Chapter 4: Call Me Mom

For a moment, Ariel just stood in the doorway of the wrecked room, too tired to feel much of anything beyond the ache in her legs. Somewhere below her she could hear dishes being cleared, someone's low laughter, the ordinary sounds of a household settling in for the night, as if a girl hadn't just been handed a rulebook instead of a welcome.

Mrs. Dalton appeared in the doorway behind them before Ariel could take in the wreckage of the room properly, her voice suddenly tight in a way it hadn't been downstairs, sharper, almost frightened.

"Nathan. This is a storage room. She can't stay here."

"It's fine, Mrs. Dalton," Nathan said, unbothered, already turning to leave, keys still swinging carelessly from one finger. "Plenty of space once you clear a path to the bed. Assuming there is one under all that."

"I said this isn't acceptable." Something in Mrs. Dalton's tone made even Nathan pause halfway down the hall. It wasn't the voice of a woman correcting a servant's oversight. It was closer to panic, quickly smoothed over the moment she noticed Ariel watching her too closely. "I'll have someone see to it in the morning. For tonight..." she stopped, seeming to lose the thread of her own sentence.

There seemed little point arguing about a bedroom on top of everything else tonight. Exhaustion was starting to press down on her shoulders. Ariel turned to follow Nathan out when Mrs. Dalton's voice stopped her at the threshold.

"Ariel. Wait."

She turned.

Mrs. Dalton stood very still in the hallway light, hands folded tightly in front of her. Ariel couldn't place her expression. Not quite warm. Not quite guilty. Something closer to need.

For a moment neither of them spoke. Down the hall, a grandfather clock ticked steadily, absurdly loud in the sudden quiet.

"I know tonight has not gone the way either of us pictured it," Mrs. Dalton said finally, her composure slipping at the edges. "I imagined this day for eighteen years, Ariel. I had an entire version of it in my head, the reunion, what I'd say, what you'd say back. None of it looked like this."

Ariel said nothing, watching her carefully. It was the first honest sentence Mrs. Dalton had spoken all evening.

"Could you," Mrs. Dalton said slowly, each word costing her something, "please call me... Mom?"

Britney, already halfway down the hall on her way to her own room, spun around so fast her heels skidded audibly on the marble. "What?"

Ariel said nothing. Couldn't have, even if she'd wanted to. Less than an hour ago, this same woman had looked at her like she didn't belong here. Now she was asking for the one word Ariel had spent eighteen years aching to say to somebody, and giving it to the wrong person felt like a betrayal she hadn't agreed to.

Mrs. Dalton didn't take the question back, even as the silence stretched long enough to become its own kind of answer. She only waited, watching Ariel with an intensity that had nothing casual in it, the look of someone who needed this particular word far more than the moment reasonably called for. Not affection exactly. Something more urgent than that. Almost like relief being requested in advance.

Britney's face had gone pale, all the earlier smugness drained out of it. She looked, for the first time since Ariel arrived, genuinely frightened rather than annoyed.

"Mom," Britney said, her voice smaller than Ariel had heard it all night, almost childlike. "What is she talking about? Why would you ask her that?"

Mrs. Dalton didn't answer her daughter. Her eyes stayed fixed on Ariel, waiting, her folded hands tightening slightly at the knuckles.

Ariel opened her mouth, some half-formed sentence rising in her throat, I already have a mother, and she's two thousand miles away, shaking too hard to hold a spoon, but the words wouldn't quite arrange themselves into something she could say out loud to a woman who was looking at her like a lifeline. She closed her mouth again.

Somewhere behind them, down at the far end of the hall, a door clicked shut very quietly, the deliberate, careful sound of someone who didn't want to be caught listening, and had just decided they'd heard enough.