Page 165 of In Somnis

The sentence sounds impossible even after I say it.

His arms tighten even more.

“On average, people lose their parents when they’re in their fifties or sixties.” I don’t know why I know this statistic. I looked it up at three in the morning in a hospital waiting room, and I haven’t been able to unknow it since. “I feel like I got robbed. Like someone reached in and took twenty years that were supposed to be mine, and I’ll never… I’ll never get to call her when something good happens. I’ll never get to call her when something bad happens. I’ll never—” My voice breaks. “She’ll never meet anyone I love. She’ll never know how any of it turns out.”

Nevan doesn’t say anything, but his comfort is enough—the fact he’s here. I’m slightly aware of the smell of him—cinnamon and worn hoodie. Beneath that is warmth, comfort, and it makes everything simultaneously better and worse. My mom was the person who knew how to give it to me in the way that fit, and she’s not here.

She would know what to do with all of it. With Tessa, Paul, Ridge, and the mess I’ve made of the last two weeks in this small town. She’d sit across from me with her coffee and her reading glasses pushed up on her head and listen to all of it without interrupting. Then, she’d say exactly the right thing, and I would roll my eyes at it and then lie awake that night, realizing she was correct.

She was always correct.

My head is pounding now, worse from all the crying, a tight band running from my temples around to the base of my skull, and I press my face harder into Nevan as if that will help.

“I’m thirty-five,” I say again, quieter this time. “I’m a fully functioning adult. I have a job and a car, and I can do my own taxes. And I’m in pain and all I want—” I gasp for air. “All I want is my mom.”

“I know.”

Something in the way he says it makes me lift my head. Nevan looks down at me, and his expression is the most unguarded I’ve ever seen.

“I know that feeling. I’ve known it my whole life. The wanting your mom part. Just… not my mom.”

I reach up, take his hand where it rests against my shoulder, and hold it.

“Tell me about her,” he says softly. “Your mom.”

So I do.

I tell him about her laugh first, because that’s the thing I miss most, how it came from somewhere deep, caught you off guard and made you feel like the funniest person alive. I tell him about the lemon cake covered in way too many sprinkles she made every birthday without fail, even the year she was going through chemo, and her hands shook. I tell him about how she swore at the television when she watched the news and kept every card anyone ever sent her in a shoebox under her bed.

I tell him she was sixty-five, which is so young, which is so unfair, which I keep bumping up against like a wall I can’t get past.

I tell him she would have loved Vernonia. She would have walked into the inn and charmed everyone in a fifteen-foot radius within forty seconds, and she would have shown up to my apartment with a car full of furniture I didn’t ask for and arranged it all while I was at work.

Nevan listens to all of it. He shifts at some point so we’re lying properly, me tucked against his side with my head on his chest, and he reaches behind himself and produces Mr. Muffin from somewhere in the blankets and sets him on my stomach without comment, pulling the yellow blanket up around us both.

When I run out of things to say, the room is quiet for a moment, but I don’t want quiet right now.

“Tell me about yours,” I request. My hand finds its way into his hair like it was always going to end up there. “Your mom.”

At first, he’s quiet, and I get the sense he is choosing which version to give me, the easy or the true one.

“She loved me. I know she did. Sometimes she’d look at me like I was the most remarkable thing the universe had ever made, like just me existing was proof of something.” A slow breath moves through him. “But she was dealing with a lot of things she didn’t have the tools for. And sometimes the people who love you can still leave gaps you spend the rest of your life trying to fill.”

I drag my nails lightly across his scalp, and he makes a low sound, letting his eyes close.

“Mabel helped,” he says, and I can hear something in his voice when he says her name that is both lighter and more complicated. “She was the one who… she made sure we were okay. Made sure I was okay. But even then, even with Mabel, there were nights where I was just…” He stops, releasing a deep sigh before continuing. “Just a kid who wanted his mom.”

“I’m sorry,” I say quietly.

Because I’ve been lying here missing my mom for everything she was, for the thirty-five years of her I had and the twenty I won’t, and he’s been missing a version of his mom his whole life. The grief is in different shapes, but it comes from the same place, and I feel the unfairness of it sitting heavily between us.

“It was what it was.”

“She’d have liked you,” I say. “My mom.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. She had a thing for people who are funny without trying…” I pause, the image of it arriving uninvited and almost too clear. She is at the kitchen table, leaning forward on her elbows, already laughing at something Nevan said and halfway to adoring him, making my chest ache at the thought of something that will never happen. “She would have made you eat too much and asked you extremely personal questions within the first twenty minutes, and you would have loved her.”