“It’s only three,” she says dismissively, like it’s no big deal that she’s stayed up all hours of the night just to check on me. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. My mother has always been there when I need her most. “Now, what’s wrong?”

Umma waits patiently on the other end of the line. I can almost see her knitted brow, her hands folded in her lap, as she waits for me to be ready to speak.

“He’s the one,” I blurt out.

She’s silent for a moment, and then lets out a soft sound, something between a tsk and a chuckle. “Daughter. I’m happy for you.”

“Is this how it felt? With Appa, I mean?”

Before she can reply, I’m already barreling on. “Alex is everything to me, but I’m freaking out. It’s just that sometimes it seems like the world doesn’t want us to be together. And with everything else going on, I’m just so overwhelmed, and I don’t know how to tell him, and…”

I stop talking because my mom is laughing.

“Umma! Are you laughing at me? I’m serious!”

“I know you are, my daughter. But the answer is, there’s no such thing as absolute certainty.”

“What?” I sit up and pound the bed. “Have you just been lying to me my entire life, then?”

She tsks. “No, Rachel, not lying. I knew, in my heart, that I loved your father. But that doesn’t always mean the world will back you. You have to trust yourself and your own feelings. Stop listening to anyone else. You don’t know with your head. You know with your heart.”

I sit there feeling petulant and silly, like a little kid who has just learned there’s no dessert unless you finish your dinner first. It’s 8:02 and Alex, wonderful Alex, Alex who has totally changed my life for the better in a million and one ways, but who, if we’re caught, also poses the biggest risk to my world falling apart—that Alex is waiting for me downstairs at the restaurant.

“Umma, I’m late for a dinner with Alex, and I don’t know what to do or say or even what to wear.” I’m being a baby, I realize, but I just don’t want to let my mother go just yet.

She gives a soft laugh. “I can’t tell you what to do or say. And you’re the fashion icon, not me. But when in doubt, wear a little black dress. Now go get ready. You should not leave a handsome man waiting like that.”

And then my mother, queen of the outro, hangs up on me.