Outside, the weather is nicer today, so the kids are on the playground. Their shouts and laughter bounce between the walls of the school and BTI, and the sound lifts my spirits. I feel a tap on my shoulder. Ruth.

“Hi, Ruth,” I say.

“What are you doing?”

“Standing outside talking to you.”

“Funny. I mean where are you headed now?”

I open my mouth to tell her, but there’s a blankness in my brain, an unknowing I can’t move past. It turns my breathing shallow, this floating in a sea of un-knowledge. My fingers dig into my palms. I hate it. On my screen are words that sharpen into arrows, stick in my chest. Mom lives in Whittier now, and Ruth knows but didn’t tell you. There’s a heated prickling in my cheeks, and I can’t meet Ruth’s eyes.

“Oh, Claire.”

I look up to find her staring at the screen. Is that pity in her tone? I straighten my shoulders, meet her gaze. The deep lines around her mouth smooth with a softness in her eyes.

I hold up the phone. “Does he know yet?” When she doesn’t reply right away, I scan my notebook, but I haven’t moved anything forward from September that indicates anyone told me. Frustration at how little I know simmers together with the idea that Ruth would keep something like this from me. I look up, unable to mask my disappointment or a sense of betrayal. Ruth knows how I feel about my mother. “Why, Ruth?”

She breathes out a heavy sigh. “She’s sober, Claire, and she has been for years. But don’t look at me like that. Vance wanted her back here. He’s the one who insisted she come home.”

I recoil. Dad wants her back? “I don’t believe you,” I say, my lips tight around the words.

Ruth blinks. “It’s true, Claire. Maybe he knew something, I don’t know, but he loves you and he loves her, and he wants you all to be together again. And I know that all you remember are her failures.” Ruth blinks again, hard, fast. “But she’s better, I swear to you.” She points to my notebook and her hand shakes, I think from emotion. It surprises me. “And that’s something you need to write down until it sticks, because we’re all too old to keep lying to ourselves.”

My pen shakes over the page and my eyes blur. “So she gets to come home, and suddenly she’s the good guy? After everything she did, Ruth? How is that fair?”