But she didn’t give me the option.

Mom walked away, going to the back door, and I knew this was her way of saying no touching. She was leaving and with my heart firmly lodged in my throat, I watched her open the door—the one she had picked the lock to open.

And then I thought of Mona’s.

“Wait,” I called out, holding the papers close to my chest. And I knew it wasn’t so much my concern for the bar that had me calling out to her. I was delaying the inevitable. “What about Mona’s—the bar?”

Her dark brows pinched. “What about it, baby?”

Okay. I doubted she had forgotten about it. “The bar, Mom. What are you doing with that? If you’ve left me the house, did you sign over the bar, too?” Because that bar only passed to me in case of her death, and I sure as hell didn’t want to say or think that.

Mom shook her head. “Baby, I don’t own the bar anymore. I haven’t in . . . a year or so.”

The floor shifted again. “What?”

“I sold it for . . .” She barked out a dry, weak laugh. “That doesn’t matter. I sold it and it’s in good hands, baby.”

The hair on the back of my neck rose and a weird rush of goose bumps raced across my skin. I suddenly thought I should be sitting.

“And you’re in the same good hands. I always thought that . . . you and Jackson would be perfect for one another. He’s a good boy. Yeah, a really good man. He loves strong and he cares, really cares,” she went on as I reached out, bracing myself by putting a hand on the back of the dining room chair. “He’s been good for the bar. He’ll take care of it like he has been.”

I drew in a sharp breath. “Jax owns the bar?”

Mom nodded and her hand tightened on the door handle. “I don’t want that kind of life for you. You’re going to be a nurse, right? You’re going to make a difference in people’s lives. Good things. That’s your . . . it’s your path.”

I blinked. Wait. What? “How did you know that?”

She opened her mouth and then her stringy hair bounced around her cheeks again. “I gotta go, baby. Be good. I know you will, but be good and . . . and be happy. You deserve that.”

Then she was gone, slipping out the door like a wraith, and I stood there, caught between too many emotions to even move. Mom was gone. She was really gone now, and before she’d left, she’d given me the world.

And she had also rocked a very large part of it straight down to its now-cracked foundations.

I felt like an idiot.

Gathering up the papers Mom had given me, I took them with me to the couch and picked up my phone off the coffee table. I wished I had my car. Since the back window had been shattered and there were a few unnecessary holes in the body of the car during the Pennsylvania version of the O.K. Corral, my car was in the repair shop for the second time around, and I doubted these repairs would be a freebie. None of that mattered right now, though. I just wanted to get out of here. I needed to do something, because my head was spinning and there was pressure building in my chest.