To Have and to Hold by Serena Bell

it might have been. The two of them, sitting together somewhere quiet, her pouring her heart out. Him offering his brand of sympathy, which she obviously liked.
    And now all that emotional support and trust, everything they’d built, suddenly gone for her.
    Yeah, they’d both lost something.
    —
    “You should tell him!”
    Linda had cornered Trina in the back of the laundry room, where she was folding a mountain of the girls’ clean clothes.
    “I can’t tell him.”
    “You have to tell him! He has a right to know he asked you and Phoebe to move in.”
    Linda had gotten pregnant with Hunter when she was not too much older than Trina had been with Phoebe, and he was her only child. She could be fierce in protecting him, but this was the first time her ire had ever been focused on Trina. It was daunting. Linda was tall, five eleven or so, and couldn’t hide her emotions to save her life. Put a headband and a few bracelets on her and she’d be Xena with red hair.
    “It wouldn’t change anything if I told him.”
    “It might.”
    “Linda, it wouldn’t. I’ve thought about it. I even read up on amnesia on Google, and there’s no evidence at all that hearing about the past helps recover memories. It’s even possible that dwelling on the past may make it harder to move beyond trauma and get your memories back.”
    Linda looked just as fierce in her disappointment as she had in anger. She’d been the most upset of any of them when Hunter had told the whole family at dinner what the doctor had said. It was the first the girls and Linda had heard of his memory loss, and there had been three very shocked faces around the table.
    Not as shocked, though, as Linda’s face had been when Hunter had told her, over the dinner dishes, that Trina was going to stay another few days and then head to L.A. They’d be there in plenty of time for the start of the school year, so she could help Phoebe with that transition.
    “For a visit?” Linda had asked.
    “Permanently, I hope,” Trina had said, wondering if at some point she’d mean the “I hope” part.
    The unhappiness on Linda’s face had been a perfect reflection of Trina’s own feelings, and Trina’s fondness for her moth—
    But Linda wasn’t Trina’s mother-in-law. Not by a long shot. There was, in fact, no good title for the mother of your ex-boyfriend, was there?
    “I was so happy for him,” Linda said, and Trina realized Hunter’s mother was about to cry. She set down the socks she was rolling and put her arms around the older woman, who hugged her back ferociously. “I liked Dee well enough, but I never thought—I never thought she and Hunter— I just think you and Hunter make such a good pair. And I love you.”
    Oh
. Well, that was nice, and so was the lavender-scented softness of Linda’s hug.
    Gah, Trina was crying, too. As if she’d needed, on top of everything else, to realize that she was losing one more thing. Linda hadn’t been around much this last year, but during her visits, she’d felt like family. Trina had come to think of her as, well, as a mother-in-law, and she had allowed herself to savor that. She missed her own mom so much. By the time she’d passed, Trina had felt secure on her own two feet, but the saying was true: a girl never stopped needing her mother.
    “Are you sure it wouldn’t help?”
    “I don’t want him to ask me to stay because he feels like he has to.”
    Trina said this very quietly against the silver-streaked red cloud of Linda’s hair.
    She knew Hunter, knew how highly he valued doing the right thing, the honorable thing, and she bet if she told him he’d asked her to move in—that he’d all but
promised
her his feelings for her wouldn’t change—he would feel like he had to honor that commitment.
    It would be even worse than his asking her to stick around
for Clara
. That one still stung a little.
    Linda stepped back from their embrace and reached out to touch Trina’s hair. Her eyes were