We hang up with him making promises to stay in touch and me agreeing that of course I’ll reach out if I need him. And yes, Merry Christmas. And a Happy New Year. My hands are so shaky I can barely press the button to end the call. I stop walking just short of smacking into a concrete pillar, my body thrumming with a strange electric buzz. Energy with nowhere to go.

Daniel is leaving my mother.

Correction. Daniel left my mother. Past tense. Old news. But not old news to me.

The world feels sideways, but nothing is different. Passengers pace. Dire weather warnings continue to scroll across every screen in sight. I check through the last three weeks of my mother’s texts, a blathering collection of love you, honey and can’t wait to see you and do you think a ham will be okay instead of a turkey this year? Why the hell would she not tell me something like this?

Unless she can’t tell me. She could be in that place where she shuts down. Like when Aunt Phoebe was sick. At the end.

Except that time Daniel was there, making her soup and toast. And I was there, holding her hand and forcing her to talk. What is this going to look like when she wakes up alone on Christmas day? Christmas, which was the ultimate holiday in our family—not because of presents, but because we had a list of traditions that we added to and laughed about every year. Mom had to start taking time off work to fit in all the ice skating and cookie decorating and hikes through evergreen forests. We were a ridiculous trio.

And now we are a duo.

Except we aren’t even that, are we? I’m here and she’s there, completely one hundred percent alone.

Something rattles softly behind me, and I turn to see Harper with something held high in her hands. Her eyes look red and her face is pale, but she’s grinning. “Hey stranger. Change your mind?”

She did it. She has keys to a car.

“I thought you had to be twenty-five to rent one,” I say.

“There are a couple of places that let you do it at twenty-one. If you pay practically double,” she says, checking her phone with a frown. She pockets it decisively. “So, are you coming with us?”

“Us?”

“Meet my friends, the fellow castaways from Flight 3694.” She looks back at three people behind her. They’re around her age, and they’re all looking glazed over and rumpled with that shitty-travel-day expression I’m sure I’m wearing, too. Harper, however, is still perfectly put together, a little twitchy and tense maybe, but unwrinkled.

She turns for introductions like we’re meeting at a fancy lunch and not at ground zero of a travel nightmare come to life.