I move around the counter and I sit down at the table across from her, because this question deserves eye contact and not the back of my head.
"I think she does," I say. "I think she thinks about you all the time."
"How do you know?"
"Because I saw her face when she looked at you. In the kitchen, that night. Whatever else is true about your mom, and I know there's a lot of complicated stuff there, the way she looked at you wasn't fake. That was real."
Sadie Jo's chin does the thing.
The trembling thing that she inherited from Coin, the one that happens right before the wall goes up. "Then, why did she leave?"
I have thought about this question.
I've thought about it since the night Angelica sat at this table, and I've thought about it from every angle I know—nurse, sister, woman, the almost-something I'm becoming to these girls.
And the truth is ugly and complicated and has no answer that will make a thirteen-year-old feel better.
But I'm not going to lie to her. Coin doesn't lie to his girls, and I won't either.
"I think your mom was broken," I say carefully. "Not in the way that excuses what she did. But in the way that makes people hurt the people they love. Some people, when they're hurting,they run. They don't run because they don't love you. They run because they don't know how to love you and be broken at the same time." I pause. "That doesn't make it okay. What she did—leaving you, leaving your sister, leaving your dad—that wasn't okay. But I don't think it means she doesn't think about you."
Sadie Jo stares at me.
Those blue-gray eyes, swimming but not spilling.
Holding it together the Adkins way, the same way her father holds it together.
Jaw tight, chin up, everything locked behind a door that only opens when she decides it's safe.
"You didn't leave," she says quietly. "You're here every day. You help me with my homework and you do Wrenleigh's PT and you make pancakes that are—" She glances at her plate. "—not great. But you make them."
I almost laugh. Almost cry. Settle for something in between.
"I'm not going anywhere, Sadie Jo."
"Promise?"
The word hits me like a freight train.
Promise.
A thirteen-year-old girl asking a woman who isn't her mother to promise she won't disappear.
The weight of that—the trust required to even ask it—is so enormous I can feel it pressing against my ribs.
"I promise," I say. And I mean it the way I've only meant a few things in my life.
Completely, permanently, with the understanding that breaking this promise would be worse than breaking a bone.
Worse than anything.
Wrenleigh puts her phone down.
She doesn't say anything.
Doesn't need to.
But she looks at me across the table, and something in her face shifts.
