A seventeen-year-oldshouldhave been able to talk to her mother the way Tessa and Kate talked to Jo Ellen. Maggie shouldn’t have lectured young Vivien on the value of a car, but been there to understand that, as Eli had said,people make mistakes.
Kate wanted that kind of conversation and relationship with Emma. She’d always wanted it, but the years of co-parenting with Jeffrey—who operated on a strict hierarchy of parent-knows-best—had made it harder to build. Now Jeffrey’s approach had blown up in the worst possible way, and Kate had a chance to do something different…and better.
She waited until Emma finished the burger, relaxed and unsuspecting.
“So, honey, has Destin worked its magic on you yet? You feeling better?” Kate leaned in and asked. “Because you look better.”
“I don’t know,” Emma said quietly, dragging a fry through ketchup but abandoning it before it reached her mouth. “I don’t know how I feel. Numb? Tired? Scared? All the things.”
Kate nodded, understanding that.
“I just…” She leaned back and wiped her hands on her napkin, stalling. “Some minutes I’m fine. Like right now, sitting here, this is nice. And then I’ll think about everything that happened and it’s like this wave that just hits me and I can’t breathe.”
Kate listened, even though she wanted to assure her the wave would pass, but at her age, Emma surely believed this one would drown her.
“I feel like everyone can see me,” Emma continued. “I keep imagining going back to Eastmont High and standing in front of the whole senior class and not one kid comes to talk to me. Even my friends have been…weird. Like Allison and Bree. I know they’re madly texting the rest of the volleyball team like I’m thatScarlet Letterlady.”
“I hated that book,” Kate mused.
“So bad,” Emma agreed. “But I feel like I’m wearing one of those signs, and aren’t we beyond that in the twenty-first century?”
“You’d think.”
“As if Allison has never done something dumb for a guy.” She rolled her eyes. “I know stuff, Mom, but I would never say. She’s my teammate and we’ve been close since we played JV volleyball.” She shook her head. “Anyway, back to my original question. Can we move here, please?”
“Probably not in your senior year.”
She snorted. “As if I care.”
Kate weighed all her possible responses and went with something that felt comfortable and natural.
“You know what I’ve learned from twenty-five years in a laboratory?” she asked.
Emma looked at her with amusement in her eyes. “Time for a science metaphor?”
“Probably. Bear with me.” She smiled and gathered her thoughts. “Every important discovery I’ve ever made started with something going wrong. An experiment fails, a result comes back that makes no sense, something breaks or burns or contaminates the whole deal. And in that moment, it feels like a disaster. Like you’ve ruined everything.”
Emma furrowed her brow, skeptical but open.
“But the failure is where the learning is. Not because the failure is good—it’s not, it’s awful, and sometimes it costs you months of work. But because it forces you to look at something you couldn’t see before. You made a mistake, Emma. A real one, with real consequences. But it doesn’t define your entire experiment. And you will learn from it.”
“Yeah, no pictures to morons who you can’t trust.” She flipped her wrist like that kid was a fly near her food. “But my life isn’t a lab experiment, Mom. It’s real.”
“Lab experiments are real,” Kate said, feeling her lame analogy fall to the floor like a discarded napkin.
Emma stared at her plate for a long time. When she looked up, her eyes were damp, but her jaw was set, and Kate saw something in her daughter’s face that she recognized—not from Jeffrey, but from herself. The stubborn refusal to fall apart completely.
“I can’t go back to school there,” Emma said. “I know you think I’ll change my mind, but I won’t. I don’t care about the volleyball team. I don’t care about my friends or homecoming or it being my senior year.”
Did she care about applying to colleges? Kate bit back the thought because it sounded more like Jeffrey and less like…Eli.
“We don’t have to decide that right now,” she said instead.
“And while we’re talking about things that don’t matter?” Emma leaned in, kind of on a roll now. “I’mdonewith Dad.”
“Oh, Emma, don’t?—”
“Mom, you should haveheardhim. He acted like I was…I don’t know. Horrible. A disappointment. A loser. An idiot. Worse. A…” She shook her head and swallowed. “Very bad girl.”
