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I find her out back on the tiny porch. “You didn’t need to clean up.”

She slowly lowers her head from where she’d been looking up at the night sky. “You were busy with Noah.”

“Yeah, but… You shouldn’t be out here. It’s too cold.”

She waves me off. “I’m fine.”

Still, I run inside to grab her a blanket. While it was warm today, the temperature dropped as soon as the sun set. Mom doesn’t fight me when I wrap her up, only smiles once I sit next to her. I stuff my hands in the pockets of my hoodie to keep warm.

“Beautiful night,” Mom says, eyes up toward the stars again. “I didn’t want to waste it.”

She’s been saying more and more things like that lately, and it scares me. Like she knows something I don’t. Can feel it.

She was diagnosed with lung cancer a little over three years ago. What started out as a constant cough that she couldn’t shake ended with her diagnosis. Since then, it’s been a long and painful journey of doctors, chemo, and radiation. Now, she uses an oxygen tank and can’t perform normal activities without becoming exhausted.

All of this on top of the bills. We had to remortgage the house, and she left her job as a librarian because it became too much. I am the sole breadwinner and caretaker of everyone in the house.

It is a lot to handle.

Too much, if I’m honest with myself.

Though I rarely am. Because if I ever stopped to look around, I’m not sure I’d ever be able to keep going. So, instead of taking a pause to evaluate my life, I’ve simply been coasting on good vibes and Zoloft.

“Noah was so happy today,” Mom says after a while, her voice a raspy whisper compared to what it used to be.

“He really was,” I agree. “It was a good day.”

We go quiet again because my mother has never pushed me to talk. Never forced me to socialize or communicate more than I was able to, which was both a blessing and a curse. Blessing because I could hide my neurodivergence so easily, but a curse because I could hide my neurodivergence so easily.

I burned out when I was twenty-one. Noah was almost three, and I couldn’t stand the noise in the Mommy and Me music class anymore. I felt overstimulated for days, had a huge meltdown eventually.

That’s when everything started clicking into place for me. That not everyone had to pretend they understood jokes or learn how to read the nuance of a conversation according to someone’s face. Not everyone needed hours to sit in silence when they came home or had to practice conversations before they had them. Not everyone lived with constant anxiety and pressure to fit in.

Since then, I did a lot of work to understand how to move around in the world more comfortably with the help of my mother, but then cancer took even that away from me. Because I can’t burden her with my worry when she literally has to fight for her life every single day.

So I don’t plan on laying out what happened today with Austin, but after a few minutes of silence, Mom focuses on me. “Whatcha thinking about?”

“Nothing much.”

She shakes her head, amused. I’m always thinking. About what I have to do in the next ten minutes, what I did ten years ago, and every possible scenario of what ten years from now will look like. In my pocket, I rub my thumb over the knuckle on my index finger. “I was offered a job today.”

“Today? When?”

“At the clinic.”

She adjusts the tubes delivering oxygen to her lungs via her nose and swings around to fully face me. “You were offered a job at the clinic?”

“Yeah. Kinda. Austin Ashwood and I were talking, and I told him how I was looking for a job, and he said he’d hire me to be his personal assistant. Right then and there.”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “That’s…unusual.”

“That’s what I said. Do you think he’s a secret murderer?”

“I highly doubt that.”

I shrug. “It is peculiar behavior, though, isn’t it? Like a serial killer.”

“You have to stop watching those documentaries about that stuff.”