44. You Got Out

Leonie

Back in Osburn, the next two weeks didn’t feel real. We spent our mornings wrapped up in a mess of limbs. Dom normally made breakfast, then we’d go for a walk, hand in hand. I would make lunch, he’d work and I would mark and then we’d make dinner together. One thing I had requested from the Castillo home was my father’s cookbook and we made our way through it, rating them on sticky notes and placing them in the precious pages.

Then we’d fuck all night long. Sometimes we’d fuck after lunch, or breakfast, or our walk, or between each paper I marked. Sometimes during meals.

He started to scour through the security footage of my home leading up to my dad’s death, using facial recognition to check who had been on the grounds.

We found the clip of my dad catching us by the pool in the early hours, that night we had gone swimming at 4 am, the night we smoked out on my patio.

One clip of him slipping off the trellis that led to my bedroom made us wheeze so much that I saved it to my phone.

All the while, there was a niggling feeling that it was all about to crash down once Issy was told.

But there was someone I wanted to tell first.

Coalhaven was a once-in-a-country kind of facility. Ivan and Derek’s wives found it while Mum was hospitalised and were now large annual donors. The gala presented money towards the business each summer and I was always the one to be photographed with the large cheque. They meant it in the most supportive of ways, but it only made me cringe.

I couldn’t get away from Mum’s illness.

The building itself was large, bigger than our family home, but nowhere near as grand. I hadn’t been there since the winter, and in the season that had passed, the grounds had once again flourished with bushes of bright flowers and trees of dark green leaves. The crunchy conkers littered the floor and always reminded me of playing at break time in school.

But when I saw Mum sitting on the bench overlooking the lake with a colouring book, I knew in comparison to my peers, I had aged thirty years instead of twenty since then. She had aged forty.

Her dark hair had sprinkles of silver in it, thick in places like chunky highlights. The mother I had known ten years ago would have despised it.

But this mother didn’t care.

She was far more alert than the last time I had seen her back when I was still with Jared. She looked up at our footsteps as they crunched on the gravel path up to where she sat.

And her eyes narrowed on our intertwined hands.

“Mum,” I said softly, but she didn’t look up. She just continued to stare. “Mum, it’s me.”

I bent down to her eye level as Dom’s hand tightened around mine.

“Dominic,” she said with a smile up at him. “How nice to see you again.”

Again? She wouldn’t have seen him in years. My guard heightened. There were times she was alert and cruel, times she was spaced out and loving and all the times in between.

“You too, Aunty Elena,” he replied without missing a beat.

“El,” she asserted. “Aunty El.” She shuffled further up the bench and tapped where she had sat, her eyes only on Dom. “You can sit. You’re a good omen.”

I blinked an eye roll.

“You are holding its hand,” she said, squinting as Dom sat and pulled me onto his knee. “Now it’s sitting on your lap.”

“She is, yeah,” Dom said. Instead of holding my hand, he rubbed circles on my back. “We’re together, Aunt El.”

“Together,” she parroted. “She has a boyfriend, Dominic. She’s bad news.”

“She does have a boyfriend,” Dom said patiently, looking up at me. “Me.”

“No. Another boyfriend. That boy with the creepy smile and the patronising voice.”

Dom cocked a brow at me, trying to hide his laughter. “I know the one.”

“See? She’s a cheat just like her father,” she said and turned back to her colouring book. Each stroke of the felt tip pen was rough and hard. Her work had been neat up until our arrival. Now, she had no issue drawing outside of the lines. “Stay well away, Dominic. You deserve better.”

Just like her father.She’d made the claims over and over, but there had never been any proof. When it first slipped from her lips eight years ago, I had searched through as much as I could without returning to the house. I’d asked Derek and Julia, but they had never heard of anything so ridiculous.

Her paranoia often brought the two of us to tears.

“Mum, I’m not with Jared anymore. I’m with Dom.”

“Exactly. Flavour of the month is all you are, Dom. You’re too good for her. Just like Luís, moving on to the next.”

“Mum—”

“Aunt El,” Dom started, his voice gentle as he took her hand to stop her angry colouring, “I’ve loved Leonie for ten years — longer, even. If anything, she is too good for me. She’s a credit to you, Elena.”

Her back straightened and she dropped the pen. It rolled off the paper and onto the floor at her feet. “Yes, well, we did raise her well.”

“Remember last time I told you she was training to be a lecturer?”

My brows lowered. Last time? And that ‘last time’ would have to be pretty recent.

She nodded slowly, but her voice had bite, “Yes, of course I do.”

“And what did you say?” he prodded, his hand under my top, those circles warm in my skin.

“I said she was always too good for our world.”

“And that she got out.”

“She got out,” she repeated, her eyes glassy as she stared out at the lake, “but then she didn’t come back.”

“I’m here now,” I said, reaching to put my hand over Dom’s.

“Yes,” she said, pulling her eyes away from the water. “You got out, but you’re here now.”