Total pages in book: 148
Estimated words: 135517 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 542(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135517 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 542(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
“What’re you talking about, Mom? What was a setup?”
“This whole thing, everything. It was all a setup.” Being here in front of her, I saw that the panic in her voice was nothing compared to the fear in her eyes.
My mom has this habit of pacing back and forth, waving her arms around frantically when she’s stressed. She was doing that now only at warped speed. For a minute, I almost thought she was on something, but this wasn’t that look. I know what mom looks like high, and this wasn’t it.
She kept rambling about lies and conspiracies and blaming herself for believing the wrong people, and I still didn’t know what she was talking about. I was too tired and, frankly, freaked out myself to have the patience she obviously needed.
“You’re not making any sense, Mom. Now stop pacing and tell me what the hell is going on.”
“Your marriage, your wife, her family, the whole thing, they set you up, they lied to everyone.” I took a minute to process what she was saying, but her words seemed to be going in one ear and out the other.
I still wasn’t sure what she was trying to say. I suspected that there was something shady going on, but that’s as far as I got in my thinking because I had no proof other than the sketchy thoughts I’d get here and there during detox.
“Mom, I know you don’t like Janie, that you two had some sort of falling out while I was high off my ass, but that’s no reason to accuse her and her family of whatever it is that you’re implying, especially when there’s no proof to back it up.”
“Listen to me.” Mom grabbed me by the shoulders and looked up at me from her much shorter height. “She never loved you; this whole thing is just crazy, and it’s freaking me out. These people are not human.”
Uh-uh, if this isn’t drugs, then what the hell has gotten into her? No, that’s not fair. Before she got hooked on drugs, she was a bit erratic in nature, but I’d somehow blocked those years out after everything that came after, so this was the first time I saw a reminder of the way she used to be.
Mom gets frazzled easily, always did. The world may see her as the well-to-do mother of a pop star, but before she became that, she was just another teenage mom who’d gone off the rails for a few years before my fame threw her into the spotlight.
No one ever thinks about the fact that there’s no training for anyone in her position, neither do they think about the fact that someone who’s not fond of making the best decisions in life is now given the keys to the city, so to speak. I’m not sure what makes them think that she’d become a neurosurgeon all of a sudden just because her son is Ryder Sumner.
I say all of that to say that most things that come out of mom’s mouth should be taken with a grain of salt. “Do you have proof of what you’re saying? And what exactly is it that you’re saying? Who set me up with what?” She took my hand and dragged me over to the table where she had a mountain of papers and folders laid out.
“Look, someone sent me these. At first, I thought it was a hoax. That’s why I didn’t say anything to you right away. But I had it checked out. Elena never cheated on you on that trip, and none of the other things that they said were true.” It took a second for the weight of her words to sink into my gut, and then I fell back against the counter in shock.
My body felt as if all the wind had been knocked out of me, and I just stared at her in disbelief. Those few words spoken in her anger rocked my whole existence and made a mockery of the last five years of my life. I wanted to doubt her; I needed to for my own sanity.
“What the hell are you saying, Mom?” My voice shook with nerves and thinly restrained anger. I wanted her to grin, to crack a smile, and tell me she was kidding. Then I could tell her what a poor joke it was, call her out on her shit, and move on to what she really called me here for.
But even as I thought it, as my mind tried to find any reason for her to tell me this messed up shit, I knew that she believed what she was saying. She’d learned a long time ago not to lie to me, and I knew very well that she wouldn’t play around like that when it came to Elena. ‘Tell me!”