Chapter 0318
We really did look alike.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“She had many demons. Addictions that stole her youth.” Rosa said. Turning the phone toward herself, she frowned sadly at it. “By the time we become friends, she’d moved passed all that. But the damage to her body had already been done. She worked hard to turn her life around, but her past still caught up to
her.”
“The news says she died from an overdose,” Logan sold.
Rosa lifted her gaze and glared at him. “She died because her liver failed. She’d been clean for years. She was on a waiting list for a transplant, but she kept insisting others go ahead of her. That’s how she was, always putting others first. Even when the doctors told her, she had such little time left.
“She was selfless,” I said.
“When I knew her, yes,” Rosa said. “And so filled with regret. Ever she talked about the two girls she loved but didn’t know. Once, I asked her to reconnect. She admitted she didn’t know where to begin. They changed everything about you, she said. Even your names.”
“My name is Hazel,” I told her.
“Nice to finally meet you, Hazel,” Rosa said, her sad smile returning.
I looked down at the headstone. “It doesn’t say anything here.” Typically headstones would give some kind of indication about the person’s life. Mother or Friend. Something to prove they were loved when -they had been alive.
“There wasn’t a lot of money for extra carvings,” Rosa said. “And I’m not sure what she would have wanted. Even with the doctors‘ insistence, I think she thought she had more time.”
What a tragedy.
Logan placed his hand on the small of my back, and I leaned into him. “What do you want it to say?” he asked me.
“You are her daughter. You should decide in her stead, Rosa agreed.
It was a tall order. I didn’t know Angela Clives in life. I barely knew her in death.
Yet she was still my mother. And she had never forgotten me, even if circumstances made it impossible
for her to reach me.
Perhaps it was imagined, but I felt a connection to her. To this place. Even to this woman Rosa who had known her well, who was likely caring for this grave.
“I think… I want it to say…” I gave a moment’s more thought, then decided. “Remembered.”
“I like that,” Rosa said at once. “She would too. I was there at the end. She didn’t cry, not until the last moments. ‘Lord, protect my girls,‘ she said. ‘Even if they never know me.”
ΤΗ
I tried to imagine it, a woman who looked like me, lying on a hospital bed, knowing she was about to die.
Chapter 0318
She had nothing on her mind or in her heart but the cam of the two girls she was forced to surrender.
“She wasn’t a woman without flaws,” Rosa said. “She’d be the first to admit that she had plenty. But she had a big heart. A kind soul. She deserved so much more than she was given.”
“I won’t forget her,” I say. “I’ll keep her alive.”
Rosa smiled wider, even as her own tears began to fall “I’d like to help you with that. If you’d allow me, I would tell you stories… I have so many pictures…”
I turned to look at this woman, Rosa, my new friend. “I’d like that,” I said.
Logan’s grandfather had brought up my mother in hopes to tarnish me and wear down my resolve.
He had no idea that he did the exact opposite.
I felt stronger now, connected to a past I didn’t know.
And I was ready to take Mr. Hatfield Senior down once and for all.
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