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“And now I’m sitting in Dora’s with my daughter on a Tuesday afternoon in May. I’m not drifting because I have nothing, Bea. I travel because my life is full. I have people everywhere. I have places I still want to see. I am genuinely happy.”

I stare at her.

“So, no,” she says. “I don’t regret leaving the paralegal job. I don’t regret the cities or the friends or even all those ridiculous apartments. It took energy. Sometimes more than I had. But it also gave me things. Your father gave me things.”

“I thought you gave everything up for him.”

“I changed things for him, sure,” she says. “But I chose to. I didn’t give up.”

I think about all the times I’ve told myself the story of my mother’s sacrifice.

I’ve been telling it since I was twelve. The fuel behind the promise that I would never let love make my world uncertain.

I built all of it on the belief that Mom had spent half her life trapped inside Dad’s dream. And she’s sitting across from me, telling me it was her dream too. How could I have got it so wrong?

Sure, not every part was hers. But enough that she would choose it again.

“You’re very different from us both, you know,” she says, and her voice is warm, proud, completely certain of itself. “From me and from your dad. You always have been. You know what you want and you go after it. You don’t get distracted like we did. That’s why you’re going to be such a good doctor.” She smiles at me. “That’s why I’m so proud of you, and he would be too.”

I nod.

I drink my coffee.

I flinched when Cal called me his good luck charm. Because thought I knew how that ended for me, I’d be second to his music and in the way and I’d either move for him or be left behind.

“Did you ever feel like you were in the way?” I ask. “Of his plans?”

She looks surprised before she laughs.

“Oh, honey, no. I wasn’t in the way. I helped him hold up the map.”

Chapter Forty-Five

Cal

The corridor outside Mabel’s room smells of floor cleaner and something faintly floral from the nurses’ station. I’m leaning against the wall with my eyes closed when I hear my mother’s heels approaching.

She stops a few feet away in a cream pantsuit, purse tucked neatly beneath one arm. She looks prepared for a board meeting, not a hospital.

“She’s asleep,” Mom says.

“I know.”

“She looks better than I expected.”

“She usually does.” I watch her face. “She’s good at pretending.”

My mother nods and looks down the empty corridor. Then, with no warning whatsoever, she says, “You’re going back to Los Angeles when the semester ends.”

I straighten slightly.

“And you aren’t coming back to finish the degree,” she adds.

I open my mouth.

“Don’t.” She holds up one hand. “You may have convinced your father, but you did not convince me.”

“I wasn’t⁠—”