Unbreak My Heart Read Online Free Page A

Unbreak My Heart
Book: Unbreak My Heart Read Online Free
Author: Teresa Hill
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angry at her mother for most of her life.
    "It was just the two of you? Once you left here?"
    "Yes."
    "You must have been close..."
    "I wouldn't say that." Allie sighed. "We just never quite got it right, you know? The mother /daughter thing. I always thought one day we would, but we didn't, and I let her rob me of all those years with my father."
    "Rob you?"
    "We both acted as if my father didn't even exist. She wouldn't talk about him, except to say that he didn't want us anymore," Allie explained. "Of course, I did what she wanted. I can't blame it all on my mother."
    Janet Bennett painted herself as a frail, wounded woman her whole life, and Allie had always known her biggest responsibility was not to upset her mother. That included not starting any conversations about her father. Not asking any questions. Giving up on the letters, and never trying to see him.
    "Your mother was all you had left, Allie. You were just a little girl. It's natural for you to want to please her."
    "Maybe when I was nine. I'm twenty-four now."
    "You grow up a certain way, expected to do certain things for your family, and it's hard to break those habits. It's hard to stop wanting to please them, hard to do what's right when you know it's going to hurt them."
    "You do things like that for your family, too?"
    "We all have our little eccentricities." He laughed humorlessly. "Eccentricities is a generous word for the things that go on in some families. Don't beat yourself up because you didn't handle your mother's problems as well as you think you should have. She was the one with the problem, Allie."
    "No. It was my life. I let her do this to me."
    "What did she do?"
    "I think the current psychology term would be that she had control issues. She liked having me under her thumb. She was unhappy and the biggest hypochondriac I've ever known. Every time I managed to pull away just a little bit, she came up with these mysterious little problems, vague weaknesses and complaints. It was like she couldn't stand the idea that I might actually be happy. If she wasn't happy, nobody was going to be happy. I feel guilty that I didn't stand up to her more often—especially when it came to my father. Even felt guilty because I didn't want to give up my job and my apartment to care for her in the end. I kept thinking she was willing to do anything to stop me from having a life of my own—even get cancer."
    "Oh, Allie—"
    "I know. It's crazy to even think it. Even crazier to miss her so much now that she's gone."
    "You took care of her? All by yourself? In the end?"
    "For a while. I quit my job. As an accountant," she said with what she thought was only a tad of distaste.
    "You don't like being an accountant?"
    "No." She grimaced. "It's so dull."
    Stephen laughed.
    "I suppose it was a good thing—that I quit, I mean. I should have figured it out long ago. I just... I've always been good with numbers, and accounting is so logical, so predictable. There was a time when that appealed to me." One place in her life where everything made sense. No surprises. No disappointments, just sheer logic. "But I've hated it. All except the last few months, at least."
    "What was different about the last few months?"
    "There was an organization in town that was very helpful to my mother and me when she was sick. A church group, sort of an umbrella organization that provided all sorts of services in town. They had a home health nurse who came once a week and a support group for women battling cancer. They brought my mother hot meals, before I moved back home, that sort of thing.
    "They lived constantly on the verge of financial ruin, lived on sheer faith alone at times." She admired them for their nerve, their renegade do-gooder tactics. "I ended up doing volunteer work for them when I had the time, juggling funds as best I could to keep everything going."
    "And you enjoyed that?"
    "I did. Clients, to me, had always been a bunch of numbers in long rows on a computer screen.
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