Liv reads her new text and cartoon heart eyes bug out of her face. Girls’ night is officially over.
I signal the bartender to run our tab. “Thank Daddy Foster for the drinks.”
“Please stop calling him that,” Liv says, rolling her eyes at my long-running joke. “I can stay a little longer. Travis can wait.”
She places her phone face down on the bar as she says it. I know she means it—she’d stay if I asked. But I also know she wants to go. I can already see the Liv-shaped hole she’s about to leave, running out the front door. Besides, nowIget to go home and eat snacks. Tonight, I’m winning.
I wave her off and order my Uber to make our exit official. “I should get back anyway. Broken hearts to heal, babies to deliver.”
“Isn’t Zola like seven months along?”
“You know she’s always been an overachiever,” I say, pulling Liv in for one last hug. “Now, let’s get you to your train.”
—
The déjà vu of sneaking back into Mom’s with a buzz is as disorienting as the strobing lights of the muted TV Mom’s currently staring through. But the stakes of getting caught now aren’t a lecture or grounding, the way they were for teenage me. Now, even so much as a tipsy stutter step will be confirmation of Zola’s assessment that I’m the less adult-y adult. Worse yet, it’d be all the proof she needs that her earlier words struck the exact soft spot she’d been aiming for.
Luckily though, when I poke my head into the living room, Mom raises a finger to her weakwelcome homesmile, before pointing toward a sleeping Zola—hands wrapped gently around her midsection. I still have to remind myself that it’s not just abelly.There’s an actual baby in there.
It’s been theHarper girlsfor so long now, I can’t imagine it any other way. But everything is about to change. In so many ways, it already has.
As I scale the stairs, I steal one final glance at Zola and Mom the way I have countless times before, and I wish life would slow down a little. My eyes linger on the familiar scene below, until I’m distracted by a glint on the coffee table. The flashing TV reflects off the silver rings of Zola’s work binder, still splayedopen the way it’d been before I left—back when Zola looked like a mogul in the making and Mom looked like her old self. It catches the light like a tiny flare declaring a state of emergency.
When my head hits my pillow, it’s spinning from more than just the margaritas. This is the longest I’ve been still enough to take everything in. The two people I love most in this world are out there. Knocked down and hurting. Mom needs this distraction. Zola needs a foothold. They need my help to get back up.
They need me to do this, and if one last Harper girls hurrah is the bridge between the way things are and whatever’s coming next for us all, that’s as good a reason as any. And it’s not the worst thing if that comes with a few free dinners and an LLC.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I send a text to the group chat that will either be exactly what we all needorthe thing that sets in motion a series of catastrophic events that will leave us all forever scarred.
Only one way to find out.
9:24pm
Me:Fine. I’ll do it.
Before my phone even registers that the message has beenDelivered,I hear the shrill excitement of my verynot-asleepsister’s voice screeching:
“Oh my god! She said yes!”
The happy shrieks and squeals coming from the living room make two things perfectly clear:
I’m doing this.
I was never not going to.
6
As a kid, I hadnight terrors. After a few quiet hours each evening, I’d shoot up in bed, certain theterrible thinghad finally found me. My family would wake to the horror of screams that tore at my throat and my parents’ hearts until they were raw. It was thenot knowingthat left me inconsolable—not knowing what was coming for me. Not knowing when or why.
By the time I’d come back to consciousness and the saner side of my meltdown, I’d demand definitive answers to all life’s unimaginables. I needed to talk through every possible worst-case scenario. A doomsday prepper with pigtail puffs.
