Margaret

Alexandria’s POV

My mother arrived on a Saturday morning with one carry-on bag and the particular energy of a woman who had raised a child alone and developed a radar for things that weren’t being said.

I picked her up from the airport myself. No house car, no driver. I wanted the thirty minutes in the car before she saw the house, before she saw Jamie, before the visit became a real thing with all its variables. Just the two of us on the freeway with the desert on both sides and the AC running and her hand reaching over to rest on mine on the gearshift the moment she got in the car.

She looked at my stomach before she looked at my face. Then she looked at my face.

“You look well,” she said. Which from my mother meant something specific — not pretty, not put together, but well. Like a plant that had been in the wrong soil and had been moved.

“I feel better than I did,” I said.

“Better than you did when?”

“Pick a point,” I said.

She nodded. Settled back in the seat. Let the freeway pass for a while before she said anything else.

“Tell me what I need to know before I walk into that house.”

That was my mother. No performance, no easing in. Just the question that mattered.

So I told her. Not everything — there were things that were still too new or too fragile to put into words for someone else, even her. But the shape of it. The leaving I’d planned, the pregnancy I’d discovered, the conversations in the kitchen at three in the morning, the therapy, Kendrick, the gala, the red dress. The suitcase still in the closet with the passport no longer inside it.

She listened without interrupting. That was a skill she’d developed over years of hearing difficult things from me and understanding that the worst thing she could do was make me feel like I needed to manage her reaction alongside my own.

When I finished she was quiet for a moment.

“Do you love him,” she said.

“I don’t know what I feel right now,” I said honestly. “I know I don’t feel nothing. I know that the version of him that’s been showing up lately is someone I could — I don’t know. I’m trying not to get ahead of the evidence.”

“Smart,” she said.

“Or self-protective.”

“Those aren’t different things.” She looked out the window. “I spent three years after your father left being very sensible about not getting ahead of the evidence and I was completely right and completely miserable for the same reasons.” A pause. “I’m not saying ignore the evidence. I’m saying don’t confuse caution with distance. You can be careful and still be in it.”

I thought about that for the rest of the drive.

Jamie was home when we arrived.

He’d offered to be out — made the offer the night before, plainly, said he could go to the office for a few hours if I wanted time with her first. I’d told him to stay. Partly because hiding him felt like the wrong message, partly because my mother needed to see us in the same room to form her own opinion and I respected her enough to let her do that.

He was in the kitchen when we came in. Not performing domesticity — he wasn’t making tea or arranging things — just at the island with his laptop, where he actually spent Saturday mornings. He stood when we walked in.

“Mrs. Reyes,” he said.

My mother looked at him. She did the thing she did where she looked at a person the way she looked at a document she was deciding whether to sign. Thorough, unhurried, giving nothing away.

“Jamie,” she said.

He extended his hand. She shook it.

“I’ll let you two settle in,” he said. He looked at me briefly — checking in, the new way he checked in, just a glance that asked if things were okay — and then took his laptop and went to the study.

My mother watched him go.

Then she turned to me. “He’s scared of me.”

“He’s not scared of anything,” I said automatically.

“He’s scared of me,” she repeated, pleasantly. “Which is correct. He should be.”

I almost smiled.

The day moved in the ordinary way of days with my mother. We sat in the sunroom and she told me about Phoenix and her neighbor and the garden she was trying to grow in a climate that resisted it. We had lunch at the kitchen island, the three of us, which was not as uncomfortable as I’d expected. Jamie was quieter than usual but present in a way that felt genuine rather than performed — asking my mother real questions about herself, actual questions, not the transactional small talk he used to deploy at dinner parties.

She told him about raising me in a house with bad pipes and good books and a corner of the kitchen table that was always mine for homework.

He listened. Not waiting to speak. Actually listening.

Afterward, when Jamie had gone back to his study, my mother washed her hands at the kitchen sink and said without turning around, “He looks at you like he’s trying to make up for something.”

“He is,” I said.

“Does he know what he’s making up for?”

“He’s learning.”

She dried her hands. Turned around. Leaned against the counter the way she’d leaned against counters my whole life, comfortable in kitchens in a way I’d always envied and apparently inherited without noticing.

“The baby,” she said. “Are you frightened?”

“Every day,” I said.

“Good. The ones who aren’t frightened aren’t paying attention.” She crossed her arms. “You’re going to be a wonderful mother, Alex.”

My eyes stung. I’d been doing that more lately — the pregnancy making my emotions faster to surface, quicker to arrive. I pressed my lips together for a moment.

“I don’t know how to do it,” I said. “I don’t want to repeat—”

“Nobody knows how,” she said. “And you won’t repeat anything. You’re already different from the girl who thought love meant disappearing into someone else.” She looked at me steadily. “That girl started leaving the moment she decided to leave. Even when she stayed.”

I looked at my mother across the kitchen. At the woman who had rearranged a whole life to keep mine warm and never once complained about the cost of it.

“I love you,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “You get that from me.”

From the study came the faint sound of Jamie on a call, his work voice, the measured cadence of a man in his element. My mother heard it too and her expression did something small and unreadable.

“He has a long way to go,” she said.

“I know.”

“But he’s going.” She picked up her tea. “That’s not nothing, Alex. In my experience that’s actually quite a lot.”

I looked at the door to the study.

At the man behind it.

At the long way still to go and the distance already covered.

And I thought maybe she was right.

Maybe it wasn’t nothing.