“I think I patched her in. Bella, are you there?” Aunt Francesca asks.
“Mom?”
“Hi, tesoro. So … we wanted to tell you something.”
My stomach lurches.
“Are you okay? What’s going on? I’ll get a flight as soon as I can —”
“Mae!” Mom yells.
“What?”
Aunt Francesca laughs, and a headache blooms in my temple.
“I’m fine. But we need to tell you something.”
I huff, irritated. “Okay, what?”
“You know how I told you to take advantage of this opportunity to go to Paxton? Do something different?” Mom asks.
“Um … yeah?”
“We never bought a house in Florida, sweetheart. We rented,” Aunt Francesca says.
“I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.”
“We were always going to come back to Paxton. Your uncle could never survive down here,” Aunt Francesca says.
“Okay, I don’t understand.”
“I was going to shut the doors to the shop. But your mother had a better idea,” Aunt Francesca says.
Then it all suddenly makes sense. There’s a reason I don’t believe in coincidences.
“Mom!”
She giggles.
“How? Why?” I spit out, unable to form a full sentence.
“I’m not your responsibility, Mae. I love you so much. But it’s because I love you I wanted you to experience something different. Even if it was in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Cooper or no Cooper, you needed to be forced out of being burdened with me.”
“Mom, you’re not a burden,” I rasp.
“We can agree to disagree. But I wanted more for you, and this was the best way to make it happen.”
“You planned this all along?” I ask them.
“Yes,” they both say.
“But it all worked out, didn’t it?” Aunt Francesca says excitedly.
I huff. “I feel like you both got lucky.”
“Even if that’s the case, it still happened,” Mom says.
“I don’t know if I should thank you or scream.”
