“You seemed to like my stepmom,” I half asked, half told him.

“How?”

I thought on it for a second. “I guess just that you were nice? I’m an asshole. I want you to dislike her or at least call her out for being snobby or obnoxiously fake. I think it bothers me that she’s the opposite of my mom. She’s not fun. My mom was really fun when I was younger. She was spontaneous and would never have made such a fuss around a dinner. And absolutely not on a weekly basis. Every fucking Tuesday? Like, who does that?”

Kael’s expression didn’t give me anything in return, but I still felt the urge to keep going.

“My mom used to listen to music every time she was in the living room or kitchen, and not on a fancy speaker that plays throughout the house.” I looked at him to make sure he was at least paying attention if he wasn’t going to speak. He was. I could feel it in the way he was watching me.

“She basically had a soundtrack to every moment of her life and would dance around the living room listening to Van Morrison, waving her arms around like a bird or a butterfly. She wore sparkly clothes and shoes, and colorful feathers, beads, and sometimes even sticks in her hair. She had soft eyes.”

“Is she alive?” Kael asked. I was so thankful not to be on the highway anymore. The town’s quiet streets were a much better place to handle such a blunt question about my mom.

“Yeah. I mean, technically.”

He raised both his brows. “Technically?”

I nodded, pulling to a stop at the red light. “She isn’t around, but she’s not dead. Not today.” I thought about it. “Not that I know of, at least.”

There it was. My oversharing, which made most people uneasy. I continued to do it even though a really shitty boyfriend I had in high school told me to stop telling people “uncomfortable” things about myself. He said it was weird, so did my brother, and a few therapists I managed to scare away. But it didn’t stop me. I drank in Kael’s face as he smiled a little, and I silently rejoiced that finally someone got my dark humor and didn’t get uncomfortable. Kael found me funny, I could tell. Maybe he was the only person in the world who didn’t think I was weird?