I couldn’t forgive that.

I poked at my phone. Well, I solved it for you, didn’t I? I quit.

No reply.

Worry niggled inside me. To my neighbors, Eric might not look like an award-winning chef on a booty call. What if they saw him as a large black man hanging around the building entrance? Ringing Doorbells While Black. What if they called the cops?

Three dots appeared. Eric, typing. I drew my breath in relief. We need to talk, he said.

I scowled at my phone, resenting the echo of my own advice to Meg. Talk? Maybe when I was cooler. Maybe when I was calmer. Maybe when I’d figured out what to say.

I think we said enough already, I answered. Anyway, I’m not . . . My fingers hesitated. Not home, I thought. New York wasn’t home anymore. Not there, I added.

Where are you?

The question yawned like a chasm, threatening to swallow me up. I teetered on the edge of answering. I’d left Bunyan because I didn’t want to be an accessory in Trey’s life. A possession. A decoration. I thought I’d found a place in Eric’s world. But I didn’t shine there. It was all reflected light. I was a satellite, the moon to his sun. I could lose myself in him, in his life, so easily. More easily, because I loved him.

My fingers hovered. Eric, I . . .

Oh God. Oh God, I didn’t want this, this terrible yearning. He couldn’t simply show up at my apartment and expect me to give up. To give in. The temptation to do both sucked at me like a tide. I was terrified that I could lose myself in him, that I would become less right when my family depended on me to be more. I couldn’t deal with this now. I needed to focus on Mom.

But at least I could save Eric from an altercation with the police.

I mashed DELETE. Typed, Go away.

Turning my phone facedown beside my bed, I buried my head in my pillow.

But when I finally fell asleep, it wasn’t my mother’s face I saw.

The buzz of my phone jarred me out of sleep. Eric, I thought dreamily. I reached out in the thin gray light of morning, my fingers fumbling across the nightstand. “’Lo?” I croaked.

“Jo?”

Beth. She had always turned to me for confidence. For reassurance. I spoke up for her at the dinner table, stuck up for her at school. But before this week, I’d never realized how much I counted on her quiet presence at home. Even after she went away to college, she was always in the background of my visits to Bunyan, like the teddy bear on her bed, a comforting talisman of our childhood.

“Hey, sweetie.” I struggled to sit, pulling up the covers against the attic chill. “How are you?”

“I talked to Meg. She said Momma’s having surgery on Friday.”