Beautifully Knight (Jordan Knight Fanfic, Liadan #5)

Pressure and Press Conferences

-NATE-

"Blouse and skirt or dress?"

Plink. Plop. Plink. Plop. Plink!

The rhythmic repetition of the leaky faucet dripping droplets into the sink full of water and shaving cream before me served as a subconscious metronome to keep my shaky hand moving a sharp blade across my face in a smooth direction while my mind meandered elsewhere.

If it was any other day, I wouldn't care that the scraggly dark hair darting my cheeks made me look a werewolf. After weeks of living in a hospital, my appearance was at the very bottom of my list of concerns. All I cared about was my son. From the time I woke up every morning until my body forced to fall asleep at night, I was focused on making sure that Mattie was okay—or as okay as any twelve year old boy who'd survived a drowning attempt could be. More than once doctors had remarked that we were "lucky". For children ages to five to fourteen drowning was second only to car crashes for cause of death. If he'd remained in the water for just seconds longer than when Eli had found and resuscitated him, he'd have suffered from brain damage. If his spine had crashed into the rocks in the river just a quarter of an inch above where it had, his current leg weakness would've been permanent.

If. If. If.

I could go around and around and around in my head over and over of all the things that could've gone so much worse. And all the things that could've gone better.

I'd told Michelle a million times not to do that.

She shouldn't dwell on the fact that Mattie hadn't wanted to leave the house that morning. She shouldn't blame herself for the fact that she'd been busy wedding planning when he'd lingered in the kitchen the night before for minutes after his siblings had run off to play and I'd locked myself in my office to perfect my powerpoint slides for my Crescendo presentation. It wasn't her fault. She wasn't a bad mother. Quite the opposite, she was freakin' superwoman in my eyes and the kids' eyes. Ruminating would get us nowhere.

And yet as easy as it was for me to tell her that, I couldn't stop myself from doing it. From wondering why Red and Eli and my own brother and father were somehow more in tune with my kids than I was. Why Red knew about the bullies and I didn't. Why James talked to Logan about his feelings in all this when I couldn't get a peep out of him. Why Dad's advice to Nick on the cautions of teenage love somehow went over better than mine. And why Mattie shared his fears of never being able to walk again with Eli and not me.

I told myself it wasn't about me. It wasn't a knock on my parenting or a reflection that my kids didn't love me. Quite the opposite, they had a big circle of people who they trusted because of my parenting and love for them. Therefore, they could reach out to many loving adults in their lives to steer them right from wrong and tell them all the same things I'd tell them. They could feel independent all the while knowing that I loved them. That was the rational answer. But my feelings weren't rational and that mixture of unresolved emotions stemming from Mattie's attack certainly were not rational.

All I wanted to do was close my eyes and wake up again on the morning before all this happened and have a do-over, but I couldn't. Instead, I had to wake up everyday in my current reality and find a way to navigate life. Today was no different. It was about my son. And for him, I knew I needed to pull myself together and put on a happy, celebratory face, even if I didn't feel like it.

The buzz of my phone vibrating on the countertop next to me temporarily pulled my gaze from the mirror and over to its lit up screen to find a new notice of an email with a subject line of checking in from Sarah Tyler Petrowski. I sat aside to my razor to tap on the popup and skim over the message: