Together Apart | ✓

|Chapter XLIV|

We try to hide our feelings but we forgot that our eyes speak

Chapter 44: Everything was fine before

"Renée!" I heard the faintest sound of my name. I continued walking in the dark using my phone as a flashlight. It was on the verge on dying and I would eventually need to go back inside. I knew I would become sick but I couldn't be in the same room as that women.

"Renée. Where are you?"

"Here." I soon heard footsteps behind me. I turned and a bright flashlight shone on my face. "Ugh. Colton, are you trying to make me even more blind?"

"Can you save your rhetorical questions for another time. It's -minus ten degrees. C'mon let's go back inside."

"No. I'd rather die out here in the cold. I'm sure that would make her really happy, wouldn't it?" I carried on walking in the thick sheets of snow.

"She didn't mean that."

"How do you know that? If she really didn't mean it then she would've taken her words back or at least apologise."

He stayed quiet for a while leaving the sound of the winter wind to fill the air. It was most probably the longest he'd kept his mouth shut.

If my grandmother really loved me, she wouldn't have implied that my existence was an inconvenience. You'd think you know someone until they turn into a whole different person. She gave me false love which she used to hide the hate she had for me and my mom. Dad had a play in all of this but my grandmother was acting like a shrew, blaming my mother as if she was some home wrecker.

"I don't even know who she is anymore."

"It's not a surprise really. She was bound to be this way. I just didn't expect it to be this bad."

"What do you mean?"

"Grandma's not exactly sane anymore." He said scratching the back of his head.

"Really? I didn't notice."

"Seriously, Renée. She's not well." His words had no humour letting me notice that he wasn't messing with me. "She's ill."

"She looks perfectly fine to me."

He sighed. "She has Alzheimer's."

I pauses. "How bad?"

"Really bad. She can't control what her mind thinks or does." He said breathlessly. "Grandpa thought he could handle it but she's acting like her old self. It's as if she went back in time and doesn't remember us or simple things. She's mostly been b*tching about your mom."

It was starting to make sense. Her forgetting Colton's name should've been a sign but I thought it was just old age. Or the fact that she had non stop mood swings, got the recipes mixed up.

"For how long?"

"Almost two years."

"Two years? Why am I only finding out now?"

"We didn't want you to find—"

"So I'm the only one who didn't know. What else are you not telling me? What else? Is there a long lost cousin I don't know about? Did my parents know?"

"Yes."

"So the vacation was an excuse just to not show up." He nodded. I really was naive. How was I not able to notice any of this? All this time I've thought that my family was living happily when there was tension within everyone. I didn't know that my grandmother tried to kill me. I didn't know that she had a Alzheimer's. But it didn't make a difference because before she was ruthless and she still is.