The house is quiet—strangely, it’s too silent to be comfortable. The absence of sound gives my brain too much leeway to think. Unfortunately, thinking isn’t always good.
I toss the towel onto the chair and grab my phone off the bed.
“Hey, Meg,” Mom says after two rings. “Are you okay?”
“What are you doing up so late?”
“At the moment, I’m answering your call.”
I snort. “Don’t get an attitude with me, young lady. You’re still indebted to me over this whole thing.”
Mom stills. “Is everything going all right?”
“Yeah, it’s going just fine.” I mosey around the room, stopping again in front of the window. “It’s so quiet here.”
“The first time I visited Maggie, I could barely sleep. I kept waiting for a siren or a car alarm. How do people function if an emergency isn’t happening in the distance?”
I grin. “Same.”
“Besides being unable to sleep, how are you, sweetie?”
I turn away from the window and shuffle around, eventually sitting on the edge of the bed.
How are you, sweetie? It’s such a loaded, complicated question from my mother.
My feet swing back and forth as I consider how to answer her.
On paper—and what she wants to hear—is that I’m fine. She wants to know that Chase and I are getting along and that I’m safe. She’d be thrilled to find out that Kennedy isn’t the foregone conclusion she made her out to be. I think she and I can find a middle ground between a rebellious teenager and a pseudo-adult.
And while all that is true, it’s not all that’s true.
I’m also lost. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with my life or what my goals even are. How can I be thirty years old and unsettled? Is it normal to look in the mirror in the morning and recognize the face but not identify with the person looking back at you?
I stand, blowing out a breath. “I’m great. Chase has been very kind, and Kennedy is probably a handful, but I think we’ll figure it out.”
“That’s so great, Meg. I’ve been worrying about it all day, and you didn’t answer my text.”
“I know. I saw it come in, but …” My cheeks split into a wide smile. “Kennedy got home from her friend’s and demanded thatChase show me the lake. There’s this huge lake behind their house, and they have this paddle boat you can take out. It’s propelled by your feet. So anyway, Kennedy wanted me to see it, so she and her dad took me down there.”
“Oh. A lake? That sounds fun.”
I laugh. “Well, it’s rained on and off all day, so it was chilly.And muddy. Oh, my gosh, Mom—you’ve never seen this much mud in your life.”
Mom laughs too.
“We mud-skated all the way home, which basically means we ice-skated on mud in boots,” I say, giggling at the memory. “I had mud in my eyebrows.”
“And here I was feeling lonely. But I’d take lonely all day over mud.”
Her comment catches me off guard. Usually, I’d take lonely over mud, too.
I hate that Mom’s relationships weren’t healthy. She deserves love and happiness. Not that she received those things from any of the men she’s entertained in the past, but every time she met another, I hoped he would be the one for her.
“It was fun,” I say, still thinking about my revelation. “I don’t know why because I just had to shower again to get the rest of the mud out of my scalp. But, yeah, it wasn’t terrible.”
“Sounds like it was more thannot terrible.”
I stand and head to the dresser. Rifling through it, I find a pair of socks. “Have you heard from Maggie? Did she make it to Kate’s okay?”
