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Prologue

Charm

The broccoli soup bubbled hard enough to spit against the underside of the lid while I stood barefoot in my kitchen, translating a Spanish love poem with flour on my cheek and lemon zest beneath my fingernails.

It wasn’t the strangest Friday night I’d ever had but it might’ve been the best.

Evening sunlight stretched through the windows above the sink, warming the exposed brick and catching across the storefronts below as downtown Kimball Falls settled into the slower rhythm of a Friday night.

My loft smelled like broccoli, garlic, lemon, and the vanilla candle burning on the windowsill. A yellow cake no larger than my hand cooled beside the stove beneath a lopsided layer of buttercream. The frosting had split when I added the lemon juice too quickly, and one side of the cake leaned far enough to suggest structural concerns, but I made it from scratch. It belonged to me, and no one who entered this apartment had permission to critique it without volunteering to wash the dishes.

I lifted the lid from the soup and stirred through the thickening cream, dragging the wooden spoon along the bottom before anything could burn.

“Perfect,” I said.

The soup didn’t answer, which was one of several reasons I preferred living alone.

My phone rested against the sugar jar with a video paused halfway through a lesson on conversational Spanish. The woman teaching it had spent nine minutes explaining the difference between por and para, and I understood approximately six of those minutes. That was better than last year.

I lowered the heat before touching the screen.

“Este pastel es para mí,” I repeated.

This cake is for me.

The sentence made me smile. A year ago, I wouldn’t have made the cake. Six months ago, I might’ve made it for someone else and eaten a careful sliver so they wouldn’t notice how frightened I was of a piece of cake. Tonight, I’d made it because I signed the final papers transferring the building’s deed and every business holding into my name. Well, almost every holding.

My mother retained two percent until the loan was repaid because the bank required something more substantial than blind confidence, online sales projections, and the declaration that I could hem a theatrical ball gown while steaming oat milk during the morning rush. Crystal—who I was working on calling Mom—cosigned quietly, legally, and without telling Lance, who would never hear me call him Daddy again unless he changed.

I still didn’t know how she managed it.

Lance knew my mother attended therapy with me. He knew she visited the boutique when he was traveling and called almost every evening to hear about my day. He knew she’d stopped carrying every opinion he formed into my life and presenting it as concern.

He didn’t know she helped me buy the building.

It was the only secret between us now, and unlike every secret I kept before, this one wasn’t built from shame. It was built from paperwork, legal advice, and my mother deciding that losing one child didn’t mean she had to stand beside her husband while he drove the other away.

She’d written to me every week while I was in treatment.

Some letters were three pages long. Others contained little more than an apology and a memory of Charlie and me. She wrote about the pressure she placed on me, the corrections disguised as affection, and every time she allowed Lance’s approval to become the weather inside our home. She never asked me to forgive her. She didn’t explain herself until her apology disappeared beneath reasons.

She just kept writing and accepting that was all I could handle at first.

When I finally agreed to let her attend a therapy session, she sat across from me without Lance (I may always call him Lance) and listened while I explained what it felt like to be raised as the remaining child. The surviving child. The daughter who had to become so polished, accomplished, and obedient that my parents never had another reason to experience disappointment or grief.

Mom cried. I cried too.

Then we returned the following week and did it again. Our relationship still had bruises. She sometimes tried to fix things before I finished telling her they hurt. She occasionally tilted her head at one of my outfits with the old correction already forming behind her eyes, then caught herself and told me I looked beautiful with such visible panic that I laughed.

She was learning me and I was learning her too.

He remained Lance.

Lance called my work at the coffee shop an unnecessary humiliation. He referred to the boutique as my “project” and asked how long I intended to live above it as though my home were a phase I would eventually outgrow. The first time he saw the loft, he looked at the exposed brick, secondhand furniture, crooked kitchen cabinets, and pipes running along the ceiling with the same expression he once used when discovering a server had brought the wrong vintage of wine.

I asked him to leave, and we both expected my mother to follow him. She stayed for dinner and tried to remind me that this was his choice, not hers or mine. Then she complimented the way I’d decorated my tiny home, exposed brick, pipes, and all.

I poured the soup into my favorite bowl, added shredded cheddar, and carried it to the small round table beneath the windows. The loft wasn’t large enough for separate dining, living, office, and bedroom spaces, but I’d never needed square footage to understand how a room wanted to be used. I worked with the exposed brick and dark pipes instead of trying to disguise them, softening everything around them with warm white walls, pale wood, cream linen, and faded blue accents. Sheer curtains framed the windows without blocking the view of downtown, while a secondhand farmhouse table and mismatched spindle-back chairs gave me somewhere to eat, work, and spread fabric out whenever the drafting table became overwhelmed.