"Baby—"
"Everyone has these expectations. Coach, the team, the scholarship, Emily, you—" I stopped. "And I'm trying. I'm trying so hard to be what everyone needs but I don't—" My voice broke. "I don't know if I can keep doing it."
The tears came before I could stop them.
Not the quiet kind from Noah's dorm room. The ugly kind—the kind that came from somewhere deep and primal, the kind I hadn't let out since I was a kid and my dad left and my mom held me on the kitchen floor and told me it wasn't my fault. I sat there in my car in an empty parking lot at midnight crying into the phone like I was twelve years old again and she was the only person in the world who could make it stop.
"Oh, Liam." Her voice so soft. "Talk to me. Tell me what's going on."
"I can't."
"Yes you can."
"I don't even know how to say it." I wiped at my face. "I just—I feel like I'm drowning. Like I can't breathe. Like everything I thought I knew about myself is wrong and I don't—" I stopped. "I don't know how to be normal."
The word hung there.
Normal.
"Baby." Her voice very gentle now. "You don't have to be anything. You just have to be you."
"But I don't know who that is."
"Then you figure it out. That's what being twenty years old is."
I let out a sound that was half laugh, half sob.
"You don't have to have everything figured out," she continued. "You're allowed to be confused. You're allowed to not know. You're allowed to change your mind about what you want."
"But the scholarship—"
"The scholarship doesn't own you."
"It's the only reason I'm here."
"No." Her voice firm now. The voice she used when she wasn't accepting arguments. "You're there because you work harder than anyone I've ever known. Because you're talented. Because you love rowing."
"I don't know if I love it anymore. I don't know if I ever did or if I just—" I stopped. "If I just needed it to get out."
Silence.
"Do you remember," my mom said finally, "when you first started rowing? You were fourteen. Came home from that summer program at the community center and you couldn't stop talking about it. About how it felt on the water. How everything made sense in the boat."
I remembered. Sitting at the kitchen table, still sunburnt, talking so fast she'd had to tell me to slow down.
"You didn't start rowing for scholarships or college or to get out of Brackett Lake," she said. "You started because you loved it. Because it made you feel free."
My throat was too tight to answer.
"And maybe you've forgotten that. Maybe all the pressure and the expectations made you forget why you started. But that doesn't mean it's not still there."
I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel.
"Whatever's going on," she said, "whatever you're dealing with—you're still my son. Nothing changes that. Ever."
The words hit like a physical blow.
"You hear me?" she asked.
