Those words!
They’re words I’ve needed to hear my whole life but never let myself dream, because dreaming would hurt too much.
But they’re more than words.
Because Mom isn’t saying them over the phone.
She came in person.
She looked for me.
She found me.
I squeeze her tighter and sob against her neck. “How did you know?”
“You sent that message about wishing you’d never agreed to date Jake, and then you went silent. And I thought—she never says things like that. She never asks for anything.” She cries in my hair, bumping my hat off the rest of the way. “And I went back through our thread, and I saw every time I thought you were joking with the boys, and I realized …you weren’t joking. You were begging for a way out in the only way you knew how. But none of us heard you.”
“I didn’t let you hear me,” I sob, hiccuping. “I was so afraid no one would care that I stopped letting any of you even try.”
“We should have tried, anyway,” Mom cries loudly in my ear. “This must have hurt so much. Like we were choosing him over you, and that idea—” She hiccups another sob and clings to me harder.
I cling back.
“It killed me,” Mom weeps. “And I realizedwe’ve always chosen Jake.Not intentionally, but intent can only go so far. I couldn’t wait for another minute to talk to you. Your father and I booked the first red-eye to Phoenix.”
Tears stream down my face, dripping down to the carpet. “You came without me asking you to come?” And then it hits me—really hits me. She caught the flightbeforemy post. Before any headlines. “You came because I … went silent?”
“That was enough,” she says simply. “You should never have had to ask. I hope you’ll forgive me, sweetie.”
“Me too,” Dad says, misty-eyed a few feet behind Mom.
“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you for looking for me.”
And then I can’t say anything else.
Mom’s hand is moving in slow circles on my back, the way she used to comfort me when I was little and had a nightmare. I didn’t know she still remembered how. I press my face harder into her shoulder and let myself be seven again. And fifteen. And twenty-seven. I let every version of myself feel this, all at once, sobbing so hard, my whole body shakes with it.
She doesn’t tell me to stop. She doesn’t sayit’s okayoryou’re all rightor anything that makes me think she wants this to end.
She just holds me.
“I’ve got you,” she murmurs into my hair. “I’ve got you, sweet girl.”
I don’t know how long we stay like that, the two of us on our knees on the lobby carpet, holding each other in such a dramatic and unglamorous way, but it’s long enough that the trembling slowly leaves my shoulders. Long enough that the worst of it passes through me instead of staying lodged in my chest.
And it’s long enough for my dad to crouch down next to us, his big hand coming to rest over both of ours, not saying anything, just being there.
When I finally pull back, my face must be a spectacular mess, because my mom’s sure is. She cups my cheeks in both her hands—the same way she did when I graduated high school, when I got my first real job—and looks at me searchingly.
“There you are,” she says softly.
The tenderness in her voice wrecks me all over again, but it’s different now.
I laugh, a wet, shaky thing. “Here I am.”
Mom laughs, too, sniffing and wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist, and suddenly it’s almost funny, the two of us mascara-streaked and red-nosed on the floor of a hotel lobby.
“I wish I weren’t fifteen years too late,” she says.
