Stepping inside the Calloway kitchen feels like walking into another world. The noise from the patio fades and the air shifts warmer, thicker. Like the house itself is part of the Calloway family.
My sneakers scuff softly against the tile as I follow her in, every step echoing just a little too loudly in the sudden quiet. The kitchen lights glow low and golden, casting soft shadows across familiar countertops and clean lines. It’s smaller than the yard, more contained. There’s nowhere to drift, nowhere to disappear into the edges.
I feel it then. The instinctive tightening in my chest. It’s ridiculous, but the kitchenfeelslike Coco in a way the backyard feels like it belongs to the boys. It’s a room designed for closeness. For conversations that don’t need witnesses.
I straighten without meaning to, shoulders pulling back, spine going alert like I’ve been summoned for inspection.
“Come on in, honey,” she calls over her shoulder, fluttering her fingers a little.
The kitchen smells like chocolate and roasted fruit and Coco’s perfume—the same layered, expensive sweetness she’s worn since I was a teenager. The scent that clung to her hugs and her couch cushions and her boys’ shirts when they loaned them to me after late nights swimming in their pool.
It hits me like a memory I didn’t consent to feel.
She strides to the island, where a towering three-layer chocolate cake sits beneath a glass dome, the frosting glossy and swirled like something out of a magazine. She hums a happy little noise, brushing a hand over the cake stand.
“Grab the plates for me, sweetheart,” she says, already reaching for the long silver cake knife.
I turn toward the cabinets before I can stop myself. Second from the left, on the bottom shelf. Stacked white plates with a faint chip on the rim of the third one down. My hand finds them without hesitation, fingers closing around cool ceramic like they’ve been waiting.
The realization needles under my skin.
I hate that I remember this. Hate that my body slots back into place so easily, like I never left, like I didn’t spend years training myself not to need rooms like this. Not to rely on women like Coco Calloway, with her perfect timing and sharper instincts.
I pull the plates free a little harder than necessary. They clink softly, a sound that feels louder than it should.
Behind me, I can feel her watching.
“You know,” she says as she lifts the dome off the cake, “I used to think my Gage was gonna marry you.”
The plates slip in my hand. Not enough that I drop them, but they clatter together with a sharpclinkthat slices straight through the room.
I still. Six years gone and my body reacts like it never left.
I force out a breath that’s almost a laugh. “Coco. I was sixteen.”
She slides the knife into the cake with smooth, practiced precision. “Mm. I met Bishop’s father when I was sixteen.” She says it like it’s simply a fact, but it feels like a warning. “I knew I’d marry him before he ever looked twice at me.”
My fingers curl around the stack of plates. “I didn’t know that.”
She finally glances up, eyes calm and assessing. “I don’t talk about my boys’ fathers much, and for good reason. But Bishop’s dad?” She exhales quietly. “Well, life had other plans for me. And my boys.”
There are a hundred questions on the tip of my tongue, but I swallow them all back down. None of them are my business, and I’m not even sure I could trust her answers, anyway.
She hands me a plate with a thick slice of cake, but she doesn’t let go of it. I glance up at her, and the air shifts. Like something decided to surface, whether either of us invited it or not.
“I was real sorry to hear about your mother, honey.” Her voice is soft but not gentle, like a secret shared between conspirators.
My chest tightens in that reflexive way it does whenever someone brings up my dead mother. It’s more muscle memory than emotion. I nod once. “Thanks. I… yeah.”
Coco studies me with an unsettling kind of perceptiveness, then steps closer, tucking a loose strand of my hair behind my ear like she’s done it a thousand times.
“Sometimes,” she murmurs, “the best thing a mother can do for us is leave.”
The floor tilts beneath me.
She isn’t wrong. And I hate—hate—how much of that truth lives in me. How relief and shame sit tangled together in my chest, like they’ve never learned to separate.
I force a nod, blinking hard.
