do what she does. We talk a couple of times a day, so she knows what’s going on, but honestly? I don’t think she cares like she did.”
Score one for depression.
“So will you come?” Annika asked.
“Liam will.” But as soon as the words were out, Liam was shaking his head. So I said, “One of us will.”
“Soon?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you, thank you so much,” Annika said with a gratitude as palpable as her relief had been at the start, which made me believe her when she said, “I’ve only been at The Buttered Scone for three years, but I really love your mother, and I know she’s in pain. She needs family with her”—she caught in a loud breath—“but I won’t tell her you’re coming.” In that instant, we became conspirators. “She’ll be furious that I called you, and if I tell her I recognized your face in People from a shot in her wallet, she’ll fire me for sure. I only went through her wallet because I thought there’d be some clue how to reach you, and I felt totally guilty the whole time. I’ll tell her that I kind of put two and two together from the friends of hers I talked with—I even called her priest, I really did—but not one of them knew. Why didn’t they know? Margaret is a proud woman.”
“Stubborn,” I murmured before I could help myself.
“That, too, but she wouldn’t like me sticking my nose in her business. Only this really is an emergency.”
The facts suggested it—assuming they were correct, and I had no cause to doubt Annika. She sounded coherent and genuinely concerned. I ended the call, promising to be in touch.
Edward and Liam had gotten the gist of what had happened from my half of the conversation. As I returned the phone to Edward, though, my eyes were on Liam.
He hadn’t moved from the sofa—had a proprietary hand on my dog now and was sitting straight. “I’m not going,” he said. “You’re the girl. You’ll know what to do with bandages and bathroom stuff. I can’t help Mom in the shower.”
I opened my mouth to argue. But the words didn’t come. The issue wasn’t Liam’s being male. Many men helped their sick mothers. Many health care workers were male.
The issue wasn’t even Liam’s having been Mom’s hero, until he was not.
The issue was me. I hadn’t talked with my mother since she had blamed me for Dad’s death and disowned me. I had tried to break through the wall many, many times and failed. The issue was whether I could try again.
I looked up at Edward. His hand had dropped from my back, but he remained close. I saw understanding in his eyes, perhaps even expectation. Beyond it, though, was just that little bit of distance between us saying that the decision was mine.
My gaze fell to his bare chest. The hair there had never been heavy, but seeing it for the first time now in the light of day, I saw a whisper of gray. It was the same gray that glinted in his finger-combed bed-head. It was also on his face, in the beard that was so short but so dense.
Five years later, he was the same, but not. He was five years older, five years more experienced, intuitive, sensitive—whatever. And me? I was five years older, too, and, if so, I had to be bolder. Sure, I could bully Liam into taking care of Mom. But she was my mother, too, and as independent, as self-sufficient, as stubborn, maybe even as angry as she was, she needed help.
We are our choices. It wasn’t a Momism. Margret McGowan Reid was too devoted to the church to admire an existentialist like Sartre. But I had studied him in school, and my friends and I had glommed onto the words. We are our choices. Five years ago, I chose to take my eyes off the road. Then I chose to divorce Edward. I chose to reinvent myself as a makeup artist. I chose to move to Devon.
Those were all big choices. But this felt like one, too. I was at a crossroad. After behaving badly yesterday, I had ended up alone with my green velvet box and no one to love. Here, now, today was my chance to be someone new and different—someone better. The issue, I realized as I stood with my eyes on Edward’s and my heart wavering, was responsibility.
“I’ll go,” I told him with quiet resolve and took a quick