
“You can’t speak to your mother in that tone of voice, young lady,” Dad says.
“I can, and I will,” I say. “I want you both to sit down.”
Mom makes a low noise in her throat and leans against the kitchen counter, arms crossed. “I don’t know what’s happened to you this morning, but you seem to have forgotten yourself,” she says.
“Actually, it’s the opposite,” I say. “I finally understand who I am for the first time in my life, and I need for you both to listen to what I have to say.”
Mom looks at my father and pulls her robe tighter across her chest. Dad sits down at the table, shaking his head.
“Go on, then,” he says. “Say what you’ve come to say.”
“It’s no secret that the two of you don’t approve of my relationship with Knox,” I say, my heart racing. “You’ve made that abundantly clear since the moment you first found out we were seeing each other. Maybe it was naive of me, but I honestly thought after you saw him stand by my side and be there for me through the entire trial that you would have the decency to show him some respect. I thought for sure once you saw how much we love each other, you would come around to at least accepting him as my choice.”
Mom sighs loudly, but I ignore her and keep talking.
“I can’t even express to you how you both hurt me the night we came to tell you about our engagement,” I say. “I came over here excited to tell you about this happy moment in my life and to have you share in that joy, but neither one of you so much as tried to pretend you were excited or happy for me. Instead, you both immediately started in by telling both me and Knox that we weren’t ready to make this kind of decision.”
I turn to look my father in the eyes.
“Knox didn’t even tell me about what you said to him on the golf course the week after we got engaged, because he didn’t want to upset me or hurt my feelings, but he told me last night, and I honestly was so disappointed in you,” I say. “To find out that you see me as weak, even after everything I’ve gone through? That cut me to my core, Dad. And you.”
I turn to my mother.
“You don’t even want me to go through with this wedding, and yet you’re set on making sure it’s the wedding you want for me, rather than the wedding I want for myself,” I say. “At every turn, it’s been a battle with you, and you always expect me to compromise to make you happy. Whenever I make a decision you don’t like, you hardly speak to me for days until I finally agree to come around to what you want. How do you think that makes me feel?”
“That’s simply not true,” she says, finally pulling out a chair and sitting down at the table.
“It is true,” I say. “And when I don’t automatically agree to a compromise, you go over my head and change it to whatever you wanted. Like with the church. I told you we wanted to get married at the lake house in the spring, but you still called the pastor to reserve the church for the date you wanted next fall. Throughout this whole process, you’ve never once seemed to care about what I want or what will make me happy.”
“I’m always thinking about what will make you happy,” she says.
“That may be what you tell yourself, but it’s not true,” I say. “You tell yourself that what you want is going to be what’s best for me. You’ve been doing it my entire life, and since I trusted you, I believed that meant you always had my best interests in mind. But the problem is that you’ve never allowed me to grow up and be my own person. You’ve never allowed me to make my own decisions, Mom. I’m an adult. I have the capability of making the right decisions for myself, and you have to stop trying to make them for me, thinking that you know be
tter.”
She clucks her tongue, and I nearly lose it.
“See? Whenever you think someone is wrong, you make that same sound,” I say. “My whole life, whenever I choose something you don’t agree with, you make that fucking sound with your tongue, letting me know that you think I’m making the wrong choice and that you know better. And instead of getting angry with you, do you know what I do? I feel guilty for being bad or for making you unhappy. You have done such a great job of training me to believe that your happiness is more important than my own that I’ve actually believed it.”
“Leigh Anne, I can’t believe you’re saying these things to me,” she says. “You’re breaking my heart.”
“What about my heart, Mom?” I shout. “What about all the times you’ve broken my heart? Does that even matter to you?”
“I have never done anything but support you in everything,” she says.
“Really? You supported my choice to break things off with Preston when he cheated on me?” I ask. “Because as I remember it, you told me I was making a huge mistake, and if I turned my back on him, I would never make anything of my life.”
She doesn’t respond. Instead, she looks away, tears shining in her eyes.
“And what about my decision to go to school in Boston?” I ask. “Are you really going to sit here and tell me you supported me in that decision? Because you never once supported that. You wanted me to go to school here in Fairhope so that I would have the potential to get back together with Preston. And when I was raped and I needed my mother more than ever? Did you fly up there to be with me? Did you hold me in your arms and tell me you loved me? No, do you remember what you said to me when I first told you it had happened?”
She closes her eyes, her body rigid against the chair.
“You told me I was being my usual melodramatic self and if he had done that to me then I must have done something to deserve it,” I say. I had thought it wasn’t possible for me to cry any more after all those tears earlier, but they are flowing again now at the memory of the ways my mother has hurt me. I can’t stop myself from continuing, and it feels good to finally put a voice to my feelings.
“I wanted to report him to the police right away for what he’d done, but you didn’t support me in that,” I say. “When I was most vulnerable and scared, you told me that I needed to trust the school’s system to take care of the issue. And when they dropped the case because he was rich and famous, you told me to come home. You said I never should have gone up there to school in the first place, as if it was my fault this happened to me. How do you think that made me feel, Mom?”
“I didn’t mean to…”
She places her hand over her mouth and doesn’t continue.
“If I had reported him to the police right away, he never would have had the opportunity to rape someone else, but he did, and I have to live with that,” I say. “You have no idea how it felt to see him on that campus day in and day out, knowing that he got away with it. And when I found out what happened to Molly, it broke me all over again. I came home to get away from that and to find some kind of support and love here in this house, but I didn’t find any of that here. Instead, the one person who reached out and gave me the love and support I needed was Knox. He was there for me in a way my own parents refused to be, and when the time came to speak up about what happened, you still asked me to sweep it under the rug.”
The words pour out of my mouth so quickly, I’m stumbling over them, rushing to say all the things I’ve held inside for so long.
“Knox was there for me the whole way through the trial, even though he knew it might mean his past would get drudged up all over again, which it did,” I say. “But he was willing to go through that because he knew I had to speak up for myself and for all those other women. And when that man who has done nothing but love me with all of his heart asked me to marry him, you both made him feel like he was worthless. You made me feel like I was worthless, and I’m tired of feeling like I don’t deserve to be happy. I’m tired of sacrificing my own happiness on the altar of your expectations. I won’t do it anymore.”
I have to take a breath. My hands are clenched into fists and my heart is pounding. I’ve been shouting at the top of my lungs, and I’ve never felt so free in my life.
“I love you both, but I refuse to put your happiness above my own,” I say. “I’m going to marry Knox Warner, and we are going to have the wedding we want. We are going to have the lives we want. He’s not going to work for some asshole friend of yours who cuts corners and worships money just so you’ll respect him. We’re going to run a business of our own together, and if you can’t respect that or see the honor in that, then that’s your problem, not ours. And if you want to be a part of our lives moving forward, you’re going to have to start treating us like the adults that we are. That means our choices belong to us. Our mistakes belong to us. I’m done trying to find a way to balance my needs with your expectations. I just want to be happy, and if you can’t understand that, then maybe you won’t be in my life.”
“You don’t mean that,” Mom says.
“I do mean that,” I say. “I mean it down to the very depths of my soul. I’ve already wasted too much time trying to make you happy and always coming up short. It’s time to make myself happy for a change. That’s what you should want for me, Mom. You should want me to be happy.”
“I have always wanted you to be happy,” she says, standing and placing her hand on the back of the chair, as if to hold herself steady. “But what about my happiness, Leigh Anne? Are you saying you don’t care about that? You don’t care about how much you’re hurting me right now? Because I can’t even tell you just how deep your words have cut me.”
I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I shouldn’t have expected her to get it or to understand.
“Of course I want you to be happy,” I say. “But what I’m telling you is that I’m not responsible for your happiness, anymore. That’s your responsibility, Mom. I’ve been carrying that burden for far too long, and I just can’t do it anymore.”
The room grows still, quiet except for the sound of my mother’s crying.
“I’m going to go,” I say. “I hope with all my heart that you’ll think about what I said and understand that I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m trying to find a way to heal myself.”
Mom shakes her head and turns away from me, holding her hand out to keep me from approaching her. My father goes to comfort her and barely even glances at me as I go to leave.
I don’t know that they’ll ever understand what I was trying to say here tonight. I’m not sure they are even capable of understanding it.
But the important thing is that, for the first time in my life, I had the courage to finally say it.
For the first time in a very long time, I am free.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I can’t sit here any longer knowing that Leigh Anne is home thinking I’m not coming back. I feel like an ass for yelling at her the way I did, and I want to make sure she knows that I’m going to be there for her no matter how long it takes. We can delay the wedding for as long as we need to until she’s ready, but I’m going to be by her side the whole way.
I say goodbye to Jo and step out the back door to see Leigh Anne getting out of her car.
“Leigh Anne, oh my God, I’m so sorry I left,” I say, practically running to her. “I shouldn’t have said all those things. I was just about to come home and tell you I was sorry.”
She looks up into my eyes. “No, you were right,” she says. “I don’t know why I couldn’t see it before, but you were right about all of it. I’ve been living with one half of my heart still stuck in the past, thinking that I’d never be free of it.”
“You can take all the time you need,” I say. “I never should have rushed you or made you feel like I didn’t understand what you were going through.”
“You didn’t rush me,” she says, her eyes completely clear and free of the sadness tha
t’s lived there for as long as I’ve known her. “You made me see the truth of it for the first time. That’s why I know you’re the right person for me, because you challenge me to go deeper and to really think about why I feel the way I do. When you walked out that door last night, I completely fell apart.”
My heart nearly breaks thinking of the pain I’ve caused her. She’s been through enough. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she says. “I needed that, Knox. I needed to know what it felt like to imagine a life without you in it. Because in that moment, I finally realized that this is exactly the life I want. All these months together, I was still holding onto the idea of what if? What if I had never gone out with Burke Redfield? What if I’d stayed at Harvard and graduated? What if I’d gone on to law school and made something different of my life? Those questions have haunted me for the past two years, because I’ve been focusing on the wrong things. I’ve been focusing on what I lost that night, instead of what I found.”
She takes my hand and places it on her chest.
“You are my heart, Knox Warner,” she says. “You are my now and my always, and I promise I am going to stop living in the past. I promise you that I’m going to fight for us, no matter what it takes, because I love you with all that I am.”
Hearing those words from her makes every moment of my life before this pale in comparison.
I place her hand over my heart so that we are standing together in this moment, both knowing that there is nothing in this world that matters more than how we are feeling right now.
“I have loved you from the moment I first laid eyes on you,” I say. “And I promise I will never walk away from you again.”
I pull her into my arms and kiss her.
Just minutes ago, I was terrified I had lost her forever, but now I know that there is nothing that will ever tear us apart again.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
A few weeks later, Knox and I are sitting at the bar during the slow time between lunch and dinner at Rob’s when my phone rings.