I hate how right he is, how sometimes I can’t see these things until someone else points them out. Like Moony’s guilt, and the bubble I’ve been living in for ten long years. I hate knowing I’m too close to it all to be clear. Even though I’m furious with Moony, I’m still angry at my mom. No matter how much I want to be free of her, no one has ever been able to pull my emotional strings like she does.

I plug my ears with earbuds and fade into the nonsensical lyrics of the Pixies while my mother listens to a podcast next to me. Even though we are sharing the car, we may as well be in separate cabs for the first couple of hours. She might have forced me to come, but she can’t force me to like it. And determined as I am to broadcast that message with every gesture, my stomach betrays me and begins rumbling sometime after nine o’clock. So when she pulls into a roadside drive-thru for “brunch,” I don’t have it in me to refuse.

I tug at the cord to my earbuds and let them fall into my lap. “Get me anything with scrambled eggs and too much cheese.”

She smiles and nods, but I don’t return it. She orders us breakfast burritos and fries and orange juices, and we chew and slurp in silence until we’re both too stuffed to even think about food, let alone eat another bite.

As we pull back onto the highway, I toy with my earbuds but don’t return them to my ears. I’m tired of fighting, tired of carrying the weight of this grudge through the years, tired of being at odds with her over everything. Her words from yesterday bounce around inside my brain like pinballs, the Gamblers Anonymous logo seared into my brain.

“Yesterday, you said Moony took me from you. What did you mean?”

She looks sideways at me. “Cat, I don’t think—”

“Please don’t shut me down. You wouldn’t have said it if you didn’t want me to know. I want to know the truth,” I tell her.

She is quiet for a long moment before she responds, so long I begin to worry that she’s not all right, that perhaps my inquiry has forced her back into her protective, depressive fog. But when she finally does speak, her voice echoes as if it is reaching me from another time. “I didn’t want to leave you there.”