Reborn: I Let My Mother Suffer the Price of Her Favoritism novel · Chapter 18 of 32

Chapter 18: Sign Here

By eight o'clock Everett had come, and the deputy had come, and the clinic's director had come in her slippers.

None of it mattered.

"Your mother is an adult on a voluntary patient's visitor list," the director said, gently and firmly. "I can't keep her out of the building. I can only supervise."

"There's an order," Everett said. "She can't go near my wife."

"Then your wife stays away from the day room," said the deputy. "It's the only way to keep it clean."

I looked at Sloane.

She had come out into the hall in a clinic robe and paper slippers, with her hair wet from the shower.

She looked clear-eyed and pale and calm.

"Let her come, Callie," she said.

"No."

"I need to ask her something."

"You don't need to ask her anything. We have the notebook."

"I want to hear it from her face," Sloane said. "Just five minutes. I'll be in the glass room. The nurse will be next to me."

I should have said no again.

I have thought about that every day since.

But she had stood up to our mother in a cream-colored room full of church women, and I had told myself I would never again make Sloane's choices for her.

"Five minutes," I said. "I'll be in the hall."

"You'll be behind the glass," the deputy said. "Where she can't see you."

The day room had a long window onto the corridor, and a sofa, and a table with a box of tissues.

I stood at the window with Everett's arm around me.

My mother came in carrying a brown paper bag, in her trench coat and her pearls and her ankle monitor.

She did not look at the glass.

She set the bag down on the table and opened her arms.

Sloane did not walk into them.

She sat on the sofa with her hands folded in her lap, and my mother sat down next to her and took both of those hands.

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