“I did the right thing… Calling you guys for help with Wren, right? She’s probably so mad at me right now. She texted me abunch this morning, but I only read the first one about rehab…. Have you talked to her since last night?” Lily asked with a sheepish grimace.
The steady click of the turn signal filled the car before Sarah responded. “I talked to her for a few minutes this morning.”
“Did she sound like she was mad at me?”
The car rolled to a stop at a T-shaped intersection on a road running parallel to the Pacific Ocean. Layers of blue stacked and diffused by misty clouds made it nearly impossible to tell where the sky ended and water began.
“Which way?” Sarah asked, thankful for the moment to think.
“Left.”
“I don’t think Wren is mad at you, sweetie. If anything, she thinks you’re mad at her.”
“I am,” Lily snapped, crossing her arms, staring out the window as they zipped down the curved road leading back to Jamie’s house. “Or at least, I was last night.” Her shoulders sank in defeat along with her voice. “I just?—”
An automated voice interrupted Lily’s train of thought as a text appeared on the in-car computer screen. “New message from ‘Beth.’ See you soon. Miss my favorite girls already. Love you.”
Sarah froze as the message was read, her pulse whooshing in her ears. How had she been dumb enough to forget that she had set up her car to auto-read her incoming texts? Her fingers flexed around the cool leather steering wheel as she glanced at Lily, waiting for her response to Beth’s message. Maybe she wouldn’t notice. Yeah, Sarah could definitely spin this in a way that made it look like she and Beth were just friends… But that wasn’t what they were. They had never truly been just friends.
“What. The. Fuck,” Lily said slowly.
“Language, Lily,” Sarah responded reflexively.
“Don’t ‘language’ me now. I think rightnowis a pretty good time to use that word because WHAT THE FUCK!” The pace of Lily’s words picked up as Sarah watched her connect more and more of the dots aligning her and Beth. “You’re who Mama’s been seeing? Ew, that wasyouin the bathroom a few weeks ago? Oh my god—oh my god… How long? What about Jamie? Wait, you’ve been so weird hiding your phone the past few weeks… Ew, do you guys sext?”
They came to another stop. Sarah knew they were close to the house—she recognized the intersection—but she wasn’t confident which direction to take. She glanced in the rearview mirror; there were no cars behind her.
She took a deep breath before speaking. “Which question do you want an answer to first? And right or left?”
“Left. Mom, you’re not denying anything…”
“Nope. I’m not,” Sarah said simply, the relief that Lily finally knew about her and Beth pushing out any anxiety that remained. Lily was an adult now and this was a conversation they could have as two adults talking to one another—direct and straightforward.
Lily grumbled under her breath. “How long?”
How long. What a complicated question. So simple, yet somehow so complex: Sarah thought back over the years and years she had spent loving Beth, but that wasn’t what Lily was asking, and she knew that. “Officially? Since January,” she stated the same way she would state facts or business objectives in a meeting. Lily was surprisingly calm after her initial reaction, and Sarah immediately recognized the shift into her info-gathering mode.
“Why didn’t you guys tell me?”
Again, without missing a beat, Sarah answered honestly. “We weren’t ready yet. Your mom and I are still figuring out who we are as a couple again.”
Lily was quiet for a minute, sitting under the weight of the revelation. “The house is up here on the right.” She gestured to the driveway.
Sarah turned the wheel, navigating the steep incline before pulling her car to a stop behind the car Lily had borrowed from Dylan. But when she parked, neither of them moved.
“I’m sure you have more questions.” Sarah shifted, turning her body in the driver’s seat to face Lily.
Lily’s hair fell in long waves over her shoulders. Sarah reached a gentle hand out, tucking the front strand away from her face and behind her ear.
Lily looked at her with an intensity she had somehow managed to inherit directly from Sarah, despite the two of them having no genetic relation. They shared that same fire to get to the bottom of any situation, to understand all sides of something before passing judgment.
“Is that why you and Nell broke up? Because you’re in love with Mama?”
Sarah took a deep breath, aligning her thoughts on how best to explain a concept that had taken her years to fully and truly understand. “No, sweetie. Nell and I… We love each other, but in a way that works better for us as friends. At the end of the day, love isn’t the only thing you need from someone in a long-term relationship, and Nell and I ultimately needed and wanted different things and that’s okay.”
Lily’s hands lay clasped in her lap as she digested Sarah’s words. Out of the corner of her eye, Sarah thought she caught the flutter of the curtains in the front window of the house and a glimpse of blond hair, but when she looked again, it was gone.
“I don’t know how to ask this… I love you and Mama both so much, but… How are you not mad at her for everything?”
