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“Hello? Darcy?”
“Hi.” I hated that tears had sprung to my eyes at the very sound of her voice, and I blinked them back impatiently.
“Is everything okay? Did something happen?” I could hear she sounded worried, which was understandable—I never called her up just to chat.
“No, everything’s fine.” I swallowed hard. “I just, um…” I looked out at the cars flying past, everyone heading somewhere. For a second I got overwhelmed by it all—all the stories contained in all of them, all the loves and losses and heartbreaks.
Focus, I reminded myself, since I didn’t want to rely on Didi and Katy to do this anymore.
“I changed a tire.”
“You—what?” Gillian sounded utterly thrown by this, and I didn’t blame her.
“I’m on a drive with a—a friend, and the tire went flat and we changed it. You showed me how. Remember? In Oregon?”
“I do,” Gillian said slowly, like she was also pulling this memory, over a decade old, from the recesses of her mind.
“But that’s not really why I called. I…” I pressed my lips together and made myself say it. “I wanted to apologize for last night. I shouldn’t… have said those things to you. And I’m sorry.”
“Wow. Okay,” Gillian said. It was like I could practically feel her regrouping over the phone. “That’s not what I was expecting. Um… thank you.”
“I guess,” I said, making myself go on, knowing that if I stopped to think about what I was doing, I wouldn’t get through it. This was walking on a balance beam, or doing a backflip off a diving board. If you thought too hard about how impossible the thing you were doing was, you’d never accomplish it. “I’ve been… really mad at you. For a while now. And I probably should have just talked to you about it, but—” I shook my head. I was now regretting not figuring out what I was going to say before I started this, but that ship had sailed, and here we were. There was no way out but through.
“I was mad that you left, that I didn’t get to see you, like, ever, and then you started a whole new family with someone else and forgot all about me. And then it seemed—it seemed—” My voice was hitching in my throat, and hot tears had started to snake down my cheeks. I took a shaky breath. “It seemed like you wanted me to just forget about it all when I said I’d go to Stanwich, like that made up for everything. Like you were trying to buy me off or something? Like—a bribe? And I just—” I swallowed hard and lifted my sunglasses up to wipe my face.
“Darcy. I never forgot about you. Never ever.” Her voice was fierce, and it sounded like maybe there were tears on her end as well. “You’re my daughter, and not a day goes by that I don’t wish… that I would have done some things differently.” I heard her take a hitching breath on the other end of the phone, three thousand miles away from me. “I was so happy when I heard you got into Stanwich. And so proud. And I thought that maybe it could be a fresh start for you and me.”
“I was talking to…” The words Wylie Sanders floated through my mind, but I didn’t want to derail this conversation by bringing a rock star into it. “… to someone this morning, and they said that as a parent, you just want to do what you can to help your kids. And I hadn’t thought of it like that until now.”
“Oh, Darcy.” Gillian sighed. “I never meant for you to see it as a bribe. It was just…”
There was a pause, and for a second I wished I knew what she looked like right now, where she was. At work? In her kitchen, in her house in Connecticut? I couldn’t even picture it—but maybe soon, I would be able to. I’d been so dismissive of her, so angry that she didn’t know anything about my life—not factoring in, until now, that this went both ways. That I also didn’t know nearly enough about hers.
After a moment, she went on, a slight tremble in her voice. “There’s so much I wasn’t there for. So much I didn’t give you. And I just thought that this was finally something I could do for you.”
I looked out at the traffic as the warm breeze lifted my hair—the hair I’d inherited from her—and blew it all around me. “I didn’t understand just how young you and Dad were—when you had me. And I know I probably got in the way of things you wanted to do—”
“No.” Gillian’s voice was firm. “You were the best thing I ever did, Darcy. And I might regret what I did—and how I handled things—but I never regretted you. Not once.”
My eyes filled with fresh tears, like the ones I was already crying weren’t quite enough.
I heard her take a halting breath, and then continue. “And I know I probably don’t deserve one—but if you could see your way to giving me a second chance, that would make me… really happy.”
I wiped the tears from my eyes. It felt like all the things I’d so firmly believed were breaking up and floating away. Suddenly, it was like I could see everything from a new angle. What if being around Gillian this year wasn’t going to be the worst thing in the world, some kind of punishment? What if it could actually be an opportunity to finally get to know my mother? Because this was all I’d wanted when I was younger—more time with my mom. To actually be in the same place that she was. It suddenly seemed beyond petty that I was turning my back on this because it wasn’t happening in the timeline I’d wanted.
“I think I’d like that too.” I pushed my sunglasses on top of my head, wiped under my eyes, and took a deep breath. “I’m not sure what that looks like, though.”
“Me either,” Gillian said immediately, and I laughed—and heard, through the phone, that she was laughing too. “But maybe we can figure it out? We don’t have to do everything all at once.”
I nodded, feeling this hit me somewhere deep in my chest. “That sounds good.”
“Well. Okay.”
“Okay,” I echoed. There was a beat of comfortable silence, and I just took a moment to note how nice even that was—a conversation with Gillian that wasn’t fraught and testy, me snapping and angry and resenting her for everything I wanted from her but wasn’t getting.
“So now that that’s out of the way,” she said, clearing her throat, “maybe you want to tell me why Wylie Sanders’s lawyer was calling me last night?”
“Oh.” I glanced back at Russell, who was standing by the car. He gave me a look that even from a distance I could tell meant Everything okay? I nodded and pointed to my phone, and he nodded as well. “Well…”
