Foggy Mirrors | Max Verstappen

Chapter 22 - THE PRESENT

They had decided to let Isa sleep some more and made their way down to the kitchen. Clad in their sleepwear, for Leanne a pair of shorts and a tank top, a thin robe wrapped around her shoulders and for Max a pair of boxer shorts and a white lose t-shirt. The older Dutchman had moved into the kitchen to make them some coffee, despite neither of them liking hot beverages in the morning or at all. This was a morning they would need to start with something stronger, but all Max was ready to offer was coffee, so Leanne accepted. He was the last one she wanted to argue with, not when her mother was here. Her mother, who would press a finger in every open wound she would find.

Leanne felt lost as she was sitting by the dinning table, Max right in the other side of the kitchen isle, her leg pulled up, so her foot was planted on the seat, her arms pulled around them, while most of her hair has slipped out of the bun she had made before going to bed.

"Here." Max muttered as he put the cup of coffee before her, before sitting down at the head of the table right beside her.

The younger Dutch looked up briefly, before landing on the half empty bottle of rum that was standing on the table. She wanted to take it before purring a big sip into her coffee, but Max seemed to have felt her gaze on the bottle, reaching for it before Leanne could.

"There is no need for that." He was talking about getting blackout drunk, because he knew that was what Leanne had been thinking about since the moment, she saw her mother the day before. She felt like that was the only state in which she was able to stand her mother's lies and bullshit for longer than five minutes.

That strategy had nearly cost her everything before. The Dutchman was glad that he had coughed Leanne drinking after the race this one time her parents were visiting. She was about to get into a car, but back then, they were still somehow closer to what one would call a relationship and he forced her to allow him to drive her to the hotel. He would have never forgiven himself if something should have happened to her. And it was also then, with Leanne drunk off her ass, that she had started to tell him what kind of person her mother was. It marked the day Max had started to detest Natalie Van der Verden.

"I can't face her." Leanne admitted quietly, while Max watched her over the rim of his cup of coffee, his hand reaching out to settle on top of hers.

He wasn't sure how to say it, how to sugarcoat it, but he was talking to Leanne and not to Isa. There was no reason to sugar-coat anything. She knew what kind of person her mother was, so he decided to just tell her in the hope it would lift the weight on her heart a bit. In the hope it would make her breath freely again. In the hope, it would relax her enough so she would be his Lea for a bit longer.

"You don't have to. I checked the other rooms before coming down. Your mother is gone, just as all her things." Max said, causing Leanne to look up from the dark liquid in her cup. She had staring at it before. As if that would change its taste.

"She left us?" Leanne wanted to know, which caused Max to nod, before the younger Dutch moved in her seat, so both her feet were now firmly planted on the ground again, while the hand which was covered by Max's curled against the surface of the table. Max was sure Leanne's nails would leave scratch marks on the expensive dark wood.

"Again." She added in a whisper. It was no question. There was nothing about this situation that asked for a question. Leanne knew her mother after all, and she was honestly surprised that there was still a part deep in her soul that was surprised. A part that fought that maybe she would change this time, that maybe Leanne was enough now. That maybe she would change and stay with them. A stupid part of her heart that never seems to learn believed that she had a mother in more than just in name. She was wrong, of course she was wrong, but Leanne was also still naive enough to hope that she would be wrong.