Mom breaks off the hug and sniffles, grabbing my cheeks in her oily, wrinkly, mom-hands. She examines my face with the precision of a hawk to see if there’s a crack in my mask, if I’m telling the whole truth.

“It’s real, isn’t it? This thing with Mal,” she asks brokenly.

“The realest.” I laugh, happy tears sliding down my cheeks.

“And you know all about what happened with Glen?” She looks at me from under her fake eyelashes, blinking slowly.

I nod. “About the scar, too. I’m not mad, Mom. I just wish you’d told me. I could’ve handled it. You didn’t have to go through all this effort.”

“Oh, but I did.” She rushes into my words, sliding her hands from my cheeks to my arms, squeezing. “I wanted you to know you deserved to be loved. You are the most precious thing in my world, Aurora, even if you don’t always feel that way. I wanted you to think he adored you, but I had to keep you far enough away from him so you’d never know the truth.”

“Is that why you didn’t want me to come to Ireland?”

She sighs. “That, and we seem to have it hard for Irish men. I didn’t want you to move across the ocean and leave me in America. It was selfish, but you’re my only family.” Pause. “I mean, you and the cigarettes and the hairspray.”

We both laugh, until I remember I have something I still need to clear up with her.

“The pictures. You sent Mal the pictures with the mean things I wrote about him. You sent him a letter saying I aborted his baby. It started a chain reaction that caused everything to fall apart over here. You have no idea.”

I’m not going to pin Kathleen’s death on Mom, obviously. But she did manipulate the hell out of our lives.

She sniffs, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her glittery denim jacket, which has pink patches and a sequin collar. That’s a sight I didn’t think I’d live to see. Usually my mother will grab anything within reach, including the Bible or a kid in a bubble, and use them to wipe off her snot before tarnishing her precious clothes.