“Breast cancer. We got her the fucking best treatment, the best doctors in the country, but it kept progressing. She would lock herself inside the bathroom and just...sob the whole night. Some days I’d get home from a shoot or whatever and find her lying on the kitchen floor. When she saw me, she’d jump up to her feet, wipe her face and try to be strong. She was always...always trying to be strong. And my father...

“He told her he didn’t love her anymore. He’d already been cheating on her, but that piece of shit finally admitted it. Said she’d given up on their relationship. On him.” Her voice shrinks, then comes back, hard in my ear. “That he wanted to be happy again, that he was moving on.” She pauses and when she speaks again, I hear how truly close she is to breaking. “Do you have any idea what that’s like?”

And just like that, my entire perception of Simon morphs in an instant. I can no longer look at him through the same lens. I try to imagine that. How I’d feel if my mom took her own life because my father cheated on her while she was dying. I’d be angry too. I’d want to kill him too.

Taylor sniffles again. “After that, she gave up. She tried—” Her voice breaks. “I saw...I’m the one who found her.”

She’s definitely crying now. I swallow. My own tears don’t feel far away.

“I saw her hanging there...in that bathroom. Just...” She stops, gasping for air, and then tries again. The words come out strangled and I can hear a lifetime’s worth of suffering in every syllable. “She had slit her wrists first. She was...”

But she can’t finish. She doesn’t need to. I know what she’s trying to say. And in that moment it becomes clear to me how profoundly alone she is. I press my forehead against the cool tile, her pain gutting me through the wireless connection holding us together, tightening my chest and resurrecting my memories of my own mom, what little I can vaguely remember. I try to conjure a discernible picture of her, but the image in my head is nothing but a shapeless, amorphous presence, nothing more than an apparition. I have no memories of being with her beyond quick flashes that feel more like fragments from old dreams than anything else. I’m not sure if any of the things I remember ever actually happened. I don’t know what’s real and what my brain has tried to fill in the gaps with. I can barely remember the sound of her voice, the scent of her hair. I have no old photos, no clear, trustworthy memories of laughter and love. Sometimes it feels as if I’ve dreamed her up completely.