Tru Love by Rian Kelley

“I never thought of that,” she says, and then carries on, thoughtfully, “I suppose I could do that. Other people have done it, I’m sure.”
                  “Since when do you need to be a follower?” Genny challenges.
                  “You’re right. I’ve never followed anyone in my life.” A frown pinches her lips together. She picks up the letter she was holding earlier and gazes at the scrawled words. “But maybe I should have, once or twice,” she concedes. “Sometimes a woman needs to follow. Maybe it’s a fifty-fifty thing, when a man’s involved.”
                  Genny pulls the letter from her mother’s fingers. Her father used a black, felt-tipped pen to write a last love letter to her mother. In it, he suggested that Genevieve bend a little. That if she met him in New York, where he was playing, then he would know that her heart was at least as invested as his. Before signing his name, he wrote, ‘Remember Rome and Paris and London?”
                  “Did dad follow you?”
                  “In the off season,” her mother admits. She sighs heavily. “I was approaching the end of my modeling career then. Any day, someone somewhere would decide they no longer wanted me. That’s how tenuous the business is. There’s never anything like retirement planning, or even the decency of a pink slip. Just a lot of phone calls never returned. Cancellations. Zero bookings.” She stares intently at Genny. “I was afraid to stop, afraid to turn down a job. I was thirty-one years old, you were four.” A softness turns her lips into a beautiful bow. “I brought you with me everywhere. You spoke better French than I did.”
                  “But you didn’t have time for dad?”
                  “No. It was a mistake,” her mom admits.
                  “So you didn’t meet him in New York?”
                  “No.” She flattens her hands against the table and stares at them. “The letter came with a ring. Neither one of us were big on marriage, but. . .he wanted to show his sincerity.” She folds her hands into fists and places them in her lap. “I sent the ring back. We didn’t talk again for a while and then I received paperwork from an attorney, describing a very fair custody agreement.” Her eyes find Genny’s. “He’s a good father, honey. He gave up on me, but never on you.”
    “I know.” Genny slides her fingers over the pile of photos her mother was sorting earlier. She knows she saw an image of her father, younger, in full uniform and tapping a bat against a cleat. He was smiling into the camera, like he was very fond of the person snapping the shot. She finds it and holds it up. “Did you take this?”
    Her mother nods. “Home game against St. Louis. April nineteen-ninety-five. You weren’t one yet and I had you strapped to my chest. You kept putting your hand in front of the lens, trying to grab it.” Her mother laughs at the memory but then says quite seriously, “You had us both from your first breath.”
                  Genny turns the photo over and starts running the glue stick over the back.
                  “You never told me any of this stuff before,” she notes. “Just how you guys met. Why you guys never got married. Why you couldn’t stay together. But none of the memories.”
                  “They hurt,” her mother admits.

 
                 
     
    Chapter Eleven
                  By ten-thirty that morning, Genny realizes that Hunter has a severe case of amnesia. Selective amnesia. He seems to remember everyone else just fine and has no problem following his usual schedule, arriving on time to his classes. Genny knows this because she spent the morning looking for him, trying to talk to him, to get him to acknowledge her. She’s on her way to calculus, late, after following