I watched them both walk away, and then turned to face Addison.
“Michael, I’m so sorry.”
“For what? You did nothing wrong.” My words came out harsher than I meant for them to.
“I just—“ Addie began.
But I couldn’t hear her. Not now, not when everything I’d imagined was crumbling like sand walls as the inevitable tide washed in to reclaim its territory. I’d failed Dan. I’d failed to keep him safe, to be the dad he needed. I’d failed at the one thing I’d vowed to focus on. “I’m just going to go to bed,” I said, turning toward the stairs.
“Michael—“
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Good night.” My heart felt like it was sinking through my chest, falling like a rock to the bottom of the deepest ocean trench. I didn’t think I’d ever retrieve it from there, and tonight I didn’t have the energy to even try.
30
Mom Love
Addison
I saw the exact moment Michael gave up on us. Daniel walked right past him as Shelly’s eyes lasered into Michael’s downcast face, and I watched his shoulders fall, his expression dim.
And I knew that whatever this was, whatever this had been, it was done.
I felt awful that Dan had gotten hurt—but then again, he’d come back inside the night before and hadn’t said a thing about stepping on a nail. Was Shelly maybe blowing it a little out of proportion? I couldn’t doubt her really, she was his mother. But why didn’t Dan tell us?
It didn’t matter now. Not where I was concerned. That night, as I lay alone in the king bed in the master bedroom staring at the ceiling, I realized what a fool I’d been.
This house had made it easy to pretend. I’d allowed myself to build an alternate reality, one in which I wasn’t a financial analyst who lived in New York City. One in which I wasn’t a spinster, recently dumped by the man I thought I’d be building a life with. One in which I had everything I ever really wanted.
But I could see now that it was a mirage. One I’d wanted so desperately to believe could be real.
Even Michael was just a flickering falsehood—a version of the man I’d wanted to believe in. One he could never be. Because Michael wasn’t free.
He’d told me himself that he lived in a prison of his own making. He didn’t use those words, of course, but he existed in a cage he built for himself out of regret and guilt over the failure of his relationship with Shelly. Over the mistakes he’d made as a kid and over the opportunities he’d lost as a result.
And now? He was going to choose to step back inside those bars and pull the door shut again, because he thought that was what he deserved.
No amount of convincing from me—that he was a worthy man, that he deserved to be happy, that he was by far one of the most successful people I’d ever met—would change his mind.
So when I woke the next morning with the sun streaming optimistically through the curtains I’d hung, I knew what I needed to do.
Michael was not in the house when I went downstairs. I’d heard his truck start early, and imagined he’d headed off to the store to punish himself some more.
I had coffee and then headed down the hill to the Muffin Tin.
“Addie!” Mom called as I walked through the door. “Oh no. Oh dear. Here, have a pumpkin creme muffin and sit.”
I guessed my distress was clear on my face. Or maybe it was just clear to mothers.
I sat at the end of the counter, watching my mother bustle around and wishing I had the energy she always seemed to have. She put a latte and a muffin in front of me and then stood, her perfectly manicured plump little hands on the counter in front of my plate. For some reason, I found myself staring at her hands.
They’d done so much in her lifetime. They’d done so much for me. Those hands had held me when I was a baby, had carried my sisters and me as children. They’d made countless treats and wiped innumerable tears from our cheeks. They’d hugged and loved, and helped for as long as I had known this woman, and for some reason staring at my mother’s hands now brought tears to my eyes.
“Oh, Addie, what is it?”
I put one of my hands atop my mother’s and looked at the difference. I’d done nothing in my life. I’d thought I was building some kind of empire of independence, modeling the new self-made woman, showing my small-town family what I could do. But my hands were smooth and unlined, and they revealed the folly in my thinking. My hands hadn’t smoothed away tears or held babies. They hadn’t made cookies for school bake sales or tied shoes on the ends of pudgy little legs. They’d typed and processed spreadsheets and dialed for takeout.
“Mom,” I whispered, and it was a broken sob that came from my lips as I realized the extent of my own failures, gazed behind me at the ignored opportunities, the scattered dreams I’d ignored. “I’ve done everything wrong.”
Mom covered my hand with her other one, shaking her head with tears standing in her own eyes. “Oh, my Addie, no. No, you haven’t.” She stepped around the counter and pulled me into her arms, and I buried my face in her familiar smell. The Aqua Net of her bob, the gardenia perfume she sprayed into the air and then shimmied through, the flour and sugar and cinnamon that made up her days. My heart broke wide open and I cried.
For what felt like hours, I sobbed into my mother’s apron like a child, Muffin Tin patrons no doubt avoiding the scene and hoping it might be over soon. But Mom didn’t say a word, she just held me close and let me cry.
And when I’d simmered down to sniffles, wiping at my face and recovering myself as best I could, Mom looked at me and said, “Let’s figure out what’s next.”
For the rest of the day, I stayed at the Tin. Mom and I worked side by side, and we didn’t actively talk about what it was I was going to do next. Instead, we cobbled together ideas percolated alongside pots of hot coffee and pieced together in the quiet moments between oven timers dinging and customers paying for muffins. And when I helped Mom close down the shop at the end of the day, somehow I had something that felt like a plan.
“So you’ll stay through Halloween, and then go back to the city,” she said. “Not because you owe anything to anyone, but because you have unfinished business there.”
I nodded, testing her words in my soul and finding that they felt right. I would have left earlier, but I felt like I owed it to Daniel to see the haunted house through, and maybe I owed it to Michael to let him know my plans.
He might not care where I went or what I did, but since we were still looped into the house together, he needed to know the plan.
I texted Michael that I was staying with Mom, and I didn’t go back to the house that night, or again until Wednesday evening, the following week. I arrived to find Michael hanging the porch swing in the fading light.
“Hi,” I said, feeling like an intruder as I stood on the front walk of what was technically my house.
He stopped what he was doing and turned to face me, and in the shadowed eaves, I could see emotions cross his face one by one. Surprise. Happiness. Regret. Distance. “Hi,” he said. He stepped toward me and then seemed to think better of it, remaining on the porch at the top of the steps.