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By eleven, the event had become Palm Sunday dinner featuring a stale grocery-store cake with DELILAH squeezed into the corner in blue gel.

By sixteen, the cake stopped appearing unless I made it myself.

And guess what?

I’m not doing that anymore. Like my last visit, I’m showing up today completely empty-handed.

No bakery box warming my lap. No folded tablecloth wedged behind my seat.

There isn’t even an emergency pie in the trunk.

My hands feel so empty they might float off my wrists.

Kane opens his door. “Ready?”

“Yeah.” But I don’t move.

He waits a moment, then reaches over and lays his hand on my thigh. His thumb presses into the denim above my knee.

“We can leave,” he reminds me, like he’s been doing all day. “I’ll take you anywhere.”

I look at the house again. “You’d really drive away?”

“I’d set the car on fire in her driveway if you asked nicely.”

“That seems rude.”

“Then don’t ask nicely.”

A laugh slips out. It’s small, but it loosens something lodged beneath my ribs.

This is why I can go inside. Not because the house has changed. Not because my mother has.

Because I won’t be arriving alone.

I take the keys from the ignition. “Come on. Let’s go celebrate Jesus’s highly marketable entrance into Jerusalem.”

Kane gets out. Together, we mount the stairs.

My mother answers before I knock.

Her gaze lands on me first, then moves down my body. It stops at my hands.

Nothing in them.

A tiny muscle jumps beside her mouth. “Kane,” she says with forced warmth. “How lovely to see you again.”

“Leanne.”

“Come in,” she says. “Everyone’s nearly here.”

The living room is crowded but not yet full. Folding chairs line the wall. I wonder who brought them up.

Aunt Virginia sees us and lifts both arms in greeting. “There she is!”

She hugs me hard enough to shift a rib. Aunt Sherry hugs me next, smelling like White Diamonds and the mimosa she’s drinking that’s 98% champagne with hardly enough orange juice to coat the bottom of the glass.

Uncle Bub shakes Kane’s hand. Cousin Jenna tells me she drove past the bakery last week and saw a line out the door. Even Father Dunn, who is hovering beside the mantel with a palm cross pinned to his lapel, says he heard business is booming.