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“Oh. Is she nice?”

I closed my eyes briefly. “He. And yes, he is.”

Another pause, longer this time. When she spoke again her voice was softer. “Oh.”

I waited, braced for the familiar shuffle of discomfort, the careful change of subject. The polite avoidance that had followed every half-finished conversation about my personal life since I’d left home.

“Is he good to you?”

The question caught me off guard.

I thought of Quinn. The way he laughed with the group at rehearsal. The way he’d leaned against me in my bed as if it was the most natural place in the world.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “He is.”

“That’s what matters.” Relief threaded through her voice. “Will I meet him?”

I blinked. “Do you want to?”

“Well, eventually, yes. If he’s going to be in your life.”

For a moment I didn’t know what to say. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might ask that.

My mother had never been cruel. That wasn’t her way. She simply avoided anything she didn’t quite understand. Music she didn’t follow. Friends she’d never met. The parts of my life that existed outside the neat framework she recognised. I’d learned not to volunteer those parts.

And now she was asking.

“If it becomes serious,” she continued carefully, “it would be nice to know the person who makes my son happy.”

I leaned back against the kitchen worktop, the phone warm against my ear. I hadn’t considered that possibility.

“Maybe,” I said slowly.

The truth was, until very recently I hadn’t planned for Quinn to exist in my life long enough for introductions to matter.

Things were changing faster than I’d expected.

“Max?”

“Yes?”

“I know I don’t always say the right thing.”

That alone was unexpected.

“But I did notice something,” she continued.

“What?”

“You sound different lately.”

I frowned. “Different how?”

“Lighter. You haven’t sounded like that since you were about nineteen.”

Nineteen. The year everything with Simon—and later Jordan—had started shaping the man I became.

My mother, apparently, had been listening all along.