"Healing. It'll be gone in a few days."
She nods. Pulls me into her arms. Holds me the way she held me the day I moved in—fierce, encompassing, her handcradling the back of my head like I'm something she pulled from a burning building and can't quite believe she's holding.
I let her. Bury my face in her shoulder and breathe in laundry detergent and flour and Margot, and the sob that rises in my throat is the hardest thing I've ever swallowed.
"I'm okay," I say into her cardigan. "I promise."
She pulls back. Wipes her eyes with the back of her wrist—flour everywhere now, on my shirt, on her cheeks, in my hair—and laughs. The watery kind, the one that meansI'm okay, I'm just feeling a lot.
"Sit," she says. "Sit down and eat something. You look like you haven't eaten a real meal in a week."
I can’t help but laugh a little bit at the irony.
I sit at the island. She puts a cinnamon roll in front of me—warm, frosted with the cream cheese she makes from scratch because thecanned stuff is a crime against baking, her words. Then a glass of milk. Then a napkin, folded, like we're at a restaurant instead of a kitchen island at noon.
The first bite almost undoes me. Butter and cinnamon and sugar and Margot. I close my eyes and chew and for a second the world shrinks down to this—a warm kitchen, a cinnamon roll, my mother humming along to the music while she starts on dinner.
I missed this.God, I missed her. Five days in a facility where I was a number, a product, a body with a price tag—I forgot that someone in the world actually cares about me unconditionally. Forgot how much she loves me. Not my scent, not my biology, not what I can be sold for.
Me.
Nobody looks at me the way Margot does. The brothers look at me with want, with possession, with hunger that has teeth. Margot looks at me like I matter. Just me. Just Max.
Just the boy she chose.
I eat two cinnamon rolls. She puts a third in front of me without asking.
"You didn't call." She says it quietly. She's dicing onions now, her back half-turned, giving me the courtesy of not watching my face while she says something hard. "The whole time you were gone. Not once."
My throat tightens. I focus on the frosting.
"You'd text, and the texts sounded like you, and I'd read them and feel better for about twenty minutes." The knife moves in steady, measured strokes. "And then the twenty minutes would pass and the feeling would come back. That something was wrong. That you weren't okay. And I'd start spiraling again—checking my phone, rereading your messages, trying to convince myself that a boy who's never taken off like that and always called when I asked... decided to stop."
I say nothing. Pick at the edge of the cinnamon roll.
"Richard kept telling me it was normal. That all his boys went through phases at that age where they pulled away. Needed space. Didn't want to check in with a parent every five minutes." The knife pauses. She shakes her head. "But you're not his boys, Max. You're not someone who pulls away because you want independence. You're someone who pulls away because you're scared. And I know the difference."
The words land in my chest like a fist. She's right. She's always been right about me—reading the signals I thought I was hiding, seeing through thefineto thenot fineunderneath. Four years of learning my patterns, my tells, the specific frequency of my silence when it means I'm hurting versus when it means I'm tired.
"I almost called the police." Her voice shakes. Just barely. "I was in the car. Keys in the ignition. And then another text came through, and it sounded like you when you just need space,and I told myself I was being crazy." She turns from the cutting board. Looks at me. "Was I being crazy?"
The question hangs between us. And I look at my mother—flour on her cheek, onion-wet eyes that might be from the onions and might not be—and I do the thing I've been rehearsing for two days.
I lie.
"You were being a mom." I manage a smile. "I just needed some time to figure stuff out. I should have called. That's on me." The script and the truth landing in the same sentence for once. "I'm sorry I scared you."
"You're here now." She crosses to the island. Takes my hand where it rests beside the plate—flour and onion on her fingers, warm, certain. "That's what matters."
I thread my fingers through hers and hold on.
"Max."
"Yeah?"
She leans against the island. Doesn't let go of my hand.
"If anything ever happened to you—if anyone ever hurt you—" Her voice is steady now. The shaking is gone, replaced by something bedrock-solid and absolute. "I would burn my entire life down. Richard. This house. All of it." She squeezes my hand. "You come first. You have always come first. Do you understand me?"
