“I was just hurting. Just out here letting the cold make me feel something,” Ziva said. “I wonder, if I hadn’t kept you from Cass, if you would have made this terribly foolish choice, now. Also, I heard the aurora borealis might be out tonight. I’ve never seen it. I thought if it appeared, I might…I don’t know, get answers to what I should do with my life.” She laughed at herself a little.

Miriam rolled her eyes, frustrated by her mother’s ability to center herself in Miriam’s life and make Miriam want to comfort her over how bad she felt about being a shitty mom. “You don’t get to have my estrangement from Carrigan’s to add to your treasure chest of martyrdom, Mom. Or my decision to stay. Feel sorry for yourself about all of the years of my childhood, if you need to, but you can’t have my choices now.”

Ziva stiffened. “I spent all of your childhood keeping you safe!”

The grief and cold finally broke down Miriam’s last filters. “You let him do it!” she cried. “You let him do all of it.”

“You think I let him?” Ziva sounded genuinely shocked.

“You control every tiny aspect of your whole life. Yes. I think you let him.” Miriam had tried for years to find ways to excuse her mother, but she was angry at her, and she did believe Ziva had chosen. And she wouldn’t keep pretending otherwise. “And I know for certain that you stayed after. You stayed all those years, through everything.” This, her mother could not refute.

Ziva hugged her coat closer. “I guess I’m flattered my illusion of control is so good that even my own daughter hasn’t seen through it. You’re right that I didn’t leave your dad. When you were little, I thought he would make it worse if we left, and when you were older, I didn’t want anyone to know I’d made a mistake. It’s hard to leave, when you don’t have anything left of yourself to go toward.”

Miriam shivered. This was the first time she’d ever heard her mom talk so honestly about her marriage. It was the first time she’d ever told her mom what she thought of her choices or even directly addressed her dad’s behavior in a conversation.

It felt seismic.

Being here, with Hannah and Noelle, claiming a big messy future, was giving her the strength to have this conversation she’d intended to avoid until she died. Their entire lives had been built on a fiction and now they were looking each other in the eye and admitting the emperor had no clothes.

“Do you think we can ever have a relationship?” her mom asked, breaking into her thoughts.

Miriam thought about telling a polite fiction but decided that’s not what they were doing here.