Time heals all wounds. When you have the power to rewind it, you begin to wonder whether it's too much responsibility for one person to hold.
*****
Sometimes, walking away is the sca...
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"See, I don't trust this Lyra girl," Iris' mom confessed, twirling her glass of rosé like the sommelier she enjoyed acting like. "I don't know, baby. There's something . . . off about her. I can't pinpoint exactly what it is, but I don't think she brings out the best in you." She sipped her wine, lips delicately puckering around the mouth of the glass. "I know people. It's my job to read them. She just screams troubled and trouble to me."
That almost made Iris giggle and correct her, although she restrained herself. Mischa Fox was many things, but she wasn't a therapist or a counselor, and she knew people because she charged them enough to learn all about their likes and dislikes, their dreams and worst case scenarios.
She enjoyed drinking and the finer things in life—she could certainly afford them, thanks to a successful career as the CEO of a wedding planning agency, endorsed by various celebrities—but her knowledge didn't run as deep as she believed it to. She knew what tasted good—all wines, especially whites, and most cocktails that didn't include egg whites, so no whisky sours, thank you very much—and what didn't, and wasn't overly worried about undertones.
Iris didn't mind, though; it was that money that was paying for her college tuition and had allowed her to live more than just comfortably, however undeserving of it she found herself to be. She was grateful to have grown up with the opportunities that she had, but, most of all, her gratitude was directed towards her mom having an occupation that kept her happy and distracted whenever Iris couldn't be there for her.
So, when Iris realized they had to play opposite roles for once in their lives and she could no longer act like the parent (when she shouldn't have ever had to do, in retrospect; she was the child, her mom was the adult), she just had to seek refuge in the one place she knew how to call home—wherever her mom was.
The dangerous thing about turning other human beings into your home was how fickle and unpredictable they were, which could leave you stranded without warning, and Iris suspected it was why she hadn't ever found the courage to put Lyra through it.
Her mom had always been more constant, easier to predict, and a child's bond with their mother was unlike any other—blood or not, that was the person who deemed you worthy or not of salvation. That was the person who might not have birthed you, but had given you a home nevertheless—not just a physical one, with a wall, windows, and a roof, but had enveloped you in her arms when you were at your lowest. When you were shipwrecked.
"She's not that bad," Iris argued, knowing full well her descriptions of Lyra in this timeline weren't painting her in the best light, not like she would do originally. Though her mom had hardly been Lyra's biggest fan, she'd always been thoughtful enough to keep the biting comments to herself, especially following her death, mostly because her relationship with Iris, however it had ended, had been generally friendlier and more digestible. "We're just going through a rough patch."
