Chapter 21
I reached across the table and broke off a piece of the cinnamon roll she hadn't touched yet, and set it in front of her.
"We're going to be fine," I said.
"But Madison — I need you to promise me something."
"Anything."
"If you're ever in trouble — money, marriage, anything — you come to me.
Not around me.
Not through someone else.
To me." I held her gaze.
"I am your mother, not an obstacle.
I need you to know the difference."
She reached across and took my hand.
"I know," she said.
"I do now."
We sat together until the coffee went cold and the cinnamon rolls were gone and the morning light had moved all the way across the kitchen floor to the far wall.
When she finally left, I stood on the porch and watched her car back out of the driveway.
She waved once through the window.
I raised my hand.
The sale of the lake house closed on a Friday in October.
I signed the final papers in Patricia's office, shook Alan Mercer's hand across the table, and drove home through the first hard frost of the season.
That night I poured one glass of wine, sat on the back porch alone in the cold, and looked at my husband's cedar beds in the dark.
I did not feel the absence of the house.
I felt, for the first time in a long time, the quiet and uncomplicated presence of my own life — whole, mine, and still going forward.
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*Sometimes the things we hold on to the longest aren't really keeping us close to the people we've loved — they're just keeping us from moving forward into the life still waiting for us.*
Have you ever had to let go of something precious — a home, a tradition, an old way of life — and found something unexpected waiting on the other side?
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