I wanted to believe her, and at the same time I didn’t. I wasn’t sure I’d know what to do if the burden of living out this dream for my mother disappeared. Before I knew it, I was blurting it all out. “I fell for this guy here.”

“Oh, Desta.” My mother’s voice was completely devoid of any judgment, and that was almost worse.

I shook my head, hardly able to process everything that had happened tonight, but it was still bursting out of me. I wanted so much, and I needed my mother to be there for me. “He’s on the team for the project, but he got into a PhD program at Columbia and I don’t know if I’m doing all of this for me, or just as an excuse to go to New York and follow him.”

My mother opened her mouth, closed it. Then she sat up straighter. “Does it matter?”

I snapped my head back at her question. That was not I was expecting. “What do you mean?”

“If you finally decided to do what you want, is it so bad that what pushed you was someone you care about?” She sounded genuinely confused.

“But I do this, Mom. I keep getting into relationships that can’t work out. Where I get my heart broken. Elias isn’t even sure he can come to the States, he’s got family to think about, and now I’ve complicated my own plans by getting involved with him.”

My mother shook her head and I could see that doing this over video was starting to frustrate her. “Desta Joy, you can be falling in love and still want to make these changes. Both can happen at the same time, baby.”

Maybe. It was true that I’d applied for that MSW program long before Elias was in the picture.

“I just don’t want to be some pathetic fool.”

“You’re not pathetic.”

I deflated at the fierce urgency in my mother’s voice and heard the echo of Elias’s plea for me to believe in what we had made. I couldn’t discard that.

“You say that, but I keep chasing after men who drop me when I’m no longer a convenient part of their plan.” But even as I said it, I knew that wasn’t remotely fair. Elias was not Miguel, and he would never do that. Even tonight, when everything was awful, he didn’t try to reassure me by making promises he didn’t know he could keep. He’d told me how he felt, promised me he’d fight, and then gone out to do it.