I pull the spare chair beside her and sit down, logging on to my laptop. “She mentioned your name in it.”
“Before she knew me, darling. Imagine I died tomorrow. Imagine Fleur and I were killed in a targeted hit-and-run on the highway tomorrow.”
I shudder as I bring up my emails. “Don’t say things like that.”
Her nails scratch in my hair. It makes me want to cry. To curl into the lap of a woman who doesn’t really exist anymore, not the way I want her to. “Butimagine, love. What would you do if you knew who was driving the car?”
“Maman,” I sigh, scrubbing my hands down my face. “I’ve overanalyzed it enough already. I don’t care what she did to Cain, I care what she did to you, to the girls. And it’s not like she would forgive me for leaving the way I did, anyway.Andthe distance. I could go on forever.”
“Tell her your lawyer asked you not to contact her.”
“It’s a cheap excuse. I haven’t contacted her because I can’t bring myself to. Helen’s advice has nothing to do with it.”
“She might’ve written it, but I think we both know she wouldn’t have leaked that article,” she continues, like she’s bringing up a point I haven’t already thought of during the countless sleepless nights of the past month. Like this isn’t the hundredth time we’ve had the exact same conversation.
Ophelia and I are separated by thousands of miles and avastocean of mistrust, all the progress I’d made with her shipwrecked at the bottom of it.
“It doesn’t matter, Mom. I’m desperately trying to move on. Even if we did work it out, I’m here and she’s over there. She can’t get on a plane to visit.”
“But once you quit—”
“Mom,” I say, gently. “Please drop it.”
Gentle fingers swipe a lock of too-long dark hair away from my forehead, eyes full of some unidentifiable emotion. Tears pool on her thick, black lashes.
“Don’t say it.” I can’t hear it again.
“Say what?”
“That I look like him. It’s the first thing anyone says when they walk into my office.”
Her bottom lip wobbles. “I was going to say how sorry I am that you’ve ended up in this position, that you’ve ended up in the one job you always made it clear you didn’t want. That you’re the only father figure in their life. I was going to say how sorry I am that you’ve …”
“Maman, don’t.”
A lone tear trickles over her cheek. “Ended up with me as a mother and him as a father.”
“You’re the best mother I know,” I whisper, snaking an arm around her bony shoulders. “And I mean that.”
“I’m justsosorry.”
I swivel her chair back to face the laptop. “Enough of that talk. Look at this.”
I bring up an email that I read earlier from Jack, my rugby teammate from Sorrowsong. It’s a forwarded chain of emails between his parents: a top-ranked neurosurgeon and a psychiatrist.
She peers in at the screen, the blue light spilling over her delicate cheekbones. “Anothermedication. Alex, I …”
“It’s been really promising in trials. They’re still rolling it out.”
“Do you know them?”
“Their son is on my rugby team—my old rugby team.”
“You can go back to Sorrowsong. Don’t rule it out.”
“I’m twenty-three, Mom. Too old to start again.”
She laughs, brushing her hair out of her face with a shaky hand. “I was like that at your age. Thinking I was running out of time even though I was just a baby.”
