Her mother. Was it ever possible to have a normal, loving conversation? Always dredging up the guts of the past. Threatening and cajoling.

Once, as a teenager, so fed up with her life and needing a little sympathy, Sutton concocted a fantasy for her friends. She confided that the woman she called Mother, Siobhan Healy, wasn’t her real mother. Sutton had no idea who her real mother was. She had a name, of course, off the birth certificate, but that woman had left Sutton behind on the steps of a fire station in Indiana and hadn’t ever come back. Finally, when she was old enough, Sutton had done the research and learned who her biological mother was. She’d tracked her down, saw the woman’s shiny new life, with her shiny husband and three shiny children in a shiny house with two shiny cars and a shiny fucking dog, and had known she’d never fit in there. So she’d gone home, back to her decidedly nonshiny trailer with Maude, her foster mother—she hadn’t yet changed her name to Siobhan—who was between husbands and needed a little extra cash, and so gamed the system to allow her to foster. Maude, pedestrian old Maude, who smoked Pall Mall cigarettes and drank rotgut vodka out of Coke cans because she thought that vodka didn’t make your breath smell like alcohol and her boss at the Kroger didn’t know she was showing up shit-faced.

It had been fun while it lasted, pretending not to belong to her reality, but word got back to Maude, who set the friends and parents straight, then grounded Sutton for lying.

Still, Maude was a poor substitute for a real, loving, kind, gentle, guiding mother. The woman thought of when she thought of mothers, and had an urge to have a conversation with a maternal figure, was her aunt Josephine—a cousin to Maude once removed by marriage—who’d swooped in to rescue Sutton after Maude was sent to court-ordered rehab for a DUI. Josephine had raised her for a while, made sure she was fed and clothed and had a roof over her head, until Maude got out of rehab and went to AA and found God and straightened out and changed her name to Siobhan and found a boyfriend named Joe, who had a nice two-story split-level near Nashville, and moved them in with him before he could change his mind, lickety-split.

No more Aunt Josephine. No more loving, motherly conversations.

Instead...Joe. Joe the Schmo.

Her mother didn’t know what Joe was saying to Sutton behind her back, or didn’t care.

Oh, stop already. Enough of that train of thought. You’re supposed to be thinking about Ethan, not Joe the dickhead Schmo and the consequences of your mother’s inability to see him for what he was.