She giggles, rolling to press her face into her pillow. “You’re never going to let me live that down.”

“Nope.”

“That commercial paid for the—”

“The camera that Dad used to film Caged,” I finish for her. “Which got him lined up at Universal for Willow Rush, for which he won his first Oscar. I know. I’m just being a menace.”

But there’s the rub. Mom’s work paid for Dad’s work, which moved our family forward, and nowhere in there did pride come into play, even though Dad is one of the most prideful men I’ve ever known. Mom came from a rich family in Pasadena. Dad came from a poor single-mother household in Spain. He never cared that his career took off because of the money and connections Madeline Vega made first. Once he’d convinced the love of his life to marry him, only three things mattered to my dad: that my mother took his name, that he could make her happy, and that they both got to do what they loved for a living.

“Why are boys so stupid?” I ask.

She laughs. “I’ve literally never heard you sound upset over a guy. I was worried.”

“Worried I was into girls?”

“No,” she says, laughing harder now. “That would have been fine. I was worried you were a cold-blooded man-eater.”

“Dad’s a tough act to follow,” I explain, pressing my face into her hair. Beneath the scent of her shampoo and face cream, she smells the slightest bit different—not bad, but... different—a result of the chemo and all the other things they’re currently doing to her body. It’s not like I go even an hour without thinking about it, but it hits me in this moment like a physical blow, this reminder that my mom is sick and my world is different than it was just two months ago. It makes me miss Finn and the strength he provided so acutely, that for a flash, I can’t breathe. “It was hard to take anyone seriously before now.”

“Before Finn, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

She rolls to face me. “What happened?”

I tell her—vaguely—about the hooking up, about my need for distraction, about how he was too distracting. I tell her about the real feelings, the I love you’s. She already knows about the potential deal with Salvatore, but apparently she doesn’t know how it unfolded.

“Sweetie,” she says, putting her warm hand on my cheek. “Your heart is always in the right place. But a partnership always starts at the beginning. I did the commercial to help Dad, but we decided that I would do that together.”