Our Scars

Thrown Down

48

Thrown Down (Title by Fleetwood Mac)

"Did your father know?"

That was the first question Rianne was confronted with when she walked into the lobby of the 'Peninsula' hotel near Magnificent Mile, where her mother was already waiting for her. It elicited the first eye roll and sigh out of her, one of many more to come, before they had even had a chance to say a proper hello. How could she have thought this was going to go differently?

Rianne wondered how there could still be such an intense competition between her parents concerning who she kept more in touch with, where she spent more time at and which one got more intel on her. It was like she was a little child in a custody war and not an adult, whose parents had split up when she had already been a grown-up.

As Rianne had been in closer contact with her father lately he indeed knew. At least that she had temporarily moved in with Jay and that there had been an 'issue' with Nate. In general she tended to tell her father more. He just took things as simple pieces of information and didn't press her further about them, trusting her to make her own decisions. Or he had long given up on having any influence on her unlike her mother, who never got tired of trying to have one.

Rianne was really glad that Jay had gotten called in for work. So she could ease into this and he didn't have to watch that train-wreck dynamic from the very beginning.

Not five minutes in Rianne was already craving for something to take the edge off. Her mother was able to drain her of all her power and energy in so little time. Making her feel like she either constantly had to hold her ground and watch out for the other woman's jabs at her or try to prove herself. And as she hadn't ever really openly gotten her mother's approval, she had sort of given up on that part, often doing the exact opposite of what she thought her mother wanted, just to spite her. It wasn't at all mature.

Looking perfectly put together as always, not a hair of her neatly plucked eyebrows out of line the classy woman standing in front of her impersonated everything Rianne had been rebelling against all her teenage and adult life.

"I just decided on not moving back in last week," she tried to soften the blow by not answering directly and going in for their usual cheek-kissing-routine.

She expected a lecture on how stupid and financially unwise that was to follow later on.

Elise op den Winkel, who had taken on her maiden-name after the divorce six years ago, was a woman who didn't take shit from anyone, least of all her daughter, on the rare occasions that she remembered she had one. The concept of "butting out" was foreign to her, whenever she found time to meddle. Not that Rianne would have listened, but still. They had never managed to establish a close mother-daughter-relationship and the one they did have, had been put to the test several times.

Her parents had met when her mother had been very young, only 20, her father, Alvarez Bautista Torres Delgado, already in his thirties. Rianne had been born not long after that, her mother turning 22 four months after her birth. There were parts of their romantic history that her parents had always kept quiet about, leaving Rianne to wonder if there was more than met the eye to those beginnings of a whirlwind romance between a much older Argentinian diplomat and a Dutch student. Instead of living the life of a well situated housewife on a diplomat's salary, enjoying all the different countries she got to visit through her husband, Elise had been adamant that this wasn't for her and had somehow managed to get what she wanted instead. A thing Rianne could have found herself admiring her mother for had she not been the one to suffer due to that choice. Elise had followed her dream of being a lawyer, continued her studies right after having her first and only child, building her own career over the years and being very successful doing so. Hence why Rianne had been raised by her paternal grandmother instead of her own mother. Rianne had always felt like she was in her mother's way of being totally free to do whatever she liked.