Chapter Eight: The Woman Who Used to Make Me Dinner

Mia's pov

Priya showed up on my porch the next morning before I'd even finished my coffee, still in her pajama shorts with her hair piled on top of her head, which meant whatever she had to tell me couldn't wait for her to get properly dressed.

"You heard about Renata," she said. Not a question.

"Heard what?"

"Mia." She stepped past me into the house without waiting for an invitation, the way she'd been doing since we were eight years old. "Cancer. Stage three. It's already all over campus, Sarah from my chem lab heard it from her cousin who works at St. Andrew's, and you know how fast that stuff travels once it starts."

I sat down hard on the arm of the couch. "Since when."

"They diagnosed her yesterday, I guess. Jordan was there, Eli showed up too apparently, somebody saw his car in the lot." She watched my face carefully, the way she did when she was deciding how much more I could take in one sitting. "You okay?"

I didn't know how to answer that. Renata Reyes had made me dinner more times than my own mother had during the two years Jordan and I were close, back before everything, back when Sunday nights meant her kitchen smelling like garlic and whatever record she had playing low on the counter, some old soul music she swore nobody under forty appreciated anymore. She used to save me the crispy corner piece of the lasagna because she knew it was my favorite, and she'd tease me about it every single time like it was a fresh joke instead of the same one for two straight years.

I hadn't seen her since the breakup. Six months of silence with a woman who used to ask about my day like it actually mattered to her.

"I have to go see her," I said.

"Mia, is that a good idea? With everything going on with Eli, and..."

"I have to go see her, Pri."

She didn't argue after that. She just squeezed my hand once and told me to call her after, and I drove to St. Andrew's with my heart doing something complicated and heavy in my chest, guilt and old affection tangled up together in a way I didn't have a clean name for.

They'd kept her overnight for a procedure, a port placement before her first round of chemo could start, and the woman at the front desk directed me up to the same third floor Jordan had probably paced the night before. I found her room at the end of the hall, door half open, and I stood there for a second longer than I meant to before I worked up the nerve to knock.

"Come in," she called, and her voice sounded exactly the same as I remembered, warm and a little raspy, like she'd just finished laughing at something.

She was sitting up in the hospital bed with a tray of untouched jello in front of her, a cardigan over her gown despite the room being warm, and when she saw me in the doorway her whole face opened up into a smile that undid something in my chest all at once.

"Well, look who it is," she said.

"Hi, Renata."

"Get in here. Don't stand in my doorway like you need permission, you never needed permission in my kitchen and you don't need it now."

I crossed the room and sat in the chair beside her bed, and for a second neither of us said anything, just looked at each other, six months of silence sitting there between us like a third person in the room.

"I heard," I said finally. "I'm so sorry, Renata."

"Don't be sorry yet." She waved a hand like she was swatting the word away. "Sorry is for later, if it comes to that. Right now I'm just tired and I've been eating jello for two days and I would commit several crimes for a plate of my own lasagna."

I laughed, surprising myself, and she smiled at the sound of it like she'd been fishing for exactly that.

"I saved you the corner piece so many times," she said. "You remember that?"

"Every single Sunday. You never let me forget it either."

"Well, somebody had to look out for you in that house. Jordan would've eaten the whole pan and left you the middle piece, no crunch at all, a tragedy." She reached over and took my hand, her fingers thinner than I remembered, the skin a little papery under mine, and I let her, because some part of me had been aching for exactly this kind of easy affection since the day everything fell apart. "How far along are you now?"

"Seven months. A little over."

"Look at you." Her eyes went soft, tracing over me the way older women do when they're doing math in their heads about time passing. "I used to think I'd get to plan your bridal shower one day, you know that? Back before everything. I had the whole thing pictured, sunflowers everywhere, you hate roses."

"I still hate roses."

"I know you do." She squeezed my hand. "Things don't always go the way we picture them. I've learned that lesson about six different times in my life and apparently I'm learning it again right now."

"Renata."

"I'm not saying it to make you feel bad, baby. I'm saying it because it's true, and because I don't have a lot of patience left these days for saying things I don't mean." She shifted a little against her pillows, wincing slightly at whatever the port placement had done to her chest. "I had my lawyer come by yesterday, right after the diagnosis. Before Jordan even got here, if you can believe that. Man works fast when I call him."

"Your lawyer?"

"Just tidying things up. Making sure everything's settled the way I want it, no loose ends for anybody to fight over later, especially not people who never bothered showing up while I was alive to ask them to." Something flickered behind her eyes, gone almost as fast as it appeared, and she smiled again before I could fully catch what it had been. "Boring stuff. You don't want to hear an old woman talk about paperwork."

"I don't mind."

"You're sweet. You were always sweet, even when you probably shouldn't have wasted it on us." She patted my hand and let it go, reaching instead for the untouched jello like she'd suddenly remembered it was there, poking at it with the little plastic spoon without actually eating any. "Anyway. Enough about lawyers and paperwork. I want to talk about something better."

"What's that?"

She set the spoon down and looked at me, really looked, the careful blankness of the past few minutes falling away into something raw and open and completely unguarded, the same look she used to give me across her kitchen table when she wanted me to know she meant every word.

"I want to meet my grandchild before I go," she said, quiet, certain, her hand finding mine again like she needed to be touching me while she said it. "Whatever happens with the treatment, however much time I end up with. That's the one thing I'm asking the universe for. I want to hold that baby in my arms at least once."

I felt my throat close up around every single thing I still hadn't told her, every question that baby's existence was tangled up in that she had no idea about yet, and I sat there holding her hand in a hospital room that smelled like antiseptic instead of garlic and old soul records, and I understood, with a clarity that scared me, that the wish she'd just spoken out loud had already stopped being a simple thing the second it left her mouth.