Free Warning Signs (Broken Promises #2) by Alexandra Moore Page B

it clear he didn’t want them. There was nothing that could ease our pain. Our mother’s death was the end of our pain, and also the beginning. She died a long time ago in spirit, yet physically she lived on. Now that her physical body was gone, we were left with the notion that our pain of watching our zombie mother harming herself along with everyone around her was gone, and that she was finally at peace. Now we had to be able to find peace with that. I was beginning to doubt the peace I felt when I saw envelopes addressed to Ben and me on the counter in a Ziploc bag with my mother’s rosary and her prayer cards. I opened the bag with care and took only what was mine. It was a letter from my mother, and the things inside I never wanted to remember. I didn’t want her to remember them either. But somehow, she did. The last line of the letter read:
     
    Brenna, I will always love you. But I cannot forgive myself for how I have hurt you more than I have hurt myself, or Ben. I am sorry, and I’m afraid an apology isn’t enough. I hope with my passing, you’ll learn to forgive me. Please, forgive me.
    Love,
    Mom
     
    When I was done reading through the letter, I noticed that tears had begun to splotch the pages I had read, and it caused the ink to bleed. I tore up the letter, and without thinking I began to scream. Screaming was what I did best. Screaming made the pain go away, but it wasn’t enough. I screamed as I tore up her rosary and prayer cards. I screamed as I broke picture frames with happy faces that no longer existed. I screamed as I threw plates on the ground and I screamed as I fell to the broken pieces on the cold, cluttered floor. Ben didn’t come down. No one came for me this time.
    “I hate you! I hate you, you fucking bitch!” I screamed.
    I was hoping my mother would hear it, because it was meant for her. I repeatedly screamed this until my lungs gave out and Ben came downstairs to see the chaos I sat in and which I had created. He sat with me and pulled me into his chest as I screamed.
    “I know,” he said. “I know.”
    I wished I could believe his words. In that moment, I chose to believe that he really knew. Because somewhere in his past, I’m sure he knew how horrible our mother could be. He never knew all the things she had done to me. At the same time, I never knew all of what she had done to my brother. So allowing him to console me was the best thing I could get in that moment, because in that moment I had never felt so alone and broken. Maybe he knew that, and maybe that’s why he was consoling me despite his own brokenness. We were broken together, and for once we lived on the same page.
     
    ***
     
    Sitting in the new therapist’s office, I was missing the fake Monet painting that my last therapist had. It was only a distraction, and in this office there were self-help books and canvases with inspirational quotes. For the record, none of it was inspirational. It pissed me off.
    “How do you feel now about your mother’s death? On top of everything else you’re going through?” my therapist asked.
    It was a new therapist, and this was only the second time I had seen her. The first time I saw her was the worst. I had to tell her everything in under an hour. I cried, hiccupped, and ranted through the whole thing. Now she was following up, and I was unsure of what to tell her.
    “Honestly, I want to move past it.”
    “How do you move past something you haven’t dealt with?”
    “I don’t know how to deal with my mother’s death. She’s been dead to me for a long time.”
    “But now it’s real. Now she’s somewhere rotting in the ground, and you’ll never see her again. How does that make you feel?”
    “Fucking great, actually.” I laughed until I began to cry.
    “How do you really feel about your mother?”
    “I hate her so much. She says she loved me in that damn letter but never once did she say that to my face.”
    “Does that make you angry?”
    “Yeah,