A Love Left Behind

Chapter 11 - The Years Between

Six years can change almost everything.

At nine, I still thought adults eventually found answers to their problems. At fifteen, I knew better.

Dad and Rea were still together. They had been living in their small rented apartment for years by then, and somehow it suited them. Rea had never wanted a house. She always said there was no reason to tie herself to one place unless she had a family of her own to build it around. I never really understood what she meant by that when I was younger. Later, I did.

Mum's house was still home.

That hadn't changed either.

She worked as much as she always had, sometimes too much, but one thing nobody could ever accuse Mum of was giving us a small life. She traveled with us whenever she could. Chloe and I had seen countries other children in our classes only knew from maps or photographs. Mum wanted us to see things, taste things, understand that the world was bigger than the streets we grew up on. Airports were normal to us. Hotels were normal. Long flights weren't adventures anymore; they were something you complained about before asking where you were eating when you landed.

Mum had given us that.

And no matter what happened between her and Dad, neither Chloe nor I ever forgot it.

Chloe was nineteen now.

She was beautiful, intelligent and, from the outside, exactly the kind of daughter people expected Mum to have. She worked hard, expected too much from herself and had become frighteningly good at hiding when something hurt.

Things between her and Rea had never really recovered.

Chloe had grown out of openly showing her anger, but not out of feeling it. When Dad was there, she could be charming. She asked Rea questions, thanked her when she cooked and sometimes laughed at something she said. If you saw them together for the first time, you might have assumed everything had eventually worked itself out.

I knew better.

There were still moments when Dad left the room and Chloe simply stopped speaking to her.

Rea knew better too.

She had stopped expecting anything else years ago.

I was different.

Not because I loved Chloe any less. If anything, growing older had made me more protective of her. I had seen things happen to my sister that I couldn't fix. I had watched friendships change and seen how cruel people could become. I knew how much pressure she put on herself even when nobody else was asking her to.

But loving Chloe didn't mean I had to hate everyone she hated.

It had taken me years to understand that.

By fifteen, I had also stopped trying to decide exactly what Rea was to me.

She wasn't my mother. She had never tried to be. Mum would never have allowed it anyway. Even after all those years, Rea had never been alone with us as the adult responsible for us. She didn't raise us, discipline us or make decisions for us.

She was simply Rea.

And somehow, that had become enough.

Life between our two families had settled into something that probably looked strange from the outside but felt normal to us. Dad still had his place in Mum's house. There were birthdays, school events, dinners and occasions when our parents stood beside each other as though the years between them had never happened. There were other days when they could barely agree on what time someone should be picked up.

Rea existed somewhere alongside all of it.

And Chloe and I grew up.

Perhaps that was the strangest part.

For years, everything had seemed enormous. Dad leaving. Rea. Mum's anger. Chloe refusing to speak to her. The arguments nobody thought we heard.

Then slowly, life became bigger than our parents.

School mattered.

Friends mattered.

Girls started to matter.

At fifteen, I was far more interested in what was happening in my own life than in analyzing my father's relationship.

I didn't know yet that this was exactly when my own story was about to begin.

It started, strangely enough, with Chloe.

We were at Mum's house one Sunday when the Philippines came up.

Not because anyone was looking for an exotic adventure. Chloe and I had traveled enough with Mum to know that another long flight wasn't automatically exciting. Mum had made sure of that. She had taken us through Europe and far beyond it whenever her work and our school schedules allowed.

But the Philippines were different.

They belonged to Rea.

Over the years, we had heard pieces of her life there. Stories about family, food, places and people whose names meant nothing to me because I had never met them.

Chloe had been listening quietly when she suddenly said, “Maybe we should go.”

Dad looked at her. “Go where?” “The Philippines.” He stared at her for a second. “You want to go to the Philippines?” Chloe shrugged as though she'd suggested going out for dinner. “Why not?”

I looked at her.

There was something strange about the suggestion coming from Chloe.

Dad seemed to think the same thing. “With Rea?” Chloe's expression changed for barely a second. “Obviously she'd have to come if we're supposed to see where she's from.”

Nobody spoke.

Chloe hated silence when she knew she'd caused it. “What? I didn't say I wanted to move there.”

I laughed. “You'd last three days without your entire bathroom.” She looked at me. “And you'd last two hours without Wi-Fi.” “They have Wi-Fi in the Philippines.” “Good. Then you'll survive.”

Dad smiled, but I noticed the way he looked at Chloe.

He knew this wasn't nothing.

So did I.

Years earlier, Chloe wouldn't even have wanted to sit in Rea's apartment. Now she was suggesting traveling halfway across the world with her.

It didn't mean she'd forgiven her.

Maybe it didn't even mean she liked her.

Perhaps Chloe was simply getting older.

Or perhaps there was a little guilt mixed into it. A quiet recognition that Rea had spent years making room for us without ever demanding a place in return.

Whatever the reason, Dad didn't question it.

He was too afraid she might change her mind.

A few weeks later, the idea had become a plan.

When Dad told Rea, she didn't react the way I expected.

She looked at Chloe first.

“Are you sure?”

Chloe nodded. “Yes.”

Rea studied her for a moment. “You don't have to do this for me.”

“I know.”

“Okay.”

That was it.

No dramatic gratitude. No attempt to turn the moment into something bigger.

Maybe that was why Chloe didn't take it back.

For me, the Philippines were simply another place on the map.

I had no idea why I should have expected anything different.

I'd traveled before. I'd seen beaches, cities, mountains, temples and places that looked nothing like Germany. I knew how quickly something unfamiliar could become normal after a few days.

So when the flight was finally booked, I wasn't counting down the days.

I wasn't imagining some life-changing journey.

I packed the way Mum had taught us to pack after years of traveling: only what I needed, something warm for the plane and enough entertainment to survive the flight.

To me, it was a holiday.

Another country.

Another stamp in a passport already filled with them.

I had no idea that somewhere in that country was a girl named Rose.

And that years later, when most of those other journeys had blurred into photographs and half-forgotten memories, I would still remember the first moment I saw her.