“It’spneumonia.”
Allie grins, unrepentant. “Worth it.”
“My babies,” Mom says, her voice thick. “God, I’m so happy to finally have more time with you guys.”
“You’re going to get sick of us,” Allie says.
“Impossible.”
“Give it a week,” I add.
“Two days,” Michalis says.
Mom laughs and pulls us in tighter. “I’ve missed you. All of you. So much.”
She lets us go and I watch her move through the room. It’s not something I plan to do. It’s not a conscious decision. But my gaze keeps finding her, following her from conversation to conversation, and I don’t try to stop it. She’s hugging people, laughing at their jokes, asking questions and actually listening to the answers. She makes everyone feel like they’re the most important person in the room, like she has all the time in the world for them even though there are forty people here.
It’s a skill she honed over twenty years of interviewing people, I guess. But it’s also just who she is. She cares. Genuinely, deeply cares about people.
Dad appears beside me, two glasses of wine in his hands. He offers me one and I kindly decline.
“She’s amazing, isn’t she?” he says quietly, watching Mom across the room.
I nod. “The best.”
And I mean it. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t look up to her.
Mom started as my nanny when I was five years old. Dad hired her after my sixth nanny quit, and I was a nightmare child back then—angry and confused and acting out because I didn’t understand why my biological mother had left.
And then Mom showed up.
She didn’t try to replace my biological mom. She didn’t try to force me to like her. She just…showed up. Every day. She married Dad soon after, and by then I was already calling her Mom. It just felt natural.
She never treated me differently than she treated Allie and Michalis. She never made me feel like I was borrowed, or temporary, or somehow less hers because I came from someone else’s body. If anything, I felt closer to her in some ways. Not because I was special, but because I was first. I got to know her before anyone else did. I got to see her figure out how to be a parent in real time, learning alongside her, growing up with her.
I got to watch her become my mother.
Rebecca is…I don’t know what Rebecca is.
She’s my biological mother. That’s a fact, immutable and meaningless. She lives in Boston now with her husband and their two kids—my half-siblings, technically, though I’ve met them exactly twice. She calls on my birthday, usually, and sends Christmas gifts that arrive in mid-January with the tags still on. We exchange emails every few months, polite and careful, like distant colleagues who once worked on the same project.
That’s the extent of it.
I used to wonder if that was my fault. If I’d done something wrong, or not enough, or too much. If there was a version of me that could have made her stay.
But I don’t wonder anymore. The truth of it is, Rebecca left. That was her choice. And it had nothing to do with me.
And in her absence, Annie showed up. Every day. For eighteen years. Not necessarily because she had to, not because she was obligated, but because she wanted to. That’s not a consolation prize. That’s not a replacement or a substitute or a second-best. That’s something else entirely, something Rebecca could never give me, even if she tried.
And through all of it—through every birthday Mom remembered when Rebecca forgot, every school play Mom attended when Rebecca was in Boston, every heartbreak and triumph and ordinary Tuesday—I never once heard my dad or Mom say a bad word about Rebecca. They never had to. Theyjust showed up. Day after day, year after year. And eventually, I stopped measuring Rebecca’s absence and started measuring Mom’s presence.
I don’t feel like I was missing anything, because I wasn’t. I had everything I needed. I had her and my dad.
Dad’s phone starts buzzing on the mantel, right between the white hydrangeas and a half-empty glass of wine. He glances at the screen and his whole face changes—that particular smile, the one that saysI’ve pulled something off and I’m very pleased with myself.
“Annie,” he calls across the room. “Come here! You’re going to want to get this.”
She’s mid-conversation with Maria, something about gardening, something about tomatoes that wouldn’t ripen last summer. But she catches something in his voice, some undercurrent, and she excuses herself with a hand on Maria’s arm.
