“The game loss making you age?”
I glance at her. She removes the reading glasses from her head and sets them down. She looks like she has something to say.
"She's been eating."
I close the refrigerator.
"Nessa," she clarifies, as if I needed clarification. "She ate dinner with us last night. A full plate." A pause. "She came downstairs this morning without being asked."
I look at her face.
"She seems better," she says. "There's something — I don't know. An energy. Like something has come back on." She tilts her head slightly. "Do you know what's changed?"
"Has she left the house?" I ask.
"A few times this week. She didn't say where." She picks up her wine glass. "I didn't push it. You know how she gets when I push."
I know exactly how she gets.
I'm already moving toward the hallway.
"Theo."
I stop.
My mother sets down her wine glass and looks at me over the island with the expression she reserves for things she's decided need to be said, regardless of whether I want to hear them.
"Your thesis," she says. "How is it coming?"
The question lands differently than she intends it to — or maybe exactly as she intends it to. With my mother, it's sometimes impossible to tell.
"The presentation went well," I say. "I have another coming up. Final defense."
Her face does something that is unambiguously proud. Not performed, not managed — just present, the way her emotions always are when she's not in a professional context and has decided not to monitor them.
"Your father told me the department head called it one of the strongest senior theses he's reviewed in years," she says.
"Dad shouldn't be making calls on my behalf."
"He wasn't. Your Professor called him." She smiles slightly. "Apparently, it was unprompted."
I hold her gaze for a moment.
"Good," I say.
She nods once and lets me go.
Nessa's room is at the end of the upstairs hallway.
Her light is on — visible under the door, the warm yellow of her lamp rather than the overhead, which means she's been in there for a while and settled into it. I can hear something faintly through the door. Music. Low, the kind she plays when she's in a good mood, which used to be the default setting of my sister and became something so rare I stopped expecting it without realizing I had.
I don't knock.
I open the door.
She's sitting cross-legged on her bed with her laptop open and her hair down. She's wearing an oversized sweatshirt, and she has color in her face, and she looks—
She looks like herself.
