“Everything okay?” he asks after I say hello. His voice is tense. He’s worried. I can tell. Afraid he was right. That this wasn’t a good idea.

But there’s no way I’m going to give him that.

“Were you and Mom having problems that summer?” There are a few moments of stunned silence on the other end of the line. “Dad?”

“I’m here,” he says. But his voice sounds like maybe he really isn’t.

“Is that why we came up here, me and Mom?” I hesitate, but I can’t resist twisting the knife just a little bit. “Was she trying to get away from you?”

He mutters something under his breath. Something in French that I don’t quite catch. Then he says, “She was mostly trying to get away from herself, I think.” There’s another long moment of silence on the other end of the phone. “But we were having problems, yes.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me that?” I ask.

“Why would I have?” He sounds genuinely confused. And that pretty much sums up our relationship. Two perpetual hiders, trying to live with each other. “Did she tell you that?” he asks. And I don’t have to ask who the she in question is. There’s a sound in his voice that reminds me of the look on Willa’s face when I mentioned my father. It’s the vocal equivalent of a frown.

“Yeah,” I say. “She’s told me a lot of stuff I never knew about Mom.”

“Did she tell you your mother wasn’t planning on coming home?” There’s a bitterness in his voice I haven’t heard before, and it throws me a little bit, because it makes it seem like he might have really cared.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“She called me not long before—” He stops. Seems to backtrack a little. “Just before she died. And she said she wasn’t coming back. That she was going to stay up there.”

She.

But he means we. Right?

Again, I’m an afterthought. He’s never seemed to understand that I’m a part of this equation. That I’m a real, actual person, and even if I can’t remember it, whatever happened up here that summer affected my life in a huge way.

“Did she say why?” I ask him.

“I think she must’ve met someone, Avril. That’s all I could figure out. We never got the chance to talk about it.”

And there it is. I didn’t even have to ask him.

My mother had met someone. Someone she was planning to start over with. Somebody worth leaving for.

I guess, in the end, she couldn’t figure out how to end it with B. C. So she was ending it with my dad instead.

Maybe she’d decided she was finally ready to become.