“I grew up chasing a lot of things, Mum. Chickens were the least of it.”
“You were always flirting with some little girl from the neighborhood. From the time you were out of nappies, I knew I was in trouble.” She smiles. It’s the real one—not the brave one she wears when the pain is bad, not the polite one she gives to strangers who hold doors for her. The real one, the one that makes her whole face change, the one I’d do anything to see more often.
She looks at the window. At the backyard. The tire swing, the garden I’ve started bringing back, the oak tree that’s older than both of us combined. I watch her take it in and I can see the thought forming before she says it—the way her eyes go soft and distant, the way her fingers tighten around the mug.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t give you all this,” she murmurs.
“Mum—”
“A backyard. A swing. A house with more than two rooms and a shower that didn’t take twenty minutes to heat up.” She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at the oak tree like it’s a shrine to her failure. “If I’d stayed with your father, maybe we could have?—”
“Stop.”
The word comes out harder than I intend. She flinches, just barely—a micro-movement that most people wouldn’t clock but I’ve been reading her body like a textbook for years. I soften my tone.
“Mum, listen to me. I had the best childhood. I’m not saying that because I’m supposed to. I’m saying it because I remember.” I lean against the counter across from her. “I remember the lunch notes. I remember you running with me in the mornings before the sun came up, both of us half asleep, the roosters going off like we’d beaten them awake or something. I remember you sitting with me at the kitchen table—our one counter—helping me with math even though you hate math. You used to get the answers wrong on purpose so I’d have to correct you, and you’d act shocked every time like I was a genius.”
“You are a genius.”
“I’m a bloke who can tile a backsplash and barbie a decent steak. But I’m not upset about it. Dad would’ve given us a bigger house and I would’ve grown up listening to him scream at you through the walls. You chose small and safe over big and broken. You taught me what a woman should and shouldn’t tolerate from a man. Every good instinct I have comes from watching you walk away from the easy life because you knew we deserved a better one.”
Her eyes are wet. She blinks it away—Mum doesn’t cry in kitchens, she cries in private, at night, when she thinks I’m asleep. I’ve heard her through thin walls since we moved to our shitty apartment in Alphabet City, and I’ve never once let her know.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and my voice catches on the words in a way I wasn’t expecting. “For everything after. For the accident. For the scam. For dragging you across the world and landing us in a fourth-floor apartment with no lift and no plan. You gave me this incredible childhood and I repaid you by?—”
“Saylor David Evans.”
Full name. She only uses the full name when I’ve said something she considers profoundly stupid, which, given that she loves me unconditionally, is a high bar.
She pushes off the counter. Her body negotiates the movement—the shift in weight, the careful alignment of her spine, the way she sets her jaw against whatever’s firing through her nerve endings. She takes a step. Then another. Then a third. Bold, upright, deliberate—not the shuffling, cautious steps she takes when she thinks I’m watching, but the steps of a woman who has decided that crossing a kitchen is a thing she will do, pain be damned.
She reaches me and wraps her arms around my chest. She’s shorter than me by a full head—the way it’s been since as long as I can remember. When exactly did I grow past the woman who used to carry me on her hip through the farm with one arm while feeding chickens with the other? Her grip is strong. Stronger than I expect. Like she’s holding me together and holding herself together simultaneously, which is probably exactly what she’s doing.
“After the accident,” she says into my chest, “before the medics got there, when I was on the ground. Do you remember what I said?”
I remember. I remember every second of it. The sound, the glass, the silence after, the way the sky looked from the pavement. I remember finding her and thinking she was gone and feeling the entire world drain of color like someone had pulled a plug.
“You were knocked out, Mum. No way you remember?—”
“I do. I was conscious,” she says. “For about thirty seconds. Maybe less. And I knew—the way you know things in moments like that, without thinking, without deciding—that I was probably dying. So I prayed. I’m not even religious, Saylor. You know that. But I prayed to anyone listening for one more thing.”
My arms tighten around her. I can feel the ridges of her spine through her sweater, mapping the damage that accident left behind.
“What did you pray for?” I ask, even though I think I know. She prayed to live. She prayed for more time. And the cruel cosmic joke is that she got it. She got more time, and every day of that time comes wrapped in pain that would break most people, and she never complains, not once, as if survival itself should earn enough gratitude for a lifetime.
“I prayed that you were okay.”
I go very still.
“That’s it,” she whispers. “Not to live. Not for the pain to stop. I prayed that my son was untouched. Protected. That whatever happened to me, you would walk away from that truck whole, with your whole life ahead of you.” She pulls back and looks up at me with eyes that are clear and absolutely certain. “That was my last hope on this earth. And my prayers were answered.”
I don’t trust my voice. Something has collapsed in my chest—not painfully, not the way the guilt usually collapses things, but like a wall coming down. A wall I built years ago to hold something back, and behind it is a flood of everything I’ve been trying not to feel since I pulled her out of that wreck and carried her to the shoulder of the road and screamed for help until my throat went raw.
“And now look at you.” She reaches up to touch my face. Her hand is warm from the tea. “I get to watch you fall in love. I get to see you build something. Start a family in this beautiful house. My prayers were answered ten times over.”
“Mum.” I catch her hand against my cheek. “About Celeste. When she gets here today, I need you to not?—”
“Not what?”
