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Sydney lasts about forty minutes before she remembers she has something to do, which I’m eighty percent sure is not true but I appreciate it. She squeezes my mom’s hand when she says goodbye, which my mom receives with genuine warmth, and then she’s gone upstairs, and it’s just the two of us in the kitchen in a familiar quiet.

My mom looks at me over the rim of her mug.

“Shall we go grab some food?” she says.

“Obviously,” I say.

It’s quiet for a Tuesday afternoon when we get to Dora’s—a few booths occupied, the particular low hum of a diner that isn’t in a rush, the smell of coffee and maple syrup and something fried that I’m going to order without thinking about it too hard. The waitress seats us at the window booth and my mom slides in across from me and picks up the laminated menu.

We order. Coffee for me, tea for her.

My mom wraps her hands around the tea.

“So,” she says.

“So,” I say.

If she’s seen any of it, all the stuff with the song, she gives no sign, and I’d bet the van she hasn’t. She doesn’t have data most weeks and wouldn’t know a fandom from a hole in the ground. It’s one of the great mercies of my mother that the worst month of my life simply never reached her.

“Do you regret it?” I blurt out. She looks confused. “Giving up the paralegal thing. All of it.”

She looks at me.

“Oh, honey,” she says. “I hated that job.”

I blink. “What?”

“I hated it.” She says it simply, like she’s surprised I didn’t know. “I was good at it, but I hated it. The hours, the office, the same building every single day. I used to sit at my desk and feel like the walls were closing in.” She wraps both hands tighter around the mug. “I never told you that?”

“No,” I say. “You never told me that.”

“Hm.” She considers this. “I suppose I didn’t want you to think I was—I don’t know. Ungrateful. It was a good job. It paid well. I just— it wasn’t my passion. It didn’t give me drive. I just sort of ended up there. Followed a traditional path, went into law because it was smart.” She shrugs. “And then I met your father.” Her entire face lights up.

I’m staring at her. I’m doing it in a way that probably looks strange because I can feel myself doing it and I can’t stop. “But then why were you so sad when you had to leave? Every time we moved, you were—I could see it. You’d be quiet for weeks.”

She’s quiet, and something moves in her expression, something honest and a little tired, the look she gets when she’s deciding whether to say a real thing.

“I was worried about money,” she says. “That’s all it ever was, sweetheart. Your dad, he wasn’t the most reliable, financially. He meant to be. He always meant to be. But there was always something—the recording cost more than they’d budgeted, the van broke down, the advance didn’t come through when they said it would. So every time I had to leave a job, what I was actually sad about was the gap. The not knowing and the anxiety. Not the job itself.” She shakes her head. “I don’t think I ever missed the job once I was gone. I missed the salary for a bit. That’s different.”

The food arrives. We both lean back slightly to let the plates land. I pick up my fork, look at my eggs, trying to reorganize something in my head that has been solid for so long but now feels like it’s crumbling.

“But you had to just follow him around,” I say. “All those years. All those cities. It was his dream.”

“I chose to,” she says. “Bea, I loved your father. I loved him deeply, but not in a he-was-all-I-had way. I loved him because he was funny and warm and noticed things other people walked straight past. He could make a terrible motel room feel like an adventure. Being around him made the world feel bigger.”

Her smile trembles.

“He wasn’t always easy to love. God, he could be selfish. He could get so caught up in the next song or the next opportunity that he forgot the rest of us were standing there waiting for him to come back down to earth.” She lets out a wet little laugh. “But I knew who he was. I chose him anyway. Every time.”

She cuts into her pancakes, although she doesn’t eat them.

“And then one day, I didn’t get to choose anymore.”

“For the first few weeks after he died, I barely understood what had happened. People kept coming to the house with food. They’d hug me and cry, and I’d end up comforting them because they loved him too. Then they all went home, and I was left there with his shoes by the door and half a cup of coffee still sitting beside the bed.”

My throat tightens.

“I kept forgetting,” she says. “That was the worst part. I’d wake up and reach across for him. I’d hear a song and think, I need to tell him about this. Once, I bought his cereal without thinking and stood in the supermarket crying over a box of cornflakes.”