"You can see them," I say.
Leah's head turns toward me. Angelica's eyes go wide.
"Not tonight. Not now. When I decide they're ready, and on my terms. You don't get to show up and blow through their lives like a storm and leave wreckage for me to clean up. Again." I pause. "Wrenleigh remembers you. She's angry enough to burn this house down. Sadie Jo doesn't remember you at all, and I won't let you hurt her by trying to be something you haven't been since she was three."
"I can be better. I can?—"
"Maybe. But you don't get to practice being a mother to my daughters. If you want to see them, you do it on my schedule, in my presence, and the second—the fucking second—either one of them tells me they're done, you walk away. No arguments. No tears. No guilt trips. You walk away."
She nods. Small, shaky. Like a woman who expected to be told no and got something she doesn't know what to do with instead.
"Leah," I say, without looking away from Angelica. "Can you ask Garrett to bring the girls down?"
"Are you sure?" Leah asks. Not challenging—checking. Making sure.
"No. But they're going to find out she's here one way or another, and I'd rather it be with me in the room."
Leah stands. Squeezes my arm as she passes—quick, subtle, a touch that Angelica clocks immediately.
I see her eyes follow Leah's hand, see the calculation happening behind the tears.
She's figuring out who Leah is to me.
Let her. I don't care anymore.
Wrenleigh comes down the stairs first.
She's always first. That's who she is.
The one who walks into the room before she knows what's in it, the one who faces things head-on because turning away isn't in her wiring.
She comes around the corner into the kitchen with her jaw set and her blue eyes blazing, and I know Garrett told her.
He told her who's down here.
He had to—Wrenleigh would have come down regardless, and it was better she knew than walked in blind.
She stops in the doorway and looks at Angelica.
The resemblance is a living thing in the room.
Two faces, twenty years apart, mirrored in the overhead kitchen light.
Same blonde hair. Same jaw. Same mouth.
Angelica sees it too. I watch her hand fly to her own face, like she's looking at a reflection she's been running from.
"Wrenleigh," Angelica breathes. "Baby, you're so?—"
"Don't." Wrenleigh's voice is flat. Hard. Sixteen years old and sharp enough to draw blood. "Don't you call me that."
"I'm your mother."
"No. You're not." Wrenleigh steps into the kitchen. She doesn't sit. She stands, because standing is a position of power and Wrenleigh knows that instinctively. "A mother stays. A mother shows up. A mother doesn't disappear for ten years and walk back in like nothing happened."
"Wrenleigh, I know you're angry?—"
"Angry? I'm not angry. Angry is what I was at five, standing at the front window every night for a month because youpromisedyou were coming back." Her voice cracks. Just once. She stitches it back together so fast that anyone who doesn't know her would miss it. But I know her. And the sound of that crack goes through me like a bullet. "I'm not angry anymore. I'm done. You left. We survived. That's the whole story."
