I didn’t even turn on the radio.

I just drove with the window down, the air roaring in and swirling around me.

Had all that really just happened? Had I really just torpedoed my career—the best thing in my entire life? Had I beaten up Heath Thompson on a stage in front of three hundred of my most esteemed colleagues? Had I given up a promotion to lieutenant by refusing to apologize? What the hell?

One thing I couldn’t decide: Had refusing to apologize been standing up for myself—or sabotaging myself? I could see arguments both ways. As I left behind everything and everyone I cared about back in Texas, and as I pictured my emptied-out apartment and my dad’s garage filled with storage tubs of my stuff, and as I watched the road ahead of me stretch out farther and farther into uncertainty, the question lingered.

It could have been worse, I kept telling myself.

I kept thinking about a woman I’d rescued from a plane crash not that long ago. The pilot, her boyfriend, got caught in a crosswind during landing and cartwheeled. The guy walked away without a scratch, but the woman was so burned, crushed, and wedged, we had to strip the plane apart with the hydraulic cutters.

During the extrication, she told me they had just gotten engaged. On that very flight.

Then she insisted it was the happiest day of her life.

After a while, in the fire service, calls start to blur together in your mind. But a rare few stand out. Something about that woman stayed with me—something about the way I’d glimpsed her future before she did. Her life as she knew it was gone, and I was the first one to know.

That’s how life is. Things happen. Lives get broken. Some people never can put themselves back together.

I wondered if she would.

I wondered if I would.

All I’d had to do was shake the man’s hand and walk off the stage. Instead, I put him in the hospital. Which was still a lot less than he’d done to me. But what was that old saying my dad loved so much? The best revenge is forgetting.

I clearly hadn’t forgotten a thing.

Despite all my efforts.

In my defense, I hadn’t expected to see Heath Thompson there. I’d had no warning. It was supposed to be the mayor—a friendly, portly fellow I’d met several times before. It was the shock of seeing the monster himself. I hadn’t had time to prepare. If I’d known it would be him in advance, maybe I could have acted differently.

Or not.

Maybe, if I’d known, I would have skipped the banquet entirely.

Maybe I wasn’t as completely fine as I wanted to think.

And now—insult to injury—I was moving in with my mother.

The last person I would have picked.

She didn’t even know the real reason I’d agreed to come. She thought I was just being nice—just doing my daughterly duty.

Or maybe she thought I’d softened toward her. Or even decided to forgive her. Was she expecting bonding? Was that on her agenda?

There would be no bonding.

I was going there to do a job. I would help her until she’d adjusted to her new eye situation, and then I’d find somewhere else to live. If I could prove myself at the Lillian FD, I’d move to Lillian. If not, I’d move somewhere else. Somewhere closer to home—preferably some place with tacos. A year at the most, she’d said. But it would take much longer.

Oh my God. I was moving back in with my mother.

How long had it been since I’d lived with her? Not since before she’d left us—on the night I turned sixteen.

A lifetime.

Would she notice how different I was now?

Would it bother me when she noticed?

Would she try to change me back?

And if she did that—if she insisted on comparing and contrasting who I’d been before with who I’d become now—what would that do to me? Would it drown me in sorrow for everything I’d lost?

I sucked in a deep breath and sat up straight.

I needed a strategy. The one thing I couldn’t do right now was to become emotionally destabilized. I had worked too hard and come too far.

The only safe approach I could see was to keep my distance. Yes, I had to live in her attic, but we’d be housemates and nothing more. I’d go to work, and take long runs, and work out, and do whatever chores she asked of me, and that would be it. My mother—and life, and circumstances, and Captain Harris—could force me into this situation. But nobody could make me like it.

 

* * *

 

ARRIVING IN ROCKPORT, I spotted my mother’s house right away. I didn’t even have to check the address.

It was a tiny, classic New England saltbox shape, with gray shingles, just as I’d seen everywhere on my drive up, but it was covered, doorstep to roof, in painted flowers.

The front door, and all around it, and the windows and shutters and window boxes—all brightly, lovingly hand-painted with folk-art reds and pinks and oranges. The tiny front yard overflowed with real flowers as well, in a colorful, tangled jumble, draping over the picket fence.

Yep. This was Diana’s place.

She’d lived in Rockport for a full decade, but I’d never visited. She kept on inviting me, and I kept on declining.

Some part of me had never wanted to see the life she’d left us for.

Now, here I was, moving in.

I stood at the garden gate, but I couldn’t seem to make myself walk through it.

The sheer cuteness of her painted house felt disingenuous. The world might pass this sweet-looking house and decide that an equally sweet person lived in it. But I knew the truth. No amount of painted flowers could cover the truth. She was still the person who’d left us. She was still the person who had disappeared when I really, really needed her.

She was still one of the greatest disappointments of my life.

I tried to get oriented by looking around at the town’s sheer, unadulterated, almost aggressive New England charm.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t been warned. According to Diana, if you’d ever seen a movie that featured a “charming seaside village” for any amount of time, it was Rockport. She could rattle off ten of them in as many seconds. And her house, she swore, was at the epicenter of the cuteness—in a historic fishing village nestled on a narrow jetty called Bearskin Neck that curved out into the harbor.

She’d described it before, of course. I just hadn’t been paying attention.

Quaint little dollhouse-like stores decorated with weathered wooden buoys sold everything from T-shirts to jewelry to ice cream. Shutters were painted cheery pastels, and planter flowers bloomed everywhere. It was too idyllic to be true, and next to my big, hot, multicultural, gritty, authentic, beloved home city of Austin, this place felt absolutely fake.

Yet it felt like my mom, too. She herself was charming, and well groomed, and lovely. I could see why she would feel drawn here. It felt like her in a way Texas never had. I felt a surge of jealously toward this adorable town and all it had to offer. It had gone up against Austin, and won. But the real loser was me.

Just then, the front door opened. And there she was. My long-lost mother. Not literally lost, since, technically, we made an effort to see each other from time to time.

But lost all the same.

It had been a year since I’d seen her—for coffee, the last time she’d been passing through Austin—and I felt the familiar sensation that seeing her always gave me in the years since their divorce. A particular kind of numbness that happened when my heart wanted to flood with all the things people feel about their mothers—but I flat-out refused to let it.