Heartbreak Hotel (Editing)

Chapter 55: Evanescing Into Nothingness

Leena's POV

My mother had many secrets. Secrets that she kept from everyone who ever loved her. It would be hard to understand why, but those people were the ones who had hurt her: Sasha, Liana, Grandma, Grandpa, Liyah. All of them she found it hard to speak heart to heart with them, tell them her feelings, because they judged her. Yes, she made many, many mistakes. Yes, she hurt all of us. But she didn't deserve to be treated the way she did. Not if she was willing to make things right.

Which she was.

Some of those secrets were resolved, others were taken to the dead, buried with the pain of her life. I guess that child was one that wasn't fully buried. Well she's not necessarily a child. As I sat on the couch and listened to her she gave us the details an image was painted in my head: She looked a lot like Mom, absolutely stunning with honey- nut colored skin, with green eyes. She was only sixteen, and had spent most of years in Brooklyn being raised by her grandparents on her Daddy side. How she came to be there, they didn't know. The child protector services didn't tell them much. Apparently, the girl, Alana (A-Lah-Na), had gotten arrested for robbing a drugstore with her friends. I didn't know what to think of that, but the girl had been bouncing from foster home to foster home ever since her grandma died, and the family she was with was getting tires of her.

That's how Sasha and Liana ended up with the phone call. Somehow they found out who her mother was and contacted them saying that they had another niece and basically, in a nice way, they said that she needed to come and get her before she ended up in juvenile.

All of this was being told us, but one question still was not answered: Why didn't mother tell us about her if she knew she had her? Liyah looked like her whole entire world had just stopped. I wasn't even sure if she heard anything that was being said. Her expression hadn't changed over the past hour-or maybe it was two hours. I wasn't sure of that either.

"So when..." I began after she had ran out of things to say. " will we be able to meet her?"

Sasha shrugged her left shoulder with a sigh. " I don't know, we're going by your busy schedule."

That was true. We had just gotten back from New York the day before and was going to be back in Los Angeles for a show the next week. Plus, we had one more video to make and a long line of interviews coming up. "We'd have to clear a spot." I said, mostly to myself. I glanced at Liyah for a reaction but there still wasn't one, her hazel brown eyes almost looked dead.

"It will have to be soon, you guys." Liana said. "They won't her hold her in that foster home that long, and we have to remember that this girl is our family."

I nodded my head showing that I understood.

"Why didn't she tell us?" Liyah's voice was hoarse when she finally spoke. "I mean..."

Sasha and Liana exchanged glances. "She might have told one of you," Sasha answered. " in those letters she wrote."

"She didn't tell me that, I read every one of those letters she sent me."

"And Aaliyah didn't read any of them." Liana's eyes went from me to her. "Did you?"

Liyah shook her head slowly. "No."

"Do you even have them?" I asked her.

"Yes,"

"Then why haven't you read any of them?" I remember her just throwing those letters off to the side anytime Liana handed her one. She never read them, she never even opened them. Little did she know, those letters held the answer to every question that she ever had. She was just being stubborn.