I bit my lip, swimming in sticky shame. It was true. They would have come, had I ever invited them with any real sincerity. But I couldn’t have withstood it, their presence in Chicago, their magic radiant and inescapable when mine was dark and guttered and echoing as a long-empty house. They would have reminded me too much of what I’d given up, of what I missed down to my bones every single day I stayed away.

No matter that it was me who’d willingly left it all behind.

“I did miss you, Mom,” I whispered, hanging my head, so beset by misery my body felt like lead. Talia had struck much closer to home than she might have thought that afternoon in the coffee shop, when she wondered how I managed on my own, so far from family. And she hadn’t even known just how often and hard I’d pushed them away from me. “Of course I did. I should have invited you for real. I should’ve . . .”

“And we should have come even if you didn’t. We should have, because discretion be damned, Emmeline Constance, you’re my daughter,” she said, overbright eyes shifting between mine, the corners of her mouth quivering. “My first and only, my absolute beloved. I should never have just let things sit and fester in the first place, I should have asked you before it was far too late . . .”

Her voice broke, and she subsided with a shaky sigh, turning away from me and closing her eyes. I hugged myself hard, wondering how many more people I loved were going to cry in the near future because of me. I’d been so caught up in my own pain, in the reasons for my flight from Thistle Grove, that I’d given shamefully little thought to the scars my departure must have carved into the ones I’d left behind.

My horoscope app had not seen fit to warn me of this incoming emotional reckoning—one star.

“It wasn’t your fault, Mom,” I said, low, my own voice wavering. I reached out blindly, without looking at her, fumbling for her hand. “None of it was. I’m the one who pushed you away whenever you tried to come close. And you’re right, Gareth did damage me. Maybe . . . maybe more, and worse, than I ever even gave him credit for.”

“Will you tell me now, love?” she said, so plaintively my heart quaked for her. “What happened to you back then? Why you thought you couldn’t stay?”

My insides felt like they were constricting, like a snake had snuck down my throat and coiled around my rib cage, a slow and awful suffocation. This kind of vulnerability between us felt uniquely terrifying, completely uncharted terrain. I loved both my parents, but we had never been the kind of family that delved into one another’s feelings deep enough to really hash things out. When it came right down to it, I just didn’t know how to talk to her this way.