The World Never Ended novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The Cashmere Coat

My mother came alone, on Thursday afternoon, in a taxi.

I watched her from the office window.

She stood at the warehouse shutter in the cream coat and white boots, with her bag held in front of her in both hands.

She did not knock.

She stood there for a long time, a fifty-nine-year-old woman looking at a steel door.

Shane came up beside me.

"I'll stay," he said.

"No."

"Cora."

"If she says anything about this room I'll want her to say it to me," I said. "Go and stand by the bunks. If she cries, don't come."

He went.

I opened the door myself.

"Cora," Mom said.

Her eyes went over me, up and down, and stopped at the wristband.

I had left it on.

"Oh, honey," she said. "You're so thin."

"Come in, Sylvia."

She flinched.

I had called her Mom every day of my life, and I had decided, somewhere between the hospital and the school fence, that I would not say the word again until she earned it.

She stepped inside.

"Sit," I said, and pointed to the folding chair.

She sat in her coat with her bag on her knees.

"Your father doesn't know I'm here," she said.

"Good."

"He says you've been poisoned by that man, that Shane. He says you can't tell what's real."

"I can tell exactly what's real," I said. "I lived inside a lie so complete I had to ask a hospital if my own blood was clean."

She put her hand to her mouth.

"It was supposed to be six months," she said.

I waited.

"That's what Dean told us. Six months, so you'd see what it was like to lose everything. Then he'd bring you home, and we'd talk, and you'd say sorry to Audra." Her voice was thin. "And then it was a year, because Audra wasn't ready. And then she was pregnant, I mean, you were, and then it was just easier."

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