“Alright,” I said, because arguing took energy I didn’t have, and because a quieter part of me had already said yes.
Sofia peeped.
I spent the day keeping busy, trying not to fall asleep on my feet. I dreaded going home, where I’d have to tell my mother my decision.
She wasn’t there when I arrived; I found a note from her instead,Went to town. Will be back in time to make dinner.
She arrived back while I was unzipping my suitcase, a stack of clothes waiting on the foot of my bed to be packed.
Mother stood in the doorway, her arms at her sides, watching.
“Why are you packing?” she asked.
“I’m going to stay in one of the cottages at the rescue while you’re here.” I placed a cardigan in the suitcase and reached for the stack of pants.
“You’re running. Again.”
Five pairs of socks. My toiletry case. “I’m not getting enough sleep here.”
“You’ve always done this. Found somewhere else to be when things got hard. Just like your father.”
My hands stilled on my clothing.
When I was nine or ten, during one summer, she’d driven us out to the lake. She bought ice cream from the stand near the boat launch, and we sat on the dock with our bare feet dangling in the water. She made up names for the tiny fish nibbling at our toes and told stories about their fishy lives with so much conviction that I’d believed her.
Then she’d left us.
“I’m not my father,” I growled out, not looking her way.
“No, but you’re still disappearing rather than dealing with discomfort. Do you know how many times he ran away from a simple conversation? He’d come home hours later and pretend it never started. Refused to give it an ending. It was so frustrating. Humiliating. As if I wasn’t worthy of figuring it out.”
I hadn’t known that. My dad had been amazing, taking me camping and to the clinic. Giving me my own child-sized medical kit when I was ten. I didn’t remember any conflict between them.
But that didn’t mean she had the right to ruin my memories of him with problems that should’ve remained between them.
I spun around. “You keep asking me questions I don’t have answers to. And questions I do have answers to that you won’t accept. I am not an eleven-year-old girl anymore. I’m not the same person who couldn’t understand why her mother was leaving.”
Dismay flickered across her face.
Her chin lifted. “You’re still retreating when the conversation gets difficult. That’s Dave all over again.”
“I’m not him!” My shoulders drooped with my sigh. “I’m retreating because you’re being relentless.”
She stared down at the floor. “I just want to be part of your life.”
I slammed the suitcase closed and started zipping it. “It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?”
Her inhale echoed in the room.
My eyes burned. My fingers fumbled with the zipper as I looked at the ceiling.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” I said when my voice worked again. “I don’t know what you’re looking for. I don’t even know why you came.”
She was quiet long enough that I almost turned around, expecting to find her gone.
“I’ll stay here alone, then,” she said. “You go. But I’m coming to the facility during the day. If I never see my daughter, why am I here at all?”
I didn’t answer because any answer I gave would be wrong. She wanted the daughter who’d stayed. One who’d kept the clinic running exactly as Dad left it. A woman who’d never questioned whether inheritance was the same thing as choice.
