The screen dimmed. The message hung there, pale blue and fragile, waiting. Hazel’s pulse drummed in her ears. She knew he was always on his phone. Work emails, investor calls, stock updates— it was practically an extension of hispalm.
So when the littleseennotification appeared a moment later, it didn’t surprise her.
But the response did.
Her message wobbled for a second and then a little thumbs up emoji appeared above it.
That was it— no words, no follow-up.
Just a digital gesture, small and meaningless. A placeholder.
Hazel stared at it for a long, slow beat.
It shouldn’t have surprised her. And maybe it didn’t, not really.
But still… she had hoped.
And that, somehow, made it worse.
13
The drive to Portland took just over two hours but Hazel didn’t remember most of it. The sky was the same dim pewter it had been for days— low clouds dragging themselves across the coast, too thick for light, too restless for snow. Her cars wipers squeaked over the windshield at irregular intervals, smearing the mist rather than clearing it. Traffic was light. The radio stayed off.
She’d meant to go last week. And the week before that.
But there was always something: a vendor to call, a batch to remake, a reason not to drive south. And then she’d told herself it was the holidays… the bakery was busy. And with the threat of winter looming, the roads often weren’t great.
But the truth was simpler.
She was scared.
The Casco Bay Recovery Center sat on the outskirts of Portland, just past a stretch of low industrial buildings and a wooded park she remembered visiting once on a school field trip. The facility itself was quiet and clean, set back from the road with wide picture windows and a faded sign staked near the entrance. There was something inherently coastal about it— white clapboard, slate-blue trim, a gull perched on the lamppost in the parking lot. You wouldn’t know what it was from the outside unless you were looking for it.
Hazel pulled in and parked beneath a bare tree, the branches dark and looming above her. She turned off the engine and sat with herhands on the wheel for a moment. The vents ticked softly as the car cooled and in her chest, something moved— a small, fluttery ache that felt like dread softened by love.
She hadn’t told anyone back in Bar Harbor she was doing this today. She hadn’t even called to give the staff here a heads up, though they always said walk-ins were welcome. It wasn’t about scheduling. It was about… bracing.
Bracing for the version of her mother she might find today. Lucid or distant. Kind or raw. There were rare days when the fog lifted completely, revealing someone soft and startlingly present— her voice gentle, her gaze clear, asking about Hazel’s life with a kind of fragile hope, like she was trying to step back into the shape of a mother she’d never quite had the chance to become.
And then there were the other days.
The harder ones. When her mother’s eyes looked right through her, or worse— saw something Hazel couldn’t name, couldn’t reach. When sentences unraveled halfway through, or her hands trembled with nerves she couldn’t hide.
Growing up, Hazel had learned to hold space for all of it, but it still took a kind of quiet courage to walk through those doors. That was why she hadn’t rushed to come— she needed to be ready for whatever version of her mother she would find, and until today, she wasn’t sure she could be.
The two-hour drive down from the coast had been silent, slow, her knuckles white against the wheel, her breath steadying in the hush of mid-afternoon.
Inside, the front lobby was warm and over lit. Fluorescent light bounced off pale linoleum floors and soft seafoam walls. A pine-scented wreath hung lopsided above the reception desk and someone had stacked holiday cards beside a jar of pens, each envelope bearing the neat scrawl of returning visitors. The scent was a strange mix of sugar cookies, institutional soap, and hand sanitizer.
Hazel signed in. The receptionist, a woman with cropped silver hair and a brooch shaped like a snowflake, greeted her with a kind smile and handed her a visitor badge. “She’s in her room,” the woman said,like she knew what this— Hazel being here— meant. “Third floor. You remember the way?”
Hazel nodded. “I do.”
The elevator was slow. Hazel stared at the numbers as they lit one by one, her reflection a ghost in the stainless steel doors. She looked tired. Her eyes were shadowed, her hair loose over her shoulders, her sweater slightly damp at the cuffs from walking through drizzle. She felt like she was shrinking into her own skin, like her body was trying to make itself small enough to survive this.
She didn’t feel ready, not anymore, but she wasn’t sure she ever would be, not fully.
The third floor was quieter than she remembered. She passed a recreation room with a half-assembled puzzle on the table and a nurse checking a clipboard beside the vending machine. At the end of the hallway, a window overlooked the parking lot and the sea beyond it, just a sliver of grey beyond the trees.
