“Of course,” I said. “I’m not asking to move to Scottsdale and live with you, Mom.”
“Good. Well.” She moved on without stopping, the way she always moved on. “Any progress on the job front?”
I stared at the loose thread on the cushion, twisting it around my finger. “I’m figuring it out.”
“Mmm.” That sound. That particularmmmthat managed to contain an entire verdict without committing to one. “I heard the salon in Willowmist Falls didn’t pan out.”
I hadn’t told her that. Which meant she’d heard it from one of her friends in town, filed it away, and was now producing it like evidence.
“Not yet,” I said carefully.
“Beauty school wasn’t cheap, Becca.” Not unkind, exactly. Just factual. The way she delivered most things that weren’t kind. “I just hate to see you wasting the investment.”
The investment. Notyour talent. Notyour work. The investment.
“I know,” I said. “I haven’t forgotten.”
“There’s always the salon.” She said it the way you’d mention an obvious solution to an obvious problem. Her salon. The one she’d built, and retired from, and sold—all without once asking whether I might have had a stake in what happened to it. “I’m sure whoever bought it would consider renting you a chair again. If you asked.”
“I’ll look into it,” I said, because it was easier than explainingagainhow the new owners had their family working the salon now and didn’t need anyone else.
“Good.” Satisfied, like she’d solved something. “Well. I was talking to one of my girlfriends this morning, and she mentioned that Stop & Go is hiring. If you need something in the meantime.”
“Oh yeah? I’ll look into that.” My friend Elizabeth’s family owned the place, a convenience store and gas station combo right in the middle of Sweetbriar.
“Smart.” A brief pause, and I thought for a half-second that she might say something else. Something warmer. “All right. Well, let me know how it goes.”
“I will.”
“Take care of yourself.”
“You too, Mom.”
The line went quiet, and I sat there with the phone in my hand, that familiar hollow feeling settling in. It wasn’t a cruel conversation. It never was. That was the thing about my mother—she never said anything you could point to and call wrong. She just left you feeling like you’d been observed and found slightly lacking.
I’d spent years trying to figure out how to be someone she’d look at differently. Travis had felt like an answer to that, once. Steady job, confident, knew what he wanted—exactly the kind of man my mother would approve of. And she had approved, right up until he’d given her no choice but to quietly revise her opinion without ever admitting she’d had one in the first place.
Invisible and disappointing.I was starting to think I’d learned that particular combination so early it had started to feel like a personality trait. And underneath everything else that was going wrong in my life—quieter, but no less persistent—was something else.
Levi.
His face kept surfacing in the middle of my spiraling thoughts. The way his eyes had softened when he asked me to talk, the careful distance he kept even when every instinct in him clearly wanted to close it. The memory of his hand on my elbow outside the hardware store—steady, warm, gone too soon. The way his voice dropped when he said my name, like it still meant something after all these years. I hated how much I noticed. How much Iwantedto notice and liked what I’d observed.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him leaning across the table at Violet’s. I remembered the exact weight of his gaze when he looked at me like I was the only person in the room. I remembered how safe it felt to be seen by him—really seen—and how terrifying that safety was now, because letting him in meant letting everything else that came along with him in too. The fear. The want. The history we’d never quite finished writing.
I opened my laptop again and applied for the job at the Stop & Go. There. A plan. Or at least the beginning of one. The relief lasted all of five minutes before the nerves crept back in, restless and insistent, pushing me toward motion instead of stillness. Feeling dangerously accomplished, I closed my laptop and turned my attention to something small and controllable.
I was halfway through reorganizing the tiny bathroom cabinet—an activity I did only when I was aggressively avoiding my own thoughts—when my phone buzzed with a notification from the podcast platform.
I frowned. I hadn’t gone live. I hadn’t posted anything new. I wiped my hands on a towel and picked it up anyway.New comment.
I opened the app, heart ticking a little faster than it should have.
The comment was not from a username I recognized.
Wild night by the river. Sweetbriar’s getting interesting.
I stared at the screen.
