Another message appeared.
She called your aunt in Saratoga last night. She left a message.
My throat tightened.
Aunt Mabel.
Of course, she had.
Mabel was the only person in upstate New York who still had my cell number written in an address book instead of saved in a phone. The only one who would answer on the second ring and listen longer than she spoke. The only one who never asked why I’d stopped coming north for Christmas.
My mother never called her unless something was wrong.
Or unless she couldn’t reach me.
I hadn’t answered her last two texts.
I hadn’t called for a while.
I’d been … occupied.
How do you know that?I typed.
There was a pause.
Longer this time.
Then:
Because when someone starts asking questions about you, I pay attention.
A chill slid down my spine that had nothing to do with the snow outside.
She wouldn’t panic, I told myself.
My mother didn’t panic.
She organized. She contained. She managed optics.
But she also hated not knowing where I was.
And I hadn’t told her I was staying in the woods with a man whose name she absolutely should not know.
The room felt smaller.
This wasn’t coincidence.
It was ripple.
And for the first time since I’d written that letter to Alpha Mail, I felt the edge of something pressing back.
I hadn’t spoken to my mother in months.
Our relationship had calcified into polite distance years ago, after she remarried a man who preferred silence to conflict and then quietly withdrew into that silence herself.
Growing up, she had always loved me best when I was self-contained.
Low maintenance.
