AYLA
Whoever said loving family and choosing family had never met a family like mine.
God really looked at all the mothers in the world, and what He could give me was Jemma.
I thought loving her would be easy.
I thought forgiving her was going to be a kiss to the air.
Wrong.
Forgiving would have been easy if there was something to forgive. With Jemma, there wasn't.
What existed between us was a vacuum. A vacuum I had no idea I didn't have the ability to fill.
I'd tried.
Over the past months that I'd visited, I'd tried to hold her hand, to smile, to act like nothing else could matter when I was with her.
But I was drained.
Because there was the part of me that wished she was dead and Dad was alive.
The part of me that wished she'd checked up.
The part of me that wished he hadn't sent those men to hunt Dad and me when I was seven because she'd been too stoned to think well.
I shut my eyes, exhaled inside the car, and shut the door back.
I wasn't ready to go in yet.
