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“I came back!” she finally said. “I came back to get you and I never did that again.”

I looked at the lawyer. “Are we finished here? There’s nothing else you need besides signatures?”

“We can get those now,” he said. “I have hard copies.” He also had a pen, which he offered to my mom.

“Go ahead,” I told her. He showed her all the places to sign, marked with yellow tabs. She wrote her name with the usual flourish on each line and dated it. “Ok. That’s done,” I said. “Goodbye.” I stood up to leave.

“Wait, Hekate,” my mom broke in and I turned on her.

“My name is Katherine! Stop calling me that!” I said. I was loud enough that the rest of the diners and the waitstaff got still and turned to stare. “Don’t call me that again! Don’t ever call me again, not for anything. I’m not going to help you. I’m not going to check on you, I’m not going to care if you make stupid decisions, I’m not going to forgive you.” I had more to say, things about her ridiculous friends and how she wasted so much money on stupid causes rather than on things that really could have made a difference. I wanted to tell her that she should have sent me to school and that she should have stayed in one place. She should have been the one reaching out for all these years that we’d been apart, too, instead of waiting to hear from me.

But she hadn’t been waiting to hear. She hadn’t cared how I was doing. She hadn’t bothered to protect me from Maël-Michael. She had left me in the La Grieta Library during storytime and taken off, for good. Only an earthquake had stopped her.

I didn’t say any of that because the words choked into a painful ball in my throat. I turned and walked away, out of the restaurant. I could hear her call “Hekate! I mean, Kat!” but I didn’t stop and I actually ran once I was on the snowy sidewalk, right back to the hearse. I started it and pulled out—I forgot to look and I definitely didn’t signal, but I only got an extra-long honk instead of an accident. I got lost on the way back to the record shop and I kept ending up at the Detroit River, but I pulled over to start the map and I made it eventually.

Gramps had several customers when I walked in to return the keys to him. “Everything all right, Kat?” he asked me and I nodded quickly before jogging over to the Milaflores Building. First, I was going to change out of my nice outfit and put on some business casual-casual attire (pajamas), but then I saw my mom’s mattress. I grabbed a pair of scissors and stabbed it hard, and I stood watching it deflate. No one was going to need it, since this was a one-bedroom apartment. It was specifically constructed for one person, sola, solitary, alone. Lonely.

I went through the rest of the place, throwing away the smudge sticks, the extra toothbrush, and the crystal necklace that I had gotten for her for Christmas but she had never worn, since she’d taken off with her criminal boyfriend. That made three times that she’d left me without a backward glance. Once when I was five, once last year when I was twenty-two, and now she was doing it again today, when I turned twenty-three. It was my birthday, although she hadn’t remembered and neither had my grandparents.

But it didn’t matter. I was in my dream apartment, living my dream life. I just needed to get some more bookshelves and I would fill them with books. I would get a bed with real mattresses and a sturdy desk, chairs that were comfortable, and a new whiteboard. I would have another go at a bubble bath and I might enjoy this time. I would be totally happy, in fact. This had been my dream for so many years and I was living it.

Someone knocked and I assumed it was Vera, here to collect the earrings that I had borrowed. I opened the front door.

“Hi,” Oliver said. “Is everything ok?”

“No,” I answered. “I mean, yes, it is. My mom is going to live in one of my grandparents’ vacation homes and they’re giving her an allowance, so it all worked out. She’s going to get on their plane and fly back to New York with them.”

“That’s good, but I was asking about you. Gramps has texted me about a thousand times saying that you were upset when you dropped off his keys. Did something go wrong with the hearse?”

“No,” I repeated. “Well, yes. I got honked at because I forgot to look when I pulled out and then it took me an hour to get back here because I got lost so many times. I kept thinking that I should have been able to find my way because I live here now. This is my home! I shouldn’t have pulled into traffic without looking, either, because I’m a licensed driver! I have everything the way I want it, so there’s no reason for me to keep messing up.”

He looked at me, nodding slightly. “Can I come in?”

“I don’t know why you’d want to. The table has all kinds of graffiti scratched into it from when my mom’s boyfriend was here and the only chair that’s left is the one I used for my desk, which is on the verge of breaking again. It’s uncomfortable, anyway.”

“I would want to come in to talk to you more, but maybe you could come to my house instead. I do have places to sit, if you’re interested.”

“Don’t you have to work?” I asked.

“I’m taking the afternoon off. Do you need a coat?”

I got one and then looked at him. “Where’s yours?”

“Oh.” He glanced down at his shirt. “I think I must have left it at the restaurant by mistake. Let’s go.”

I was glad to get in his car and leave but somehow, that also made me feel worse. “I’m an adult now,” I mentioned. “I’m a grown woman. I’ve lived on my own for years and I don’t know why I’m acting like this. I guess it’s because of La Grieta.”

“The earthquake city?”

I told him what I’d learned at lunch. “I’d always wondered why I was in the library that day, and now I know,” I concluded. “My mom was leaving me there.”

“She had left you at storytime and then driven away,” he clarified. “She was abandoning you when you were five years old? If you just heard this today, then I understand why you’re upset. That was an awful thing to do and a terrible thing to learn about your mother.”

“I made a lot of excuses for her,” I said. “I went along with a lot, until I couldn’t anymore and I got myself to the boarding school.”

“I think that was the best thing that could have happened to you.”

“Well, no, it wasn’t. I was lonely and unhappy there, and then I went to college and I was exactly the same. But I didn’t do anything to fix it!” I said. “I keep thinking about my roommate, freshman year. She had all these ideas about decorating and making our room cute.”