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She shrugged. “Why do you think Maël left?” she asked.

“I think he wanted the money. He was afraid that I was going to make him give it back, and the gun, too.”

“I was thinking about all my stuff, all the bags I brought. He probably didn’t want to be bothered with physical possessions,” she told me. “He isn’t someone to be weighed down like that.”

“I noticed that he never changed his clothes,” I agreed. Now I would return the shirt I’d gotten for him as a Christmas gift and he could wear the same one for the rest of his life, for all I cared. I leaned closer to the mirror to work on my mascara.

“Give that to me,” she suddenly said. “Try it like this.” She put some on herself, sweeping the little applicator up and wiggling it as she went. “There’s less clumping that way.”

“Thanks,” I said. It did look better when I tried the technique. She had never helped me with makeup before, since she’d always said that she didn’t believe in artificial enhancements and that beauty was transient and undetermined. “How did you know that trick?”

“I started wearing a full face of makeup when I was about ten,” she said. But her mind was still on Maël-Michael. “He’s really a very energy-forward guy. You should have seen him trapping strays in Mexico! It was thrilling.”

“I know that you liked him,” I responded.

“But you didn’t.”

“Well, I’ve always enjoyed cleanliness and he doesn’t. And I didn’t get why you thought you needed him so much,” I explained.

“When you get older, in your twenties, you may understand.”

I put down the eyeliner. “Mom, I’m turning twenty-three next month.”

“What?” She looked shocked. “That can’t be true.”

“It is, I swear. I even have a passport now to prove it. I’m old enough to understand about loving someone,” I told her.

“Twenty-three,” she repeated, shaking her head. “That doesn’t seem right.”

“I promise that it is.” I nudged her out of the way so I could leave the bathroom. “I’m going to head out now, so let me know if you want me to bring any takeout home for you. I mean that I would bring it here, to my home. Where I chose to live alone,” I clarified.

“I’m so full of emotions right now,” she said, sighing. “There’s no room for food.”

“I can see that you’re upset, but you really don’t need him!” I told her. “You should start thinking about moving forward. Did you do any of the things on the list I made? The one I wrote on the whiteboard?”

“What whiteboard?”

I looked around the living room and realized that I hadn’t seen it since that morning. It might have gone out with the furniture pieces by mistake. “I’ll write a new one when I get home. In the meantime, you could do a little yoga and read.” I glanced around again. “I used to have a book on one of those shelves, but I don’t know what happened to that, either.”

“I’ll probably work on trying to clear some of the terrible energy from this apartment,” she said, and I was glad that she had a project.

“Great!” I answered. “I’ll see you later tonight.”

Oliver was already downstairs to pick me up and we went to a restaurant that was nearby, one that he and Gramps both liked. We had a really nice time talking about things other than the problem with Maël-Michael and my mom, although we did discuss Gramps, his vacation (we had both received many, many pictures), and a possible reconciliation between him and his son, Oliver’s dad.

“New Year’s Eve,” he suggested. “I could have them over. It’s a time to start fresh with everything and they could, too. Are you free?”

“I don’t have much of a social calendar,” I said. “I think I’ll be available. I was working on reconciliation ideas, too.” I opened my phone to show him the draft of the email I had written to my grandparents. “I’m trying to make it sound conciliatory.”

“It sounds more accusatory. ‘You should consider this as an opportunity to right some of the numerous wrongs you’ve done to her, such as permitting her to party as a preteen and be preyed upon by perverts,’” he read aloud. “It’s also alliterative.”

“I should fix that.”

He kept reading. “You go into a bit of a tangent about Mexican handicrafts,” he continued. “But overall, you make a lot of good points. I hope they’ll step in and help out.”

“The only reason that they stepped in before, when I wanted to go to school, was a fear of embarrassment. I had been writing to them for months to ask for their help but they ignored it until they were going to have the profile done about them.”

“Do they have any reason to be embarrassed now?”