Free My Beloved: A Thin Love Novella by Eden Butler

From what she heard, the illness was painful, lingering and her mother suffered for almost a year before her liver finally failed. When she got the call that the woman was dead, there had been no instant swell of grief, no overwhelming emotional display that leveled Keira. To Keira, her mother died the instant she told Keira to get rid of her baby.
    Sixteen years she had kept her mother out of her mind. Keira never thought of her, never wanted to be reminded of her life in New Orleans and her mother’s cruelty. Then after the death she returned to the Lake House. Keira was the only one left to rummage through her mother’s belongings, years of pointless memories sorted and organized into albums and scrapbooks that Keira had no desire to keep.
    But one day, Keira came across a box in the attic with her name scrawled across the top. When Keira opened it, all that she thought she knew about her mother fractured.
    Inside were pictures, newspaper clippings, sheet music, articles and copies of record charts filling up dozens of scrapbooks and they were all of Keira. Her successes, media and PR materials that the record label insisted she participate in, pictures of Keira accepting her Grammy, speaking quietly, shyly to the press with her trophy in hand. Her mother had documented everything, was proud. Keira knew that from the tiny, elegant handwritten labels, titles that said “Keira’s First Number One” or “My Baby on the Grammys”.
    Keira had taken those scrapbooks and held them close to her chest, confused that her mother hadn’t really hated her, that after all these years and everything she tried to force on Keira, she’d really loved her, was proud of her. And it broke Keira’s heart. Cora Michaels, her mother, had been abusive, horrible to Keira, angry that the girl had turned out too much like her father. She’d driven Keira away, kept her away because she hated the baby growing inside her daughter’s belly. She’d hated even more the boy who had put that baby there. It was her rearing, the small-minded bigotry that was engrained into her generation. Her parents, theirs, had only cared about social standing and money—how much they had, how much they could get, and that attitude had left Cora expectant, cold. She’d landed Keira’s father in college, then left him when he no longer wanted to pretend he believed in what she did. Keira had never understood her mother, but those clippings, those proud labels told a different story, and convinced Keira that she’d never really known the woman, either.
    Keira had spent years trying to forget that her artistic, free-spirited father had loved her mother, that there had been something about her that he’d found irresistible once. That love hadn’t ever left her mother, not really. It had become displaced, hidden by expectation and ignorance, but it still lived in her and in a small, undeniable way, had been reserved for her daughter.
    Keira had never forgiven her mother for all those years of criticism, for the abuse, the pain she had caused. She had never even told her mother goodbye when she walked out to start a life on her own with her unborn baby. So she sat in that attic that day with those scrapbooks around her and for the first time in sixteen years, Keira cried out for her mother. She’d told her she loved her, no matter what a vicious, entitled, racist woman she was, that Keira couldn’t help but love her. And she realized, with shocking clarity, that’s what real love is; loving blindly, loving despite flaws, despite the horrible things we all do to each other. Keira hated everything her mother believed in, she’d hated it so much that she’d purposefully run from it. Still, that drunk, ignorant woman had been her mother. She’d given Keira life. She’d made Keira the stubborn, determined woman she had become.
    She didn’t want Kona to have to live with that same regret for his manipulative mother. Keira certainly wasn’t ready to hug Lalei