vita spezzata, cuore spezzata
Someone had once said that Danielle had it easy just because her son was rich and took care of her. They had no clue what they were talking about. Life was never easy for her. From a young age, she never really had a family. Her biological parents gave her up for adoption when she was seven, unable to take care of her anymore. She hadn’t been so young enough to forget them, but she wasn’t old enough to completely remember them. All she remembered was the confusion and hurt when her parents dropped her off at the park with a backpack with clothes and some food before driving off, never coming back for her. Unable to speak much English (her parents only spoke to her in Italian, being Italian immigrants, but she had been going to school for a year and a half), she had a hard time talking to anyone for help. Someone had found her, a good Samaritan, and took her in. John Heartcock was a good man. He always made cracks about his name, always offering people his “John Hancock” because he was John Heartcock. His wife, Rachel, wasn’t as friendly. She tried her best, but Danielle knew she had a cold heart. She wasn’t ready to be a mom, no matter what she tried to convince herself, no matter how many kids she had. When John brought Danielle home, she could see the flicker of hesitation and frustration on Rachel’s face before her lips twisted into an attempt of a warm smile.
A year after John (and Rachel, she supposes) took her in, the papers were finally processed and she was legally their child. She was Danielle Heartcock, and to her, that was the only identity that really mattered. She was John’s daughter. Not her biological parents’ and not even Rachel’s (even if that was what the papers said). She had three other sisters, and though she tried her best to fit in with them, they weren’t as close as she liked to pretend. The oldest, Arabella, ignored her. (But there were those moments where Danielle was picked on in school and Arabella stood up for her, taking on that overprotective big sister role.) The middle child, Sylvia, was indifferent to her. She didn’t go out of her way to talk to her, but she didn’t outright ignore her either. And the youngest, besides Danielle, was the closest to her. Her name was Elizabeth, but her nickname was Minti, and to this day, that was what Danielle called her in her mind. From the beginning, Minti was there for her until the end when she wasn’t.
The end. The end of any hope she had for a family to depend on. John and Rachel had been killed in a car crash when Danielle was seventeen, ten years after John had found her. The sisters tried their best to stay together for the sake of family, but it was hard. Without John, the other girls had no real obligation to keep talking to Danielle.
When she met Ethan when she was eighteen, she fell hard for him. He had been someone she thought who’d be there for her. Perhaps it was just loneliness and desperation that led her to believe that. Because in the end, when she got pregnant at only eighteen, he ran for the hills. He tried to be in their son’s life, but he couldn’t handle the obligation. He finally left for good when Bryson was four. At twenty-two, Danielle was barely an adult; she didn’t know what the hell she was doing. But she loved Bryson with all of her heart and wanted the best for him. She wanted to provide something of a good life for him, so she went to school to get a degree.
While she went to school and work, trying to scrap up money to fucking survive (because no one else was going to help her with that part of her life), her friends, Sean and Blythe, stepped in to help babysit. She’d known Sean in high school when he had been dating Kaci, but he eventually ended up marrying Blythe. (She had been a witness.) She didn’t feel completely comfortable with leaving Bryson by himself, but what else was she supposed to do? Everything she was doing, it was for him. And yet, she found Bryson slowly growing more and more distant from her.
She tried having a makeshift family of her own with Bryson and the new man in her life. Nathan. He was a godsend. He was everything he ever needed in her life, and he was genuinely the one. He was patient and supportive and kind and made attempts to befriend her son. He didn’t care that she had a son from such a young age, just that she had been taking care of him on her own for so long. And the best part was that Nathan loved her as much as she loved him. He wasn’t going to go running for the hills at the first sign of something going wrong. Though, it seemed most things in her life went wrong anyway. By the time she’d married Nathan, Bryson was completely distant from her. And didn’t that break her heart every time she got a call from the principal’s office that he got into another fight or he was caught ditching or cigarettes were found on his person. And it broke her heart when he snuck out at night and didn’t come back until the next morning, or worse, til dinnertime. It seemed like Bryson did everything he could to not be in the house when she was. And she didn’t know what to do. She loved Bryson, no matter what he did. He was her son. She would not abandon him. Though, many, many, many years later, she would find that in reality, doing what she thought was best was actually abandonment in some form. And for that, she would never forgive herself.
(No matter what Bryson said now, no matter how much he assured her that she was a great mom, she couldn’t ever believe him. He’s a better parent to his kids than she ever was to him.)
So here she was now, trying to pick up the pieces of her life because Nathan was gone, Bryson was gone, Jensen was gone, her unborn child was gone, and Addie was halfway around the world (and with Addie away so much, always in another country, Danielle couldn’t help but wonder if it was because Danielle was still such a horrible parent that she drove another child away), unable to talk to her as much she’d like. But in the end, she did have a family. One she could turn to. If she just let herself, anyway. The grandchildren, what angels they were. They checked up on her as often as they could, talking and spending time with her.
For most of her life, she was alone. She didn’t have anything. She had no family. So, no, things weren’t easy for her. But with such a huge family, one that would do anything for one another, a nice house, a good job, she could see why people thought she had it easy. So she let them believe that. She didn’t have anything to prove to them. Because really, there were people out there who had it a lot worse, and she wanted to help those people instead.
