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“I don’t want it taken care of for me, though,” I tell him. “I’m twenty-six and buying my first place. I want to do it myself like any other adult would.”

“Normal adults do things themselves. The benefit of being a celebrity is that you don’t have to. I need you focused on your job—you know, the one you haven’t exactly been crushing of late.”

My chest is growing tighter and tighter the longer this conversation goes on. Exactly how much does he have to hide?

“Except I’ve already handled it,” I reply. “You’re the one wasting my time arguing. And why would my accountant be calling you?”

He’s flustered then. I’m sure he anticipated I’d hand this over as readily as I have everything else. “He was just concerned. He didn’t understand why you’d be dealing with a stranger for all this.”

“Everyone I deal with is a stranger,” I reply.

He sighs heavily, as if I’m being childish. “A stranger to me. You should only be going with people I’ve vetted. I’ll find you someone else.”

“No,” I reply. “Just tell the firm to give Ben whatever he needs.”

“I’m very uncomfortable with bringing in outsiders,” he says.

Yes, I think. I bet you are.

* * *

Beth and I chat on the phone the day after my meeting with Ben. I don’t reference her cancer, since I’m not supposed to know, but I do ask how she’s doing and she dismisses the question, wanting instead to know how I am. I stammer through a conversation about the tour, about the sitcom I’m filming. It’s hard when the most exciting thing in my life—the only exciting thing in my life—is my relationship with her son.

We make plans to get together when I’m back in LA, which is when she asks if I’m going to see my mother before I leave.

I blink in surprise. Beth and I have never really discussed my family before. “I hadn’t planned on it,” I reply, gazing at Central Park through the hotel room window. It’s March, but still fully winter here. There are lots of things about New York I don’t miss, and the weather is high on the list—but not first. “We don’t really get along all that well.”

“How could any mother not get along with you?” she asks. “You’re an angel.”

My throat swells. Obviously, I have to take what Beth says with a grain of salt—she’d say the same of Six, I’m sure—but the simple fact that she still likes me, even after I broke up with her son, feels like a gift I can never repay. “I’m not really an angel,” I say quietly. “I’m frequently kind of a jerk.”

She tsks. “I can’t see that. But even if it’s true, I’ll bet you have your reasons. And I bet your mom has her reasons too, and they probably don’t have much to do with you at all. Give her a chance, honey.”

I smile and tear up at the same time. Beth is trying to fix her boys’ lives before she dies. And I get the sense she’s trying to fix mine too.

“Life isn’t black and white, Drew,” she says. “And you have to learn to live in the gray a little, accept that it can be perfect in all its imperfections.”

Because she asks me to do it—and only because of that—I meet my mother for lunch the day before I return to Europe to finish the tour.

She’s already waiting at the restaurant when I arrive.

Sometimes when I see her on a week day—her hair pulled back in a neat bun, clad in her annoyingly corporate attire—it’s hard to picture the woman my father fell in love with. Today though, I catch a glimpse of her in an unguarded moment, before she’s seen me, and there’s something wistful in her expression, something that’s gone unfulfilled—and I find the woman I remember once more. The mother of my early childhood, who made forts out of pillows and blankets with me and laughed as my father sang ridiculous songs in Russian. Before she ruined it all.

I move toward the table. She smiles and stiffens, simultaneously, as if I make her happy and she’s bracing for me to take that happiness away at the same time.

“I like your hair,” she says.

Of course she does. I could walk into her law firm now as a junior associate and no one would blink an eye. The teenage rebel in me wants me to go to the bathroom and shave it off, pronto.

“Thanks,” I say grimly, taking the seat across from hers.

“And you’re sober,” she says.

“Tell me something, Mom,” I reply, looking over the menu, “are we always going to throw our worst moments in each other’s faces? Because you’re not cheating on my father right now either, but I managed not to bring it up.”

I look at her just in time to watch a wealth of emotions pass over her face. Shock, anger, sadness, resignation.

“You’re right,” she says for the first time in her life. “I’m sorry.”