And I’ve spent the last twelve years making sure Hudson never felt like someone’s afterthought, making sure he never had to wonder if he was enough. Making sure I never let anyone into our lives who might leave again.
What would it mean if I let Boone in now? Not just in a co-parenting way but in a…romantic way?
Would Hudson even want that?
Maybe he’d like it. Maybe it’d feel like the piece we’ve been missing.
But then what?
What if Boone changes his mind again? What if I let him back in and it’s not just my heart that takes the hit this time?
What if I’m still not enough to keep him here?
The thought seeps in, unbidden, unwelcome, but relentless all the same. It’s the fear that’s always been there, tucked into the quietest corners of me, the one I never say out loud.
Maybe that started the day my mom left.
She used to exist only in pieces. In grainy photographs tucked inside a shoebox in my dad’s closet, in whispers of perfume that still clung to the silk lining of a coat he never got rid of. In the few memories I had managed to keep—her hands playing with my hair, the sound of her laugh, the way she would tap her fingernail against her glass when she was thinking, a soft, rhythmic sound like rain against a windowpane.
She was beautiful. I remember that much. Long blonde hair, feathered bangs, blue eyes so big and bright they looked like they could swallow you whole. I used to stare at those pictures for hours, tracing the curves of her face, looking for pieces of myself in her features, trying to understand the woman who had carried me into the world and then walked right out of it.
She left when I was three. That’s what my dad always said. Left and never looked back.
I used to ask about her all the time when I was little, waiting for a different answer, one that might make sense. But my dad never wavered. He’d just sigh, rub his hands over his tired face, and tell me the same thing.
She wasn’t ready to be a mom.Some people just aren’t meant to stay, baby.
Like that was supposed to explain it.
Maybe it did, in a way. Maybe some women just aren’t built for it, the weight of a child too heavy to carry. But now that I’m a mother myself, I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t imagine looking at Hudson and deciding that he was too much. That I was too little. That he’d be better off without me. I would walk through fire for him, move heavenand earth, break myself apart and rebuild a thousand times over just to make sure he had everything he needed.
That’s what being a mother is supposed to mean. That’s what love is supposed to be.
So what did it say about me that I was never enough for her?
One day, curiosity got the better of me.
I don’t know what I was expecting when I decided to look her up. Maybe a marriage license, an old address in some town I’d never heard of, a record of parking tickets—something that made her feel real, like she still existed somewhere beyond the edges of my memory. I remember typing everything I knew about her in the search bar.
Tara Lynn Westwood.
Birth date: August 7, 1972.
Birthplace: Summit Springs, Montana.
I hit return.
And there it was—her obituary.
I’d stared at the words until they blurred together, my brain struggling to catch up with what I was seeing. And then I clicked on the link, and there she was.
Only she wasn’t.
The woman in the obituary photo was not the one I remembered from the old photographs my father kept in a shoebox beneath his bed. Not the woman with the bright, sea-glass eyes and a mouth that always seemed on the verge of a secret. Not the one who looked alive in the way few people ever truly do—like the world hadn’t yet found a way to touch her.
The woman in the obituary was different.
Her hair was brittle, limp, the color faded. Her face was sharper than I remembered, gaunt, as if she had been carved down to the bone. But it was her eyes that unsettled me the most.
