And all I had to do was agree to destroy the girl I like.

Apparently, I’m not doing a great job hiding my angst, because my mom calls me out as soon as I get home from practice and crankily slam the front door behind me. She’s back on the night shift, which means we’ve got a couple of hours of overlap before she leaves for the hospital.

“You seem … less than cheery, dear daughter.”

“I feel less than cheery,” I grumble, taking a banana from the bowl on the little peninsula in our kitchen and yanking down the peel as if Cara would be able to vicariously feel my wrath.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

I take a huge bite. “No,” I lie as I chew.

“Let me rephrase. Let’s talk about it! What’s going on, sweetheart?” She hops up on one of the two stools that line the breakfast bar, which serves as our dining set, and smooths her hand over the top of my head.

The banana is soft, but swallowing feels like choking down a rock anyway. “Have you ever dated someone all your friends hated?”

She snorts. “You mean your father?”

“That doesn’t count,” I say, although I guess it sort of does. My parents were high school sweethearts, but as I got older, my mom confided more and more that it wasn’t all that sweet a romance. Not that I couldn’t guess considering he abandoned us a couple of years later.

“There was a woman, for a little while, when you were still in day care and I’d gone back to school. Aunt Lily despised her, because she was always insisting I get a babysitter so we could go on dates. I obviously couldn’t afford that, so I’d beg Lily or my mom to watch you, constantly.”

“Hey, I thought they loved watching me.”

“They did! Of course they did. But they also thought if this woman—Rowena was her name—was going to be in my life for real, she needed to accept that my beautiful daughter was going to be a significant and constant presence. It hit me when Lily said that Ro really didn’t get that, how she was picking out the parts of my life—of me—she wanted to enjoy. And if she couldn’t appreciate that, or appreciate you, then she wasn’t the one for me. Especially since things were only going to get more complicated once we finished school and weren’t surrounded by quite as liberal an environment.”

“So Lily was right not to like her.”