When she answers the door with red-rimmed eyes, wearing my t-shirt from the weekend we spent together, I nearly fall apart.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, and she wipes her face and shakes her head. “Penny,” I sigh her name and she takes a step back.
I don’t care. As I enter her apartment, she backs up against the wall and wraps her arms around herself.
“Why were you crying?” I ask softly, shutting her front door and giving her space, making sure not to touch her.
She wipes her face again and takes a deep breath.
“The PI called me today.”
“Did your birth mom change her mind?”
Her face scrunches up, and she shakes her head.
“She died,” she barely gets the words out.
It doesn’t matter what I want, or feel in that moment as I wrap her up in my arms and hug her. She grips on to me like I’m a life line.
I’m the only person she told about getting in contact with her birth mother. There’s no one else she could confide in.
I rub her back, just letting her cry.
“Do they know what happened?”
“He said it was a car accident. I thought… I thought maybe one day she’d change her mind, you know? It was stupid, I know that. But I had hoped, despite her letter, that one day she would come around, but now I’m just stuck wondering forever. He sent me her picture,” she says, breaking our hug and heading to the kitchen to grab her phone.
She uses the collar of the shirt to scrub her face and scrolls through some pictures before landing on one and handing me the phone.
“She was a nurse,” she says.
“You look alike,” I reply, looking at the woman in her early fifties in her scrubs, smiling. They have the same blonde hair and smile.
“You think?”
I nod and hand her back the phone. She stares down at the picture.
“I don’t mean to keep crying on you,” she says.
I enter her space again and wrap my arms around her.
“Let me stay.” It's nearly pathetic how much control she has over me.
“You shouldn’t.”
“I know, but let me stay anyway.”
Penny rubs her face against my shirt and nods, grabbing my hand and bringing me to her bedroom.
She turns on the TV and starts the stupid fucking reality show from the same episode we started from.
I pull her close against my chest, and she doesn’t protest and I take that for the win it is.
“I’m sorry about your birth mom,” I whisper against her hair.
“Me too.”
Now’s not the time to convince her of anything. I just have to be there for her.
