I cleared my throat and poured myself coffee instead of making eye contact with either of them.
“It—wasn’t David. And it wasn’t a date.”
Silence.
The heavy, loaded kind.
My mother blinked once. Slowly. “I’m sorry?”
“I said it wasn’t David,” I repeated, focusing very intently on buttering a pancake. “I didn’t feel a connection with him. So I . . . went out with someone else.”
Her face froze into that careful, porcelain mask she used for funerals and charity galas.
“A stranger,” she said, voice soft as a knife. “You went out with astranger.”
Ava’s gaze ping-ponged between us, sensing something wrong but not understanding it.
“He’s not a stranger,” I whispered, trying to be calm. “He’s someone I’ve gotten to know.”
This was not how I wanted to broach the subject of dating with Ava. After everything she’s been through, I wanted to sit down and have a real conversation with her. Yet here I was being interrogated by my mother.
“And who might this mystery suitor be?” she asked, sugar-sweet and poisonous.
I swallowed. “Just . . . someone I met through the Penguins Project. A parent.”
Something flickered in her eyes. It was disapproval, disappointment, judgment, all wrapped in one breath.
“I see,” she said. “So you threw away a perfectly respectable match for some . . . single father you barely know?”
My cheeks flamed.
Ava’s fork paused mid-air.
I forced a smile toward my daughter. “Eat your strawberries, sweetheart.”
Then I turned back to my mother, lowering my voice. “I had a nice time. That’s all you need to know.”
Her lips thinned. “Eleanor, after everything you’ve been through, I would think you’d choose someone stable. Someone appropriate. Someone who understands your responsibilities.”
The words hit harder than I wanted them to.
But my phone buzzed softly in my lap, and beneath the table, I saw his name light up again, just a simple:
Alex Prince: Good. :) See you at rehearsal on Monday. Hope your Saturday’s a good one.
A quiet reminder that someone out there saw me not as a disappointment, or a project to fix, or a fragile widow, but assomeone worth smiling at.
I swallowed the lump in my throat and set my shoulders back.
“Mom,” I said gently, “I know you worry. But I’m allowed to make my own choices.”
She didn’t answer.
She just carved into her pancake with the elegance of someone murdering a very small, very flat man.
Ava reached over and nudged my arm. “Mom?”
I looked down.
