Page 73 of Cruel Kiss

"Mom."

"That man isn't pretending, Calista." She sets the plate down in the rack. "He didn't do a single thing tonight for my benefit. Charming men look at you to see if their shtick is working. He was just—there. Cutting the chicken. Filling the wine. He didn't need me to notice him." She looks at me. "The only one at that table pretending was you."

"I wasn't pretending anything!"

"Yes, you were. You were pretending you weren't watching him the whole time."

"I was watching him because—" I stop. Because what? Because I didn't trust him around my mother? Because I was waiting for the mask to slip. "… It's complicated."

"It's not, though." She picks up her wine and finishes it. "It's the least complicated thing I've seen you have in a decade. You justdon't want it to be simple, because if it's simple, then you have to do something about it."

"I think you're getting a little ahead of yourself, Mama," I scold. "You've barely known him for three hours."

"I knew your husband for ten years," she retorts. "I sat at his table, too. I watched him roll his eyes at you when he thought I couldn't see. I watched him correct you in front of me, belittle you, disregard you. I never said anything, because you never asked, and because a mother who says something gets to watch her daughter defend the man for another five years." She sets the glass in the sink. "I'm saying something now, because you asked me here on purpose, whether you'll admit it or not. That man up there washing my grandbabies has never once made you smaller. Has he?"

I don't have anything to say to that.

Nodding, she kisses my cheek. "That's what I thought. I'm going to go say goodnight to the kids and then I'm going to drive home and leave you two to whatever this is. You don't have to tell me what it is. You don't even have to know yet." She pats my face with nothing but love. "But stop pretending, baby. You're bad at it. You always were. It's why I never worried about you lying to me."

She goes up. I hear her voice mix with the kids', the bath-time chaos, Ronan's answers. I stand at the sink with my hands in the water.

She leaves shortly afterward. She hugs Ronan at the door, a real one this time, and says something to him quiet that I don't catch, and he nods, serious. Then she's gone into the dark. It's just us and the tucked-in kids and the house settling all around.

"Your mother," Ronan says, "is a formidable woman."

"She liked you."

"She threatened me at the door."

"That's how I know I'm right." I lean against the counter. "What'd she say?"

"That's between me and her." He picks up his briefcase from where it leans by the stairs, and something crosses his face when he does. "Goodnight, Ms. Meadows."

"Goodnight."

He goes up. I hear his door close, one down from mine.

I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and have the argument with myself, the one I always have, the one where I line up the receipts on one side and the man who cut Isabella's chicken on the other and try to make them balance.

They don't balance. They never balance. That's the whole problem.

At some point, I get up. I don't get water, or even pretend to. I slip down the hall in his shirt and step directly on the creaky board on purpose.

"You're loud tonight."

"Shut up."

I open the door. He's sitting up against the headboard in the dark, awake.

"Do we need to go over the rules?"

He shakes his head.

"That's what I thought."

I close the door behind me.

It starts the way it always starts, quick and quiet and mean, both of us keeping to the terms, pretending this is just the body sorting out what the day couldn't.