Mom sighed, and I realized how tired she looked. “Honey, I always want to protect you—”

“By moving me in with a murderer and a bunch of creepy ladies who will make me call them ‘Mom’? Yeah. I feel really safe.”

She cut her eyes at me, and I knew I was taking it too far.

“As I was saying, I always want to protect you, but you need to know that things are precarious right now. I don’t know how long our accounts are going to be frozen, and I’m not the number one draft pick in the finance world.”

I could feel anger rising in me. “Well, that’s not fair. You didn’t have anything to do with Dad’s stuff!”

I knew Mom would never steal from someone. We’d sleep on the sidewalk first.

“I know, honey, but you and I both know that’s how the world works.”

“Well, that’s just sucky. I am so tired of living in a world where a woman is judged by a man’s actions. A man that she has no real control over, by the way. It’s not fair. Eff the patriarchy.”

I had to say eff because the last time I said the real sentence, Mom had grounded me for a week, specifically from all my music accounts until I could be mature enough to learn which Taylor lyrics I was allowed to quote.

Mom sighed. “Honey, please?”

I crossed my arms. “Fine.”

“Fine, you’ll stay here?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Sweetheart, look, I’m sure we’ll be back in our house soon. But for now, we don’t have a lot of great choices.”

That was a harsh, scary reality, and I decided right then and there that I would shut my mouth and go with the flow. Things were hard enough for my mom. I didn’t need to make them worse.

“I’ll do it on one condition,” I said.

She raised her mom-eyebrow.

“You let me go see Dad.”

She sighed and nodded.

I smiled. Gosh, I missed him so much. “When?”

“I’ll go see him tomorrow and put in your paperwork. You can go as soon as it gets approved.”

I nodded, realizing how absurd this was, how much my life had changed.

“So can we go up?” she asked.

Mom put her arm around me. I leaned my head on her shoulder and turned my head up to kiss her cheek. “Fine. This will be a really great chapter of my memoir one day.”

She laughed. And as we paused just a moment to stare at the ocean, I felt fortified by its presence. By her presence. “We’re Lorelai and Rory Gilmore now,” I said.

“The Sitterly Girls,” Mom solidified.

“Mom, we don’t have to, like, wear long skirts and keep our hair in buns now, do we?”