Page 210 of Notes of Attraction

“When you care about something, Callum, you are relentless. I saw it with the music stuff.” She pauses, choosing the word carefully. “You have not been relentless about that degree.”

I thought I’d fooled them.

Every time I went to the house, I had the easy voice ready. Classes are good. I’m enjoying it. I might look at postgraduate options. Drew saw through it immediately, obviously. Drew has been calling me on my bullshit since he learned how to speak.

Turns out my mother was watching the whole time and just waiting for this moment to tell me so.

“I’m not…” She purses her lips. “I haven’t always been good at saying the right thing.” She looks back into Mabel’s room. “About standing up for what I believe in. Your father and your grandfather have always had very fixed ideas, and I found it easier to agree with them than to fight about it,” she says it quickly. “Mabel has helped me understand. She’s…” She pauses, and her eyes get glassy. “She’s helped me understand some things I should have understood years ago. About you. About what it meant to you, all of it. And about what I should have said.”

Catherine Fox does not do apologies. Not in the usual way. She rearranges the problem, fixes something practical and behaves as if the repaired version was always the plan. When she forgot my eleventh birthday, she moved the celebration to the following weekend and convinced the entire family she’d planned it like that.

She glances through the window in Mabel’s door.

“The Joshua Tree house,” she says. “You know we’ve been renting it out since your father stopped wanting to vacation there. Short term rentals, mostly. It does well.” Another small wave of her hand. “It’s sitting empty most of the fall, and Mabel says your band will need somewhere to write.” She looks at me directly. “You can use it. As long as you need it. You’ll have to cover utilities, of course, but otherwise it’s yours as long as you need it.”

For a second, I don’t understand what she’s offering.

“The Joshua Tree house?”

“That is what I said.”

Ten-year-old me running out onto that back porch at six in the morning. Fourteen-year-old me lying on the flat roof with a guitar, writing the worst song in human history about a girl in my year, deeply convinced I was a genius. We stopped going a while back, but I’ve always fucking loved that place.

We need to write. And she’s handing me the exact perfect space, which she cannot possibly know is also the one I’d have chosen from any place in the world.

“Are you sure?” I hesitate. “No strings?”

“I rarely say things I don’t mean. Consider the house my contribution to the band,” she says. “I do believe in you, Callum. I think Atlas Falling can go very far. You boys are extremely talented.”

My heart pumps.

“What about Dad?”

She sighs, steps forward, and kisses me once on the cheek.

“Let me handle your father.”

There’s a new firmness beneath the words.