Chapter 1
Chapter One
Mara
That strange little tug in your stomach—the one that whispers something’s about to shift? Yeah. That. It slips in before I even read the subject line.
The email comes in while I’m sitting in a hotel room in Lisbon—somewhere between Mila wrapping up her math assignment and me pretending cold coffee is a lifestyle choice.
The yellow morning light spills through the thin hotel curtains, painting the room in a warm haze.
Outside, an old tram grinds up the hill, its rumble threading through the quiet between Mila’s pencil scratches and my slow-motion spiral, grounding me in a morning that refuses to cooperate with my denial.
My inbox is full of ignored messages: clients, my agent, editors, and friends who worry I’ve vanished into a creative black hole.
Which, to be fair, happens. Sometimes by accident.
Sometimes by pure, intentional avoidance—my own disappearing act worthy of a magician with questionable decision-making skills.
I blame life. I blame parenting. I blame whoever invented the concept of juggling careers, motherhood, and the illusion of balance as if it were real.
I mean, I have things to do. Pictures to take.
Bills to pay. A daughter to raise. Homeschooling, which sounded so whimsical and bohemian in my head, is actually exhausting.
There’s curriculum, and science experiments, and math that looks nothing like the math I grew up with.
Honestly, trying to teach Mila while dragging her around the world feels like signing up for an Olympic sport I never trained for.
A bitch of a sport, if I’m being truly honest with myself.
Not that I’d ever admit that publicly. Nope. If anyone asks, I’ll smile with my cheerful I’ve-got-this expression and insist it’s so fucking easy. Emphasis on the “so fucking easy” part. It’s like breathing. Or following a MapQuest printout without getting hopelessly lost.
In any case, I freeze the moment I read the subject from Ariadne, my best friend: URGENT: Regarding Your Aunt Lina.
My brain stumbles over it. Aunt Lina and I haven’t spoken in years—not since she married that rich man and promptly cut off the entire family like we were some inconvenient subscription service she kept forgetting to cancel.
I can’t remember if I was twelve or fifteen when she drifted out of my life, but before that, she was the “cool aunt”—seventeen years older than me, sometimes more like a reckless big sister who skipped curfew and knew about music than . . . an adult figure.
We were close . . . until we weren't.
And fine, that’s not entirely true. She did reach out when he—the love of my life—died. But I ignored her message. I ignored everything. I erased whole sections of my world in those months because breathing hurt, and grief had me convinced I could outrun pain if I narrowed my life enough.
Yet, here I am now, staring at an email from Ariadne with the word “urgent,” like my aunt still has any right to cause a tremor in my chest. I stare at it longer than I should, long enough for my stomach to drop in that quiet, low swoop I insist I don’t experience anymore.
It feels like the universe tugged on a thread I’ve been pretending wasn’t loose.
It’s not about my aunt.
It’s about the old life I abandoned when grief hollowed me out.
“Mom, you’re doing the thing again,” Mila says without looking up, pencil moving across her workbook.
“What thing?” I ask, lifting the cup to my mouth and sipping the cold, bitter coffee like it’s totally normal behavior.
It’s absolutely not.
“The staring-into-the-void thing.” She flips a page with theatrical annoyance, the same flair she uses when judging my dating apps. “It’s very emotionally frazzled of you.”
I drag my eyes away from the screen and glance toward the balcony. Lisbon rooftops stretch in patchwork terracotta under a pale blue sky, the kind that almost convinces you life is softer than it is.
Mila says “emotionally frazzled,” the way other kids say “ew.” She’s almost nine going on thirty-five, a strange little miracle who can sound wiser than me one minute and collapse into giggles the next.
It’s a blend that confuses me, humbles me, and occasionally convinces me I’m failing motherhood while simultaneously crushing it.
That contradiction is stored under: Lies I Tell Myself to Stay Functional.
I finally click open the email. Ariadne is explaining—too casually—that a lawyer is looking for me.
A lawyer. For what? I didn’t want to talk to Aunt Lina when she left a message on my answering machine years ago, so why would I suddenly want to talk to someone who bills thousands of dollars by the hour?
“What the fu—” I choke on the rest and switch lanes. “What in the fulfilling universe does a lawyer want with me?”
Mila looks up like she’s been waiting her whole life for this moment. “Tax fraud? Identity theft?”
“Ha. Very funny.” I give her a look, though a tiny part of me wonders why she even knows what tax fraud is.
Probably from overhearing conversations she shouldn’t, because she’s always in the room when I think she’s not.
She collects information the way some kids collect stickers.
Then again, it could be from all the research she does about her future.
Like: Which careers require the least math?
Or, how early can one reasonably start college without being labeled a prodigy?
She’s almost nine and somehow already planning her retirement already.
I should tell her to slow down, to enjoy being a kid before life starts handing out responsibilities like unwanted souvenirs.
But then I catch my reflection in the dark laptop screen—the outline of a woman who pretends her life is color-coded and perfectly handled—and it hits me that Mila probably learned the whole overachiever routine from watching me fake competence on a daily basis.
The truth? I don’t have anything together.
Not really. If I sit down every night and make enough lists to wallpaper a small room, I can usually get through the next day without causing an international incident.
And honestly, isn’t that the bare minimum?
Keeping us afloat, staying one step ahead of disaster, doing my best in this shiny new millennium while trying not to ruin an eight-year-old who trusts me with her entire world?
“What if she registered a company under your name?” Mila asks, far too casually. “Like in that Tom Cruise movie?”
I squint at her. “Where did you watch a Tom Cruise movie?” The parental horror is instant. “That’s not appropriate.”
“A few months ago. It was the babysitter in Paris.” She grins with full gremlin pride.
Okay, that babysitter won’t be contacted again if I get another job over there. Not that it’ll fix anything right now.
“No more movies without my permission from your parental . . . whatever I am today.” I try to sound like a very responsible adult. See, I’m kicking ass at this whole parenting . . . I think.
I clear my throat, trying to summon a version of adulthood I’m allegedly supposed to have mastered by now. “It’s just a lawyer. Something about my aunt, that’s all. Don’t read too much into it.”
I aim for casual—light, breezy, totally unbothered. Honestly, I’m killing it . . . Okay, not really. When I say it out loud, it sounds like someone auditioning for the role of Woman Who Has Her Act Together and not quite making callbacks.
Though, this is me. I’ve been playing that part since he died—this strange balance between performing and rebuilding, trying to create a new version of myself that isn’t made of all the cracked pieces I left behind.
If I pretend long enough, maybe the performance will stick.
Maybe I won’t crumble. Maybe the world won’t see how hollow certain places still feel.
As long as Mila believes me, it’s all good, though.
I’ve been doing great. Ever since I sold our house, I haven’t cried.
Not once. Not when I packed his mug and store it with the rest of our things.
Not when I donated his shirts. Not when I passed the street where he used to pick up pastries on Saturday mornings.
Emotions drift through me but never stay long enough to take shape.
Well—except for Mila and the love I have for my precious daughter. She lives in the part of me that still works.
Ariadne says she always knows when I’m faking it. Apparently, my eyebrows give me away.
Traitors.
Mila narrows her eyes. “So which aunt is this? The one with the creepy crystal collection? Or the one who thought Wi-Fi was witchcraft?”
“You’ve never met this one,” I say, and something inside me tugs—unexpected, almost nostalgic—as a memory slips in.
Lina dancing barefoot in our living room to ABBA, hair flying, jean shorts frayed at the edges, sun-warm skin glowing like she owned the whole summer.
She’d grab my hands and spin me until we were both dizzy, her laughter bright enough to drown out anything that hurt. “She’s . . . complicated.”
“Ah,” she says knowingly. “The one Grandma calls her. I had no idea her name was Lina.”
“Yep. That one.” I exhale and reach toward the laptop, resisting the urge to explain that in my family, we deal with hurt by stopping the use of names—like forgetting someone on purpose somehow protects us.
It’s probably an awful habit, but it’s stitched into me all the same.
“I should probably call your grandmother. She’ll know what’s going on. ”
Mila closes her workbook with a dramatic thud. “Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“Please don’t freak out.”
“I’m not freaking out,” I say, trying to sound breezy, not sure why she’s acting like I am.
“Umm, you just drank cold coffee on purpose—twice.”
. . . okay, maybe I’m freaking out a little, but I refuse to let the universe know that. I will not give fate, destiny, or a random lawyer the satisfaction.
My specialty is pretending I have my life buttoned up, even when it’s dangling by a thread and caffeine. I smile through things. I sunshine my way through disasters. I have absolutely spiraled in airport bathrooms—but quietly. With dignity. . . Kind of.
I straighten my shoulders like posture alone could convince both of us I’m fine. “I am perfectly calm,” I announce with the confidence of someone who absolutely is not.
Mila gives me a skeptical glance. “You’re gripping the mouse like it committed a crime.”
I blink down at my hand.
Nothing gets past this child. Nothing.
She’s right, though.
The poor mouse is wedged in my palm, my knuckles pale enough to qualify as their own distress signal. I loosen my grip, place it down gently—like maybe that small act will somehow convince the universe I have my life together. It doesn’t. The poor thing still looks traumatized.
“See?” I try again, waving my hand toward the screen full of unanswered emails. “Totally calm.”
Mila tilts her head. “Mom, your eye is twitching.”
For fucks sake. Even my eye is giving me away now.
I try to blink it back into cooperation, but then I glance at the email again—and that’s when I feel it.
A shift. The warning in my stomach. The unmistakable sense that everything is about to tilt in a direction I did not schedule, plan for, or mentally prepare to survive.
It hits me with the same cold jolt I felt the day my world broke, and I had to rebuild myself into . . . whatever version of me exists now. The patched-together one. The one who keeps moving because stopping isn’t an option.
Suddenly I’m not sure I have the room—or the strength—for another change. Not again.
But the universe doesn’t ask for permission.
It just crashes your world and settles the new rules.
A soft breeze pushes through the cracked balcony door, carrying the faint scent of pastries from the bakery downstairs and the metallic clang of a passing tram.
Lisbon is loud and alive and sun-washed—and somehow, I still feel like I’m standing in the center of my own private silence, knowing the universe is about to crush me again.