“She expected him to look after all of you.”

“I think that was his expectation, too.”

“And he was prepared to do that because he really loved you?”

Her eyes stay fixed on her mug. “I feel terrible. I just left. I should have looked him in the eye and told him what I was feeling. Instead, I sent him a text as I boarded my flight. I just knew my mom would force me to go through with it if I stuck around. Once I decided I couldn’t marry him, there was no way back. If I had married him, I would have resented him and my mother for the rest of my life.”

“Couldn’t you just tell your mother you didn’t want to marry Frank?”

She fiddles with the edge of her mug. “You’d think so, right? Problem is, my mom has a way of making me feel guilty unless she gets her way.” She stares into her mug. “She would have told me I was being selfish and reckless, that I would never find a man as good to me as Frank was.” She’s chewing on the inside of her cheek like she thinks her mom might have been right. I have the urge to scoot closer, to tell her she did the right thing. But who the fuck am I to this woman?

“Sounds like she’s more concerned with her happiness than yours,” I say.

“It’s weird, the farther I am from her, the more differently I see her. I always thought she was just doing whatever she needed to do to make sure our family made it. But now I think she was making me do whatever she wanted to make sure our family made it.”

I set my mug on the railing. “Sometimes parents don’t realize the pressure they’re putting on their children,” I say. “Or they don’t think about it.” For years after his death, I wondered how my dad slept at night, knowing he’d taken out loan after loan on the family farm to pay off his gambling debts. Eventually, I realized he wasn’t thinking about us at all. He was only ever thinking about himself.

“Do you think I’ve been selfish?” she asks.

“No.” My voice comes out with a gravelly edge. “It sounds like you escaped a future you didn’t want. That’s not selfish. It’s self-preservation.”

“That’s exactly how it feels.” She scans my face like she’s committing it to memory. “You say that like you know how that feels, too.”

I let out a breath. “Yeah, I know a thing or two about escaping a future I didn’t want.”

“And you didn’t want Star Falls?”