A/N: Hey, hope y'all had a good Christmas. Sans COVID exposure. (Long story, but I'm vaxxed and boostered up, and I don't have any symptoms yet, so... *fingers crossed*) Here's today's update. It's a little on the shortish side, but I'm fond of it. TW for references to child sexual & physical abuse.

3. Full of Woe

. . .

And just like that, it hit her: after fifty-four years, she finally felt loved enough, safe enough, to be angry with her mother. To call her out on all her bullshit. It flooded her with such an overwhelming sense of relief and freedom, tears filled her eyes.

"The things you did to me . . . the— the beatings, the sexual abuse, the way you let grown men take advantage of me. I was a little girl, Mom. I thought I deserved it. Conceived by a monster, I mean I must have, right? So I built my whole life around making it up to you, and then you up and disappear for good? Without even a goodbye? Was that your plan all along, to screw me up as much as you possibly could, do the maximum damage, then leave me? Did you just want me to be as miserable as you were? I still— I just don't understand."

When it was she had started pacing, Olivia couldn't say, but she looked up in surprise to find herself closer to the adjacent headstone, a Roland Weaver who had died at the ripe old age of eighty-six. She wished that was whom she'd come to see. Mister Weaver had probably never gone on a drinking binge and left his first-grader to fend for herself for days on end, or taken his latest conquest back to the bedroom after discovering him sexually abusing his fifteen-year-old daughter. He'd probably never tried to kill her with a broken vodka bottle, or drunk dialed her in the middle of the night, cursing and sobbing about how she had abandoned him. He was probably a good dad whose kids loved him enough to buy that marker with his laser-etched photo in the center.

Olivia turned back abruptly to her Beloved Mother, absently scooping up the flowers she had placed on top of the stone and, out of habit, almost bringing them in for a sniff. She held them away at the last second, feeling somehow betrayed. Rejected. That was it, she felt rejected.

"And I can't even get any answers from you now, because you're dead," she sighed, making a flippant gesture with the bouquet. "I used to think . . . I used to think that when I got older, we might be able to have a real relationship. That you might stop hating me when I wasn't so young and such a reminder of what you could've been if he hadn't raped you, and I wasn't born. But that was never going to happen, was it? You were so goddamned . . . so goddamned poisoned—up here, in your mind—you couldn't even see that I was hurting just as much as you were. The only difference was, I put all my pain aside to take care of you, to be a good daughter so you would love me. Jesus Christ, why couldn't you just love me?"

Unaware of what she was doing until it was too late, Olivia grabbed a handful of the dahlias and anemones and yanked them from their stems, crushing them in her fist. "You saw what he was doing to me, and you did nothing! How could you let that happen, after what he did to you? How could you go screw someone who had just assaulted your child?" With each angry outburst, she tore apart the flowers, flinging the debris onto Serena's grave like she was spitting it out, or casting a curse. "How could you attack me like that? Do those things to my . . . my little body? It hurt to pee for days after you used your knee on me. You branded my chest with your fingernails just like Lewis with that fucking cigarette. Eight years old! You— you monster!"

Octave by octave, her voice rose until the last few notes were on full blast. She couldn't remember the last time she'd screamed at someone like that. It felt exhilarating, as if she could reach down into the earth with her bare hands, grab Serena by the soul, and shake her as ferociously as she had shaken Olivia during so many of their past arguments. She could reach straight down into hell itself, and do it. (There's no such place as Heaven, Serena had said when Olivia asked if that's where her daddy was. But there is a Hell, and that's where you're going if you ever mention him again.)

That was exactly what she was going to do, plunge her fists into the juvenile spring grass, the rich
(So different, so)
dark soil, past the crust and the mantle, past the liquid core and into the solid crystalline center, hot as the sun, hot as Hell, hot as the blood coursing through Olivia's veins, and unearth Serena from that deep dark place she'd run away to, leaving Olivia far behind.

But the second she hit her knees, Amanda was there, brushing the clumps of grass and dirt from her fists, pulling her into a tight, rocking embrace, shushing her horrible bitter cries. She struggled at first, convinced it was Serena trying to tug her back down into Hell. The ultimate payback. "Shh, hey, it's me," Amanda said, catching the arm that flailed free, tucking it to Olivia's side. "You're safe, I got you. Shh, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have made you come here. It was too soon."

"I didn't come here because you made me," Olivia said indignantly, though the tears tempered her frustration. She didn't want to take out her anger at Serena on her wife. That was the last thing she wanted, today of all days. Letting herself go limp, she leaned into the shelter of Amanda's arms, only slightly ashamed that she wanted to curl up there like one of their children. She had, on occasion or two, done just that. "How could it be too soon? She's been gone for twenty-two years. I let her get away with so much for so long . . . "

"I meant too soon after Giacomo and that whole cluster." Amanda pressed her lips to the top of Olivia's head, murmuring into her hair as she stroked it. "Those memories you got back were pretty traumatic, even if they did happen a long time ago. I knew you were having a hard time with it. The other night with the kids, the weight loss, the, um— the other stuff. I thought this would help, but I pushed too much, and I'm sorry."

Olivia stiffened a little at the mention of her emotional meltdown in front of the children. She tried so hard to keep her trauma and its effects as far away from her kids as possible, and any slip, no matter how small—even as small as crying over a dead fictional spider—felt catastrophic. She remembered well the distress she used to feel while watching her mother, drunk of course, sobbing over something as minor as no instant coffee in the can or her name misspelled in the newspaper.

Her children were never supposed to know that fear. And now they did.

"What other stuff?" she asked, swiping the heel of her palm under her nose. She hoped to skirt the weight-loss topic altogether. It wasn't really intentional, but her slacks had started to get loose again. Today, she was wearing a pair of jeans she hadn't fit into since she and Amanda first started dating. On her feet were the K-Swiss classics she had borrowed during the pregnancy when Amanda's feet were too swollen to get them on, and had yet to return. And she hadn't exactly worn the cable knit sweater with the horizontal sailor stripes to give the illusion of a fuller figure—she wasn't skinny, after all—though she had been relieved when her wife deemed her "scrumdiddlyumptious" in the ensemble.

(They had switched to reading the kids Roald Dahl, after the E.B. White fiasco.)

But despite the colorful wording for Olivia's normally voluptuous curves, it seemed she hadn't completely pulled the wool over her wife's eyes after all. If she didn't know better, she'd swear Amanda had installed a scale under her side of the mattress.

"Huh? Oh, um. You know, your hypervigilance has kinda gone up, and I don't think you're sleeping as well." Amanda cleared her throat a bit gruffly, as if she were going to insert an accusation or curse between rumblings. Coughliarcough. "That kind of thing. Did I mention the weight loss?"

She was deflecting from whatever lie she'd just told, but Olivia couldn't call her on it without admitting she was right about everything else she'd noticed—Olivia was practically jumping out of her skin at loud noises as of late; waking from bad dreams had become a nightly occurrence; and Amanda had seen her in a lot less than the jeans and sweater recently, so denying a change in size would be about as obvious a lie as hacking up an answer.

They would just have to call a truce and let each other off the hook. For now.

"Well, it has been a lot to take in," she said, turning her face up to find Amanda watching her intently. It had been disconcerting at first, having those china blue eyes always focused on her—"What do you mean, 'no comment?'" she'd asked Fin, after he lifted both eyebrows and laughed when she questioned why the new blonde detective kept staring at her, even if her back was turned—but now Olivia didn't know who she would be without that vigilant gaze watching over her, seeing her more clearly and more fully than anyone ever had. "You're right. I've been . . . struggling with it. But you didn't force me into this, I came here of my own free will."

Taking a quick glance at Serena's grave, she was startled by the sight of the bouquet she'd spent hours pre-ordering online, searching until she found a local shop with just the right one. Now it was mulch, very expensive mulch, the dahlias' florets scattered overtop the grave like the burgundy tongues of a thousand small flames, the single black eyes of the anemones staring up accusingly. The petals were dispersed among the wreckage like the plucked wings of white moths. Jesus, had she really done all that? Were those gouges in the earth really made by her hands?

The dirt under her fingernails and the green stains on her skin and jeans left little room for doubt. She couldn't remember the last time she'd ripped something apart like that with her bare hands. Maybe she never had—until today. "I came here . . . I came here to tell her I'm done. No more keeping her secrets, no more shame. No more believing that I'm some kind of mistake or abomination because she was the one too damaged to love me." She sat up in Amanda's embrace, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist, and eased away to support herself, rather than letting Amanda do all the work. She brought her wife's palm up for a kiss, then tucked it into her lap, reassuring her the distance wasn't a rejection.

"And I came to tell her I'm done with her. For good." Olivia cocked her head and studied the grave marker as if it were written in a foreign language she couldn't decipher. She never did understand what her mother was trying to say to her. "I won't be coming back here anymore. I'm going to abandon her the way she abandoned me. Here, among all these strangers . . . "

Not another Benson in sight, Olivia thought, gazing at the surrounding stones. Just like you always wanted it, Mom. Olivia didn't even know where her grandparents were buried. "Upstate" was the closest thing she'd gotten to an answer whenever she had inquired about where her mother was from. Sometimes she thought about running a search on an upstate husband and wife, last name Benson, who died in a car accident in the 1970s, but things like that tended to have disastrous results for her. If she dug deep and found out her grandparents weren't the sweet old couple she had imagined as a kid, it would just be yet another loss.

"Liv." Cupping a hand to the one in Olivia's lap, Amanda brought her back gently to the present. She needed that more often now than she had before hypnotherapy with Giacomo. It was almost as though he had put her under a long-lasting spell that made it harder to separate the real from the not-real, the past from the present. (A few times she'd wondered if she had ever come out of the hypnosis at all.) "Do you think that's a good idea? Never coming back? Don't get me wrong, you know how I feel about her, and I'll support whatever you decide to do, but . . . "

The last part came in a rush, preventing Olivia from interrupting, but Amanda waffled back and forth on the conclusion, hesitant to continue.

"What?" she prompted, more curious than annoyed at being second guessed. She had expected her wife to be the leader of the entire Farewell Serena parade, complete with gaudy floats, a marching band, and dancing poodles.

Shoulders drawn up in a childish shrug, Amanda gave a wincing smile. "It doesn't really sound like you? To never come back? Ever? And I just don't want you to feel bad if you end up decidin' to visit her again someday."

"Because I'm so weak I can't help crawling back to my abuser, is that it? I'll break down eventually and start fawning again, because that's what I always do?" Olivia hadn't expected the sharpness of her own reply, and she instantly wished she could take it back. She did not want to get into an argument with Amanda today, dammit. They should be home, celebrating with their kids, not wasting precious time on Serena on a day she barely acknowledged while still alive. She hadn't wanted to be a mother in the first place. At least not to Olivia. "I'm sorry, I—"

"It's okay." Amanda caught Olivia's anxiously gesturing hands, drawing them back down, circling her thumbs over the backs. "You don't have to apologize. And that's not what I meant. There ain't a weak bone in your body . . . 'cept maybe that bum shoulder." She brought her elbow up to nudge Olivia's, signaling an attempt at humor, encouraging the subsequent smile. "As for the fawning, hell, I do it sometimes too. You had to do it to survive with her, darlin', that's nothing to be ashamed of. But I just meant that it's not you to walk away from anyone. I'm sayin', if you do decide to visit her again someday, even if it's just to yell at her some more, you have the right. You have every right when it comes to her."

That hadn't occurred to Olivia before now. From as early on as she could remember, her mother had made it quite clear she didn't have any rights, least of all to challenge or defy in any way. With Serena, she barely had the right to exist. "I suppose," she drawled. It was going to take some time for her to accept that one, but she summoned another smile when Amanda ducked her head, waiting for confirmation that she believed what she'd heard. "Yeah. I'm sure you're right. It'll just take some— some—" She held up her finger and sneezed heartily into her sleeve. "—getting used to."

"Bless you. 'Course I'm right. Name me one time I've ever been wrong." Amanda followed up the bold statement with a big shit-eating grin, and this time Olivia couldn't help but snicker at the incorrigible little nut she'd married.

"I would, but I'd like to get home before Daphne puts the kids to bed," she said, quickly assuming the straightest face she could manage.

"Babe, it's only—" Amanda paused in the middle of rotating Olivia's watch on her wrist to look at the time (12:03), and clucked her tongue. "Ha ha, very funny."

"I thought so."

After Amanda got to her feet, with a bit more grunting and groaning than the task had required before Sammie came along, she helped Olivia up. Together, they stood surveying the remains of the bouquet as if they were the scattered ashes of a distant relative or a neighbor only spoken to once or twice. "Jesus. What a mess," Olivia said, still a bit stunned by the fact that she had made it. She sighed and started to reach for a floret cluster, the only blossom left mostly intact; she'd always been the one who cleaned up after her fights with Beloved Mother.

"You should leave it." Amanda took her by the crook of the elbow, urging her to stand back up fully. No more bending a knee to Serena Grace. "It'll just go back to the soil. 'Sides, I bet she'd appreciate the symbolism of bringing something pretty just to tear it apart."

Sometimes Olivia felt like Amanda understood her mother better than she did. And they had never even met. How's that for irony.

"Sure you're ready to go?" Amanda asked, an arm around Olivia's shoulders as they turned away from the grave of flowers, of too many lies and tears to count. Enough to water a field of dahlias for years to come. "You got everything off your chest?"

How to explain that no amount of screaming or crying or destruction could alleviate all the hurt Serena had caused? How to describe that, though a weight had been lifted, another had settled over Olivia when she turned her back on her mother, possibly for the very last time? How to suggest that perhaps the grave she should have visited to find closure bore the last name Hollister—the man who drove her into Serena's life like a spike or a venomous tooth, seeping deadly poison?

It was on the tip of her tongue when the older woman walking toward them stopped short a few paces away and gasped as if she'd seen a ghost. Olivia glanced around reflexively, half-expecting to see an axe-wielding maniac or the Jersey Devil standing behind her, but there were only burial plots. Names of ghosts carved into thick stone. "Ma'am?" she asked, glancing back around to find the woman was staring at her, not someone over her shoulder. "Are you all right?"

. . .